OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Common Corruptions for Enhancing and Evaluating Robustness in Air-to-Air Visual Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The main barrier to achieving fully autonomous flights lies in autonomous aircraft navigation. Managing non-cooperative traffic presents the most important challenge in this problem. The most efficient strategy for handling non-cooperative traffic is based on monocular video processing through deep learning models. This study contributes to the vision-based deep learning aircraft detection and tracking literature by investigating the impact of data corruption arising from environmental and hardware conditions on the effectiveness of these methods. More specifically, we designed $7$ types of common corruptions for camera inputs taking into account real-world flight conditions. By applying these corruptions to the Airborne Object Tracking (AOT) dataset we constructed the first robustness benchmark dataset named AOT-C for air-to-air aerial object detection. The corruptions included in this dataset cover a wide range of challenging conditions such as adverse weather and sensor noise. The second main contribution of this letter is to present an extensive experimental evaluation involving $8$ diverse object detectors to explore the degradation in the performance under escalating levels of corruptions (domain shifts). Based on the evaluation results, the key observations that emerge are the following: 1) One-stage detectors of the YOLO family demonstrate better robustness, 2) Transformer-based and multi-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN are extremely vulnerable to corruptions, 3) Robustness against corruptions is related to the generalization ability of models. The third main contribution is to present that finetuning on our augmented synthetic data results in improvements in the generalisation ability of the object detector in real-world flight experiments.
CANAL -- Cyber Activity News Alerting Language Model: Empirical Approach vs. Expensive LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In today's digital landscape, where cyber attacks have become the norm, the detection of cyber attacks and threats is critically imperative across diverse domains. Our research presents a new empirical framework for cyber threat modeling, adept at parsing and categorizing cyber-related information from news articles, enhancing real-time vigilance for market stakeholders. At the core of this framework is a fine-tuned BERT model, which we call CANAL - Cyber Activity News Alerting Language Model, tailored for cyber categorization using a novel silver labeling approach powered by Random Forest. We benchmark CANAL against larger, costlier LLMs, including GPT-4, LLaMA, and Zephyr, highlighting their zero to few-shot learning in cyber news classification. CANAL demonstrates superior performance by outperforming all other LLM counterparts in both accuracy and cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, we introduce the Cyber Signal Discovery module, a strategic component designed to efficiently detect emerging cyber signals from news articles. Collectively, CANAL and Cyber Signal Discovery module equip our framework to provide a robust and cost-effective solution for businesses that require agile responses to cyber intelligence.
Shape Conditioned Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Human motion synthesis is an important task in computer graphics and computer vision. While focusing on various conditioning signals such as text, action class, or audio to guide the generation process, most existing methods utilize skeleton-based pose representation, requiring additional skinning to produce renderable meshes. Given that human motion is a complex interplay of bones, joints, and muscles, considering solely the skeleton for generation may neglect their inherent interdependency, which can limit the variability and precision of the generated results. To address this issue, we propose a Shape-conditioned Motion Diffusion model (SMD), which enables the generation of motion sequences directly in mesh format, conditioned on a specified target mesh. In SMD, the input meshes are transformed into spectral coefficients using graph Laplacian, to efficiently represent meshes. Subsequently, we propose a Spectral-Temporal Autoencoder (STAE) to leverage cross-temporal dependencies within the spectral domain. Extensive experimental evaluations show that SMD not only produces vivid and realistic motions but also achieves competitive performance in text-to-motion and action-to-motion tasks when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Shared Virtual Memory: Its Design and Performance Implications for Diverse Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Discrete GPU accelerators, while providing massive computing power for supercomputers and data centers, have their separate memory domain. Explicit memory management across device and host domains in programming is tedious and error-prone. To improve programming portability and productivity, Unified Memory (UM) integrates GPU memory into the host virtual memory systems, and provides transparent data migration between them and GPU memory oversubscription. Nevertheless, current UM technologies cause significant performance loss for applications. With AMD GPUs increasingly being integrated into the world's leading supercomputers, it is necessary to understand their Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) and mitigate the performance impacts. In this work, we delve into the SVM design, examine its interactions with applications' data accesses at fine granularity, and quantitatively analyze its performance effects on various applications and identify the performance bottlenecks. Our research reveals that SVM employs an aggressive prefetching strategy for demand paging. This prefetching is efficient when GPU memory is not oversubscribed. However, in tandem with the eviction policy, it causes excessive thrashing and performance degradation for certain applications under oversubscription. We discuss SVM-aware algorithms and SVM design changes to mitigate the performance impacts. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first in-depth and comprehensive study for SVM technologies.
