OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Self-supervised Meta-Prompt Learning with Meta-Gradient Regularization for Few-shot Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient method, which learns soft prompts and conditions frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Though effective, prompt tuning under few-shot settings on the one hand heavily relies on a good initialization of soft prompts. On the other hand, it can easily overfit to few-shot training samples, thereby undermining generalizability. Existing works leverage pre-training or supervised meta-learning to initialize soft prompts but they fail to data-efficiently generalize to unseen downstream tasks. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a novel Self-sUpervised meta-Prompt learning framework with MEta-gradient Regularization for few-shot generalization (SUPMER). SUPMER leverages self-supervised meta-learning with a diverse set of well-designed meta-training tasks to learn a universal prompt initialization for efficient adaptation using only unlabeled data. Additionally, it jointly meta-learns a gradient regularization function to transform raw gradients into a domain-generalizable direction, thus alleviating the problem of overfitting. Extensive experiments show that SUPMER achieves better performance for different few-shot downstream tasks, and also exhibits a stronger domain generalization ability. The code for SUPMER will be available at https://github.com/beepkh/SUPMER.
Risk-Based Authentication for OpenStack: A Fully Functional Implementation and Guiding Example
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Online services have difficulties to replace passwords with more secure user authentication mechanisms, such as Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). This is partly due to the fact that users tend to reject such mechanisms in use cases outside of online banking. Relying on password authentication alone, however, is not an option in light of recent attack patterns such as credential stuffing. Risk-Based Authentication (RBA) can serve as an interim solution to increase password-based account security until better methods are in place. Unfortunately, RBA is currently used by only a few major online services, even though it is recommended by various standards and has been shown to be effective in scientific studies. This paper contributes to the hypothesis that the low adoption of RBA in practice can be due to the complexity of implementing it. We provide an RBA implementation for the open source cloud management software OpenStack, which is the first fully functional open source RBA implementation based on the Freeman et al. algorithm, along with initial reference tests that can serve as a guiding example and blueprint for developers.
Demonstrating Performance Benefits of Human-Swarm Teaming
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot swarms to real-world applications. Human operators can define goals for the swarm, monitor their performance and interfere with, or overrule, the decisions and behaviour. We present the ``Human And Robot Interactive Swarm'' simulator (HARIS) that allows multi-user interaction with a robot swarm and facilitates qualitative and quantitative user studies through simulation of robot swarms completing tasks, from package delivery to search and rescue, with varying levels of human control. In this demonstration, we showcase the simulator by using it to study the performance gain offered by maintaining a ``human-in-the-loop'' over a fully autonomous system as an example. This is illustrated in the context of search and rescue, with an autonomous allocation of resources to those in need.
Road Extraction with Satellite Images and Partial Road Maps
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Road extraction is a process of automatically generating road maps mainly from satellite images. Existing models all target to generate roads from the scratch despite that a large quantity of road maps, though incomplete, are publicly available (e.g. those from OpenStreetMap) and can help with road extraction. In this paper, we propose to conduct road extraction based on satellite images and partial road maps, which is new. We then propose a two-branch Partial to Complete Network (P2CNet) for the task, which has two prominent components: Gated Self-Attention Module (GSAM) and Missing Part (MP) loss. GSAM leverages a channel-wise self-attention module and a gate module to capture long-range semantics, filter out useless information, and better fuse the features from two branches. MP loss is derived from the partial road maps, trying to give more attention to the road pixels that do not exist in partial road maps. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, e.g. P2CNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with the IoU scores of 70.71% and 75.52%, respectively, on the SpaceNet and OSM datasets.
CLIP$^2$: Contrastive Language-Image-Point Pretraining from Real-World Point Cloud Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, benefiting from large-scale unlabeled text-image pairs, has demonstrated great performance in open-world vision understanding tasks. However, due to the limited Text-3D data pairs, adapting the success of 2D Vision-Language Models (VLM) to the 3D space remains an open problem. Existing works that leverage VLM for 3D understanding generally resort to constructing intermediate 2D representations for the 3D data, but at the cost of losing 3D geometry information. To take a step toward open-world 3D vision understanding, we propose Contrastive Language-Image-Point Cloud Pretraining (CLIP$^2$) to directly learn the transferable 3D point cloud representation in realistic scenarios with a novel proxy alignment mechanism. Specifically, we exploit naturally-existed correspondences in 2D and 3D scenarios, and build well-aligned and instance-based text-image-point proxies from those complex scenarios. On top of that, we propose a cross-modal contrastive objective to learn semantic and instance-level aligned point cloud representation. Experimental results on both indoor and outdoor scenarios show that our learned 3D representation has great transfer ability in downstream tasks, including zero-shot and few-shot 3D recognition, which boosts the state-of-the-art methods by large margins. Furthermore, we provide analyses of the capability of different representations in real scenarios and present the optional ensemble scheme.
Self-Reflection as a Tool to Foster Profound Sustainable Consumption Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The production of goods we buy on a daily basis accounts for a large portion of greenhouse gas emissions. Although consumers have the power to influence industries' behavior through their demand, making sustainable purchases is challenging. Current ICT systems supporting sustainable shopping decisions are not established in consumers' daily lifes. Shopping decisions are made on a complex set of criteria, thus classical persuasive approaches, like recommender-systems, might not be suitable. This work compiles the state of research on ICT supporting sustainable consumption, outlines unsolved challenges, and finally presents a novel concept: a system based on self-reflection instead of classical persuasive approaches, like recommender-systems. Self-reflection provokes revising individual behaviour and decisions, instead of presenting instructions. Combined with additional information on e.g., decision impact, people could learn how to make more sustainable decisions independently. We envision the deployment of such a system, fostering a change towards more sustainable industries to combat climate change.
Preserving HRI Capabilities: Physical, Remote and Simulated Modalities in the SciRoc 2021 Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In the last years, robots are moving out of research laboratories to enter everyday life. Competitions aiming at benchmarking the capabilities of a robot in everyday scenarios are useful to make a step forward in this path. In fact, they foster the development of robust architectures capable of solving issues that might occur during human-robot coexistence in human-shaped scenarios. One of those competitions is SciRoc that, in its second edition, proposed new benchmarking environments. In particular, Episode 1 of SciRoc 2 proposed three different modalities of participation while preserving the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), being a fundamental benchmarking functionality. The Coffee Shop environment, used to challenge the participating teams, represented an excellent testbed enabling for the benchmarking of different robotics functionalities, but also an exceptional opportunity for proposing novel solutions to guarantee real human-robot interaction procedures despite the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. The developed software is publicly released.
Lower Bounds on the Bayesian Risk via Information Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper focuses on parameter estimation and introduces a new method for lower bounding the Bayesian risk. The method allows for the use of virtually \emph{any} information measure, including Rényi's $α$, $φ$-Divergences, and Sibson's $α$-Mutual Information. The approach considers divergences as functionals of measures and exploits the duality between spaces of measures and spaces of functions. In particular, we show that one can lower bound the risk with any information measure by upper bounding its dual via Markov's inequality. We are thus able to provide estimator-independent impossibility results thanks to the Data-Processing Inequalities that divergences satisfy. The results are then applied to settings of interest involving both discrete and continuous parameters, including the ``Hide-and-Seek'' problem, and compared to the state-of-the-art techniques. An important observation is that the behaviour of the lower bound in the number of samples is influenced by the choice of the information measure. We leverage this by introducing a new divergence inspired by the ``Hockey-Stick'' Divergence, which is demonstrated empirically to provide the largest lower-bound across all considered settings. If the observations are subject to privatisation, stronger impossibility results can be obtained via Strong Data-Processing Inequalities. The paper also discusses some generalisations and alternative directions.
Semi-supervised counterfactual explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Counterfactual explanations for machine learning models are used to find minimal interventions to the feature values such that the model changes the prediction to a different output or a target output. A valid counterfactual explanation should have likely feature values. Here, we address the challenge of generating counterfactual explanations that lie in the same data distribution as that of the training data and more importantly, they belong to the target class distribution. This requirement has been addressed through the incorporation of auto-encoder reconstruction loss in the counterfactual search process. Connecting the output behavior of the classifier to the latent space of the auto-encoder has further improved the speed of the counterfactual search process and the interpretability of the resulting counterfactual explanations. Continuing this line of research, we show further improvement in the interpretability of counterfactual explanations when the auto-encoder is trained in a semi-supervised fashion with class tagged input data. We empirically evaluate our approach on several datasets and show considerable improvement in-terms of several metrics.
Traffic Volume Prediction using Memory-Based Recurrent Neural Networks: A comparative analysis of LSTM and GRU
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Predicting traffic volume in real-time can improve both traffic flow and road safety. A precise traffic volume forecast helps alert drivers to the flow of traffic along their preferred routes, preventing potential deadlock situations. Existing parametric models cannot reliably forecast traffic volume in dynamic and complex traffic conditions. Therefore, in order to evaluate and forecast the traffic volume for every given time step in a real-time manner, we develop non-linear memory-based deep neural network models. Our extensive experiments run on the Metro Interstate Traffic Volume dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models in predicting traffic volume in highly dynamic and heterogeneous traffic environments.
A Word is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Prompts as AI Design Material
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in Machine-Learning have led to the development of models that generate images based on a text description.Such large prompt-based text to image models (TTIs), trained on a considerable amount of data, allow the creation of high-quality images by users with no graphics or design training. This paper examines the role such TTI models can playin collaborative, goal-oriented design. Through a within-subjects study with 14 non-professional designers, we find that such models can help participants explore a design space rapidly and allow for fluid collaboration. We also find that text inputs to such models ("prompts") act as reflective design material, facilitating exploration, iteration, and reflection in pair design. This work contributes to the future of collaborative design supported by generative AI by providing an account of how text-to-image models influence the design process and the social dynamics around design and suggesting implications for tool design
Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have been developing and refining large language models (LLMs) that exhibit remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. The latest model developed by OpenAI, GPT-4, was trained using an unprecedented scale of compute and data. In this paper, we report on our investigation of an early version of GPT-4, when it was still in active development by OpenAI. We contend that (this early version of) GPT-4 is part of a new cohort of LLMs (along with ChatGPT and Google's PaLM for example) that exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models. We discuss the rising capabilities and implications of these models. We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. In our exploration of GPT-4, we put special emphasis on discovering its limitations, and we discuss the challenges ahead for advancing towards deeper and more comprehensive versions of AGI, including the possible need for pursuing a new paradigm that moves beyond next-word prediction. We conclude with reflections on societal influences of the recent technological leap and future research directions.
Pedestrain detection for low-light vision proposal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The demand for pedestrian detection has created a challenging problem for various visual tasks such as image fusion. As infrared images can capture thermal radiation information, image fusion between infrared and visible images could significantly improve target detection under environmental limitations. In our project, we would approach by preprocessing our dataset with image fusion technique, then using Vision Transformer model to detect pedestrians from the fused images. During the evaluation procedure, a comparison would be made between YOLOv5 and the revised ViT model performance on our fused images
Comparing Trajectory and Vision Modalities for Verb Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Three-dimensional trajectories, or the 3D position and rotation of objects over time, have been shown to encode key aspects of verb semantics (e.g., the meanings of roll vs. slide). However, most multimodal models in NLP use 2D images as representations of the world. Given the importance of 3D space in formal models of verb semantics, we expect that these 2D images would result in impoverished representations that fail to capture nuanced differences in meaning. This paper tests this hypothesis directly in controlled experiments. We train self-supervised image and trajectory encoders, and then evaluate them on the extent to which each learns to differentiate verb concepts. Contrary to our initial expectations, we find that 2D visual modalities perform similarly well to 3D trajectories. While further work should be conducted on this question, our initial findings challenge the conventional wisdom that richer environment representations necessarily translate into better representation learning for language.
Using word embeddings to analyse audience effects and individual differences in parenting Subreddits
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Human beings adapt their language to the audience they interact with. To study the impact of audience and gender in a natural setting, we choose a domain where gender plays a particularly salient role: parenting. We collect posts from the three popular parenting Subreddits (i.e., topical communities on Reddit) r/Daddit, r/Mommit, and r/Parenting. These three Subreddits gather different audiences, respectively, self-identifying as fathers and mothers (ostensibly single-gender), and parents (explicitly mixed-gender). By selecting a sample of users who have published on both a single-gender and a mixed-gender Subreddit, we are able to explore both audience and gender effects. We analyse posts with word embeddings by adding the username as a token in the corpus. This way, we are able to compare user-tokens to word-tokens and measure their similarity. We also investigate individual differences in this context by comparing users who exhibit significant changes in their behaviour (high self-monitors) with those who show less variation (low self-monitors). Results show that r/Parenting users generally discuss a great diversity of topics while fathers focus more on advising others on educational and family matters. Mothers in r/Mommit distinguish themselves from other groups by primarily discussing topics such as medical care, sleep and potty training, and food. Both mothers and fathers celebrate parenting events and describe or comment on the physical appearance of their children with a single-gender audience. In terms of individual differences, we find that, especially on r/Parenting, high self-monitors tend to conform more to the norms of the Subreddit by discussing more of the topics associated with the Subreddit. In conclusion, this study shows how mothers and fathers express different concerns and change their behaviour for different group-based audiences.
PACO: Provocation Involving Action, Culture, and Oppression
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In India, people identify with a particular group based on certain attributes such as religion. The same religious groups are often provoked against each other. Previous studies show the role of provocation in increasing tensions between India's two prominent religious groups: Hindus and Muslims. With the advent of the Internet, such provocation also surfaced on social media platforms such as WhatsApp. By leveraging an existing dataset of Indian WhatsApp posts, we identified three categories of provoking sentences against Indian Muslims. Further, we labeled 7,000 sentences for three provocation categories and called this dataset PACO. We leveraged PACO to train a model that can identify provoking sentences from a WhatsApp post. Our best model is fine-tuned RoBERTa and achieved a 0.851 average AUC score over five-fold cross-validation. Automatically identifying provoking sentences could stop provoking text from reaching out to the masses, and can prevent possible discrimination or violence against the target religious group. Further, we studied the provocative speech through a pragmatic lens, by identifying the dialog acts and impoliteness super-strategies used against the religious group.
JaCoText: A Pretrained Model for Java Code-Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Pretrained transformer-based models have shown high performance in natural language generation task. However, a new wave of interest has surged: automatic programming language generation. This task consists of translating natural language instructions to a programming code. Despite the fact that well-known pretrained models on language generation have achieved good performance in learning programming languages, effort is still needed in automatic code generation. In this paper, we introduce JaCoText, a model based on Transformers neural network. It aims to generate java source code from natural language text. JaCoText leverages advantages of both natural language and code generation models. More specifically, we study some findings from the state of the art and use them to (1) initialize our model from powerful pretrained models, (2) explore additional pretraining on our java dataset, (3) carry out experiments combining the unimodal and bimodal data in the training, and (4) scale the input and output length during the fine-tuning of the model. Conducted experiments on CONCODE dataset show that JaCoText achieves new state-of-the-art results.
Scale space radon transform-based inertia axis and object central symmetry estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Inertia Axes are involved in many techniques for image content measurement when involving information obtained from lines, angles, centroids... etc. We investigate, here, the estimation of the main axis of inertia of an object in the image. We identify the coincidence conditions of the Scale Space Radon Transform (SSRT) maximum and the inertia main axis. We show, that by choosing the appropriate scale parameter, it is possible to match the SSRT maximum and the main axis of inertia location and orientation of the embedded object in the image. Furthermore, an example of use case is presented where binary objects central symmetry computation is derived by means of SSRT projections and the axis of inertia orientation. To this end, some SSRT characteristics have been highlighted and exploited. The experimentations show the SSRT-based main axis of inertia computation effectiveness. Concerning the central symmetry, results are very satisfying as experimentations carried out on randomly created images dataset and existing datasets have permitted to divide successfully these images bases into centrally symmetric and non-centrally symmetric objects.
Ethics in Computing Education: Challenges and Experience with Embedded Ethics
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The next generation of computer engineers and scientists must be proficient in not just the technical knowledge required to analyze, optimize, and create emerging microelectronics systems, but also with the skills required to make ethical decisions during design. Teaching computer ethics in computing curricula is therefore becoming an important requirement with significant ramifications for our increasingly connected and computing-reliant society. In this paper, we reflect on the many challenges and questions with effectively integrating ethics into modern computing curricula. We describe a case study of integrating ethics modules into the computer engineering curricula at Colorado State University.