OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hindi-BEIR : A Large Scale Retrieval Benchmark in Hindi
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Given the large number of Hindi speakers worldwide, there is a pressing need for robust and efficient information retrieval systems for Hindi. Despite ongoing research, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmark for evaluating retrieval models in Hindi. To address this gap, we introduce the Hindi version of the BEIR benchmark, which includes a subset of English BEIR datasets translated to Hindi, existing Hindi retrieval datasets, and synthetically created datasets for retrieval. The benchmark is comprised of $15$ datasets spanning across $8$ distinct tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual retrieval models on this benchmark to identify task and domain-specific challenges and their impact on retrieval performance. By releasing this benchmark and a set of relevant baselines, we enable researchers to understand the limitations and capabilities of current Hindi retrieval models, promoting advancements in this critical area. The datasets from Hindi-BEIR are publicly available.
Towards Boosting LLMs-driven Relevance Modeling with Progressive Retrieved Behavior-augmented Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Relevance modeling is a critical component for enhancing user experience in search engines, with the primary objective of identifying items that align with users' queries. Traditional models only rely on the semantic congruence between queries and items to ascertain relevance. However, this approach represents merely one aspect of the relevance judgement, and is insufficient in isolation. Even powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) still cannot accurately judge the relevance of a query and an item from a semantic perspective. To augment LLMs-driven relevance modeling, this study proposes leveraging user interactions recorded in search logs to yield insights into users' implicit search intentions. The challenge lies in the effective prompting of LLMs to capture dynamic search intentions, which poses several obstacles in real-world relevance scenarios, i.e., the absence of domain-specific knowledge, the inadequacy of an isolated prompt, and the prohibitive costs associated with deploying LLMs. In response, we propose ProRBP, a novel Progressive Retrieved Behavior-augmented Prompting framework for integrating search scenario-oriented knowledge with LLMs effectively. Specifically, we perform the user-driven behavior neighbors retrieval from the daily search logs to obtain domain-specific knowledge in time, retrieving candidates that users consider to meet their expectations. Then, we guide LLMs for relevance modeling by employing advanced prompting techniques that progressively improve the outputs of the LLMs, followed by a progressive aggregation with comprehensive consideration of diverse aspects. For online serving, we have developed an industrial application framework tailored for the deployment of LLMs in relevance modeling. Experiments on real-world industry data and online A/B testing demonstrate our proposal achieves promising performance.
Efficient Online Sensitivity Analysis For The Injective Bottleneck Path Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The tolerance of an element of a combinatorial optimization problem with respect to a given optimal solution is the maximum change, i.e., decrease or increase, of its cost, such that this solution remains optimal. The bottleneck path problem, for given an edge-capacitated graph, a source, and a target, is to find the $\max$-$\min$ value of edge capacities on paths between the source and the target. For any given sample of this problem with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, there is known the Ramaswamy-Orlin-Chakravarty's algorithm to compute an optimal path and all tolerances with respect to it in $O(m+n\log n)$ time. In this paper, for any in advance given $(n,m)$-network with distinct edge capacities and $k$ source-target pairs, we propose an $O\Big(m α(m,n)+\min\big((n+k)\log n,km\big)\Big)$-time preprocessing, where $α(\cdot,\cdot)$ is the inverse Ackermann function, to find in $O(k)$ time all $2k$ tolerances of an arbitrary edge with respect to some $\max\min$ paths between the paired sources and targets. To find both tolerances of all edges with respect to those optimal paths, it asymptotically improves, for some $n,m,k$, the Ramaswamy-Orlin-Chakravarty's complexity $O\big(k(m+n\log n)\big)$ up to $O(mα(n,m)+km)$.
MedMAP: Promoting Incomplete Multi-modal Brain Tumor Segmentation with Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Brain tumor segmentation is often based on multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, in clinical practice, certain modalities of MRI may be missing, which presents a more difficult scenario. To cope with this challenge, Knowledge Distillation, Domain Adaption, and Shared Latent Space have emerged as commonly promising strategies. However, recent efforts typically overlook the modality gaps and thus fail to learn important invariant feature representations across different modalities. Such drawback consequently leads to limited performance for missing modality models. To ameliorate these problems, pre-trained models are used in natural visual segmentation tasks to minimize the gaps. However, promising pre-trained models are often unavailable in medical image segmentation tasks. Along this line, in this paper, we propose a novel paradigm that aligns latent features of involved modalities to a well-defined distribution anchor as the substitution of the pre-trained model}. As a major contribution, we prove that our novel training paradigm ensures a tight evidence lower bound, thus theoretically certifying its effectiveness. Extensive experiments on different backbones validate that the proposed paradigm can enable invariant feature representations and produce models with narrowed modality gaps. Models with our alignment paradigm show their superior performance on both BraTS2018 and BraTS2020 datasets.