Non-stationary Domain Generalization: Theory and Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Although recent advances in machine learning have shown its success to learn from independent and identically distributed (IID) data, it is vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) data in an open world. Domain generalization (DG) deals with such an issue and it aims to learn a model from multiple source domains that can be generalized to unseen target domains. Existing studies on DG have largely focused on stationary settings with homogeneous source domains. However, in many applications, domains may evolve along a specific direction (e.g., time, space). Without accounting for such non-stationary patterns, models trained with existing methods may fail to generalize on OOD data. In this paper, we study domain generalization in non-stationary environment. We first examine the impact of environmental non-stationarity on model performance and establish the theoretical upper bounds for the model error at target domains. Then, we propose a novel algorithm based on adaptive invariant representation learning, which leverages the non-stationary pattern to train a model that attains good performance on target domains. Experiments on both synthetic and real data validate the proposed algorithm.
Better Algorithms for Constructing Minimum Cost Markov Chains and AIFV Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The problem of constructing optimal AIFV codes is a special case of that of constructing minimum cost Markov Chains. This paper provides the first complete proof of correctness for the previously known iterative algorithm for constructing such Markov chains. A recent work describes how to efficiently solve the Markov Chain problem by first constructing a Markov Chain Polytope and then running the Ellipsoid algorithm for linear programming on it. This paper's second result is that, in the AIFV case, a special property of the polytope instead permits solving the corresponding linear program using simple binary search
Bridging the Gap: Protocol Towards Fair and Consistent Affect Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing integration of machine learning algorithms in daily life underscores the critical need for fairness and equity in their deployment. As these technologies play a pivotal role in decision-making, addressing biases across diverse subpopulation groups, including age, gender, and race, becomes paramount. Automatic affect analysis, at the intersection of physiology, psychology, and machine learning, has seen significant development. However, existing databases and methodologies lack uniformity, leading to biased evaluations. This work addresses these issues by analyzing six affective databases, annotating demographic attributes, and proposing a common protocol for database partitioning. Emphasis is placed on fairness in evaluations. Extensive experiments with baseline and state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the impact of these changes, revealing the inadequacy of prior assessments. The findings underscore the importance of considering demographic attributes in affect analysis research and provide a foundation for more equitable methodologies. Our annotations, code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/dkollias/Fair-Consistent-Affect-Analysis
Disrupting Style Mimicry Attacks on Video Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generative AI models are often used to perform mimicry attacks, where a pretrained model is fine-tuned on a small sample of images to learn to mimic a specific artist of interest. While researchers have introduced multiple anti-mimicry protection tools (Mist, Glaze, Anti-Dreambooth), recent evidence points to a growing trend of mimicry models using videos as sources of training data. This paper presents our experiences exploring techniques to disrupt style mimicry on video imagery. We first validate that mimicry attacks can succeed by training on individual frames extracted from videos. We show that while anti-mimicry tools can offer protection when applied to individual frames, this approach is vulnerable to an adaptive countermeasure that removes protection by exploiting randomness in optimization results of consecutive (nearly-identical) frames. We develop a new, tool-agnostic framework that segments videos into short scenes based on frame-level similarity, and use a per-scene optimization baseline to remove inter-frame randomization while reducing computational cost. We show via both image level metrics and an end-to-end user study that the resulting protection restores protection against mimicry (including the countermeasure). Finally, we develop another adaptive countermeasure and find that it falls short against our framework.
Unveiling the Era of Spatial Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The evolution of User Interfaces marks a significant transition from traditional command-line interfaces to more intuitive graphical and touch-based interfaces, largely driven by the emergence of personal computing devices. The advent of spatial computing and Extended Reality technologies further pushes the boundaries, promising a fusion of physical and digital realms through interactive environments. This paper delves into the progression from All Realities technologies encompassing Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mediated Reality to spatial computing, highlighting their conceptual differences and applications. We explore enabling technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G, cloud and edge computing, and blockchain that underpin the development of spatial computing. We further scrutinize the initial forays into commercial spatial computing devices, with a focus on Apple's Vision Pro, evaluating its technological advancements alongside the challenges it faces. Through this examination, we aim to provide insights into the potential of spatial computing to revolutionize our interaction with digital information and the physical world.
Fairness in Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

While our understanding of fairness in machine learning has significantly progressed, our understanding of fairness in reinforcement learning (RL) remains nascent. Most of the attention has been on fairness in one-shot classification tasks; however, real-world, RL-enabled systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are much more complicated in that agents operate in dynamic environments over a long period of time. To ensure the responsible development and deployment of these systems, we must better understand fairness in RL. In this paper, we survey the literature to provide the most up-to-date snapshot of the frontiers of fairness in RL. We start by reviewing where fairness considerations can arise in RL, then discuss the various definitions of fairness in RL that have been put forth thus far. We continue to highlight the methodologies researchers used to implement fairness in single- and multi-agent RL systems before showcasing the distinct application domains that fair RL has been investigated in. Finally, we critically examine gaps in the literature, such as understanding fairness in the context of RLHF, that still need to be addressed in future work to truly operationalize fair RL in real-world systems.
Multimodal Pretraining and Generation for Recommendation: A Tutorial
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Personalized recommendation stands as a ubiquitous channel for users to explore information or items aligned with their interests. Nevertheless, prevailing recommendation models predominantly rely on unique IDs and categorical features for user-item matching. While this ID-centric approach has witnessed considerable success, it falls short in comprehensively grasping the essence of raw item contents across diverse modalities, such as text, image, audio, and video. This underutilization of multimodal data poses a limitation to recommender systems, particularly in the realm of multimedia services like news, music, and short-video platforms. The recent surge in pretraining and generation techniques presents both opportunities and challenges in the development of multimodal recommender systems. This tutorial seeks to provide a thorough exploration of the latest advancements and future trajectories in multimodal pretraining and generation techniques within the realm of recommender systems. The tutorial comprises three parts: multimodal pretraining, multimodal generation, and industrial applications and open challenges in the field of recommendation. Our target audience encompasses scholars, practitioners, and other parties interested in this domain. By providing a succinct overview of the field, we aspire to facilitate a swift understanding of multimodal recommendation and foster meaningful discussions on the future development of this evolving landscape.
ResSurv: Cancer Survival Analysis Prediction Model Based on Residual Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Survival prediction is an important branch of cancer prognosis analysis. The model that predicts survival risk through TCGA genomics data can discover genes related to cancer and provide diagnosis and treatment recommendations based on patient characteristics. We found that deep learning models based on Cox proportional hazards often suffer from overfitting when dealing with high-throughput data. Moreover, we found that as the number of network layers increases, the experimental results will not get better, and network degradation will occur. Based on this problem, we propose a new framework based on Deep Residual Learning. Combine the ideas of Cox proportional hazards and Residual. And name it ResSurv. First, ResSurv is a feed-forward deep learning network stacked by multiple basic ResNet Blocks. In each ResNet Block, we add a Normalization Layer to prevent gradient disappearance and gradient explosion. Secondly, for the loss function of the neural network, we inherited the Cox proportional hazards methods, applied the semi-parametric of the CPH model to the neural network, combined with the partial likelihood model, established the loss function, and performed backpropagation and gradient update. Finally, we compared ResSurv networks of different depths and found that we can effectively extract high-dimensional features. Ablation experiments and comparative experiments prove that our model has reached SOTA(state of the art) in the field of deep learning, and our network can effectively extract deep information.
DTMamba : Dual Twin Mamba for Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We utilized the Mamba model for time series data prediction tasks, and the experimental results indicate that our model performs well.
Global Motion Understanding in Large-Scale Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we show that transferring knowledge from other domains of video understanding combined with large-scale learning can improve robustness of Video Object Segmentation (VOS) under complex circumstances. Namely, we focus on integrating scene global motion knowledge to improve large-scale semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation. Prior works on VOS mostly rely on direct comparison of semantic and contextual features to perform dense matching between current and past frames, passing over actual motion structure. On the other hand, Optical Flow Estimation task aims to approximate the scene motion field, exposing global motion patterns which are typically undiscoverable during all pairs similarity search. We present WarpFormer, an architecture for semi-supervised Video Object Segmentation that exploits existing knowledge in motion understanding to conduct smoother propagation and more accurate matching. Our framework employs a generic pretrained Optical Flow Estimation network whose prediction is used to warp both past frames and instance segmentation masks to the current frame domain. Consequently, warped segmentation masks are refined and fused together aiming to inpaint occluded regions and eliminate artifacts caused by flow field imperfects. Additionally, we employ novel large-scale MOSE 2023 dataset to train model on various complex scenarios. Our method demonstrates strong performance on DAVIS 2016/2017 validation (93.0% and 85.9%), DAVIS 2017 test-dev (80.6%) and YouTube-VOS 2019 validation (83.8%) that is competitive with alternative state-of-the-art methods while using much simpler memory mechanism and instance understanding logic.
A Turkish Educational Crossword Puzzle Generator
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the first Turkish crossword puzzle generator designed to leverage the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for educational purposes. In this work, we introduced two specially created datasets: one with over 180,000 unique answer-clue pairs for generating relevant clues from the given answer, and another with over 35,000 samples containing text, answer, category, and clue data, aimed at producing clues for specific texts and keywords within certain categories. Beyond entertainment, this generator emerges as an interactive educational tool that enhances memory, vocabulary, and problem-solving skills. It's a notable step in AI-enhanced education, merging game-like engagement with learning for Turkish and setting new standards for interactive, intelligent learning tools in Turkish.
Length-Aware Multi-Kernel Transformer for Long Document Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Lengthy documents pose a unique challenge to neural language models due to substantial memory consumption. While existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models segment long texts into equal-length snippets (e.g., 128 tokens per snippet) or deploy sparse attention networks, these methods have new challenges of context fragmentation and generalizability due to sentence boundaries and varying text lengths. For example, our empirical analysis has shown that SOTA models consistently overfit one set of lengthy documents (e.g., 2000 tokens) while performing worse on texts with other lengths (e.g., 1000 or 4000). In this study, we propose a Length-Aware Multi-Kernel Transformer (LAMKIT) to address the new challenges for the long document classification. LAMKIT encodes lengthy documents by diverse transformer-based kernels for bridging context boundaries and vectorizes text length by the kernels to promote model robustness over varying document lengths. Experiments on five standard benchmarks from health and law domains show LAMKIT outperforms SOTA models up to an absolute 10.9% improvement. We conduct extensive ablation analyses to examine model robustness and effectiveness over varying document lengths.
Towards Context-Aware Modeling of Situation Awareness in Conditionally Automated Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Maintaining adequate situation awareness (SA) is crucial for the safe operation of conditionally automated vehicles (AVs), which requires drivers to regain control during takeover (TOR) events. This study developed a predictive model for real-time assessment of driver SA using multimodal data (e.g., galvanic skin response, heart rate and eye tracking data, and driver characteristics) collected in a simulated driving environment. Sixty-seven participants experienced automated driving scenarios with TORs, with conditions varying in risk perception and the presence of automation errors. A LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine) model trained on the top 12 predictors identified by SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) achieved promising performance with RMSE=0.89, MAE=0.71, and Corr=0.78. These findings have implications towards context-aware modeling of SA in conditionally automated driving, paving the way for safer and more seamless driver-AV interactions.
The Road to Compliance: Executive Federal Agencies and the NIST Risk Management Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

This informative report provides a comprehensive analysis of how executive federal report agencies implement the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Risk Management Framework (RMF) to achieve cybersecurity compliance. By exploring the concept and evolution of the RMF, the report delves into the framework's importance for enhancing cybersecurity measures within federal agencies, addressing the challenges these agencies face in the digital landscape. Through a methodical literature review, the report examines theoretical foundations, implementation strategies, and the critical role of continuous monitoring and automation in RMF processes, drawing from key sources like Ross (2014), Lubell (2020), Barrett et al. (2021), and Pillitteri et al. (2021, 2022), among others. Employing a detailed methodology for data collection and analysis, the report presents findings on the successes and challenges of RMF implementation, highlighting the impact of automation and continuous monitoring in bolstering cybersecurity postures. Case studies offer in-depth insights into the experiences of specific agencies, providing lessons learned and best practices. The report concludes with strategic recommendations for overcoming implementation challenges and suggests future directions for enhancing RMF research and practice. This investigation underscores the RMF's critical role in establishing robust cybersecurity compliance across executive federal agencies, offering valuable recommendations for policymakers, cybersecurity professionals, and governmental bodies.