Ancestral Reinforcement Learning: Unifying Zeroth-Order Optimization and Genetic Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a fundamental framework for discovering optimal action strategies through interactions within unknown environments. Recent advancement have shown that the performance and applicability of RL can significantly be enhanced by exploiting a population of agents in various ways. Zeroth-Order Optimization (ZOO) leverages an agent population to estimate the gradient of the objective function, enabling robust policy refinement even in non-differentiable scenarios. As another application, Genetic Algorithms (GA) boosts the exploration of policy landscapes by mutational generation of policy diversity in an agent population and its refinement by selection. A natural question is whether we can have the best of two worlds that the agent population can have. In this work, we propose Ancestral Reinforcement Learning (ARL), which synergistically combines the robust gradient estimation of ZOO with the exploratory power of GA. The key idea in ARL is that each agent within a population infers gradient by exploiting the history of its ancestors, i.e., the ancestor population in the past, while maintaining the diversity of policies in the current population as in GA. We also theoretically reveal that the populational search in ARL implicitly induces the KL-regularization of the objective function, resulting in the enhanced exploration. Our results extend the applicability of populational algorithms for RL.
StyleBrush: Style Extraction and Transfer from a Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Stylization for visual content aims to add specific style patterns at the pixel level while preserving the original structural features. Compared with using predefined styles, stylization guided by reference style images is more challenging, where the main difficulty is to effectively separate style from structural elements. In this paper, we propose StyleBrush, a method that accurately captures styles from a reference image and ``brushes'' the extracted style onto other input visual content. Specifically, our architecture consists of two branches: ReferenceNet, which extracts style from the reference image, and Structure Guider, which extracts structural features from the input image, thus enabling image-guided stylization. We utilize LLM and T2I models to create a dataset comprising 100K high-quality style images, encompassing a diverse range of styles and contents with high aesthetic score. To construct training pairs, we crop different regions of the same training image. Experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results through both qualitative and quantitative analyses. We will release our code and dataset upon acceptance of the paper.
A Logic for Policy Based Resource Exchanges in Multiagent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

In multiagent systems autonomous agents interact with each other to achieve individual and collective goals. Typical interactions concern negotiation and agreement on resource exchanges. Modeling and formalizing these agreements pose significant challenges, particularly in capturing the dynamic behaviour of agents, while ensuring that resources are correctly handled. Here, we propose exchange environments as a formal setting where agents specify and obey exchange policies, which are declarative statements about what resources they offer and what they require in return. Furthermore, we introduce a decidable extension of the computational fragment of linear logic as a fundamental tool for representing exchange environments and studying their dynamics in terms of provability.
Enhancing ASL Recognition with GCNs and Successive Residual Connections
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study presents a novel approach for enhancing American Sign Language (ASL) recognition using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) integrated with successive residual connections. The method leverages the MediaPipe framework to extract key landmarks from each hand gesture, which are then used to construct graph representations. A robust preprocessing pipeline, including translational and scale normalization techniques, ensures consistency across the dataset. The constructed graphs are fed into a GCN-based neural architecture with residual connections to improve network stability. The architecture achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating superior generalization capabilities with a validation accuracy of 99.14%.
Pre-assignment problem for unique minimum vertex cover on bounded clique-width graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Horiyama et al. (AAAI 2024) considered the problem of generating instances with a unique minimum vertex cover under certain conditions. The Pre-assignment for Uniquification of Minimum Vertex Cover problem (shortly PAU-VC) is the problem, for given a graph $G$, to find a minimum set $S$ of vertices in $G$ such that there is a unique minimum vertex cover of $G$ containing $S$. We show that PAU-VC is fixed-parameter tractable parameterized by clique-width, which improves an exponential algorithm for trees given by Horiyama et al. Among natural graph classes with unbounded clique-width, we show that the problem can be solved in linear time on split graphs and unit interval graphs.
Acquiring Bidirectionality via Large and Small Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Using token representation from bidirectional language models (LMs) such as BERT is still a widely used approach for token-classification tasks. Even though there exist much larger unidirectional LMs such as Llama-2, they are rarely used to replace the token representation of bidirectional LMs. In this work, we hypothesize that their lack of bidirectionality is keeping them behind. To that end, we propose to newly train a small backward LM and concatenate its representations to those of existing LM for downstream tasks. Through experiments in named entity recognition, we demonstrate that introducing backward model improves the benchmark performance more than 10 points. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method is especially effective for rare domains and in few-shot learning settings.
CusADi: A GPU Parallelization Framework for Symbolic Expressions and Optimal Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The parallelism afforded by GPUs presents significant advantages in training controllers through reinforcement learning (RL). However, integrating model-based optimization into this process remains challenging due to the complexity of formulating and solving optimization problems across thousands of instances. In this work, we present CusADi, an extension of the CasADi symbolic framework to support the parallelization of arbitrary closed-form expressions on GPUs with CUDA. We also formulate a closed-form approximation for solving general optimal control problems, enabling large-scale parallelization and evaluation of MPC controllers. Our results show a ten-fold speedup relative to similar MPC implementation on the CPU, and we demonstrate the use of CusADi for various applications, including parallel simulation, parameter sweeps, and policy training.
3D-Consistent Human Avatars with Sparse Inputs via Gaussian Splatting and Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing approaches for human avatar generation--both NeRF-based and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based--struggle with maintaining 3D consistency and exhibit degraded detail reconstruction, particularly when training with sparse inputs. To address this challenge, we propose CHASE, a novel framework that achieves dense-input-level performance using only sparse inputs through two key innovations: cross-pose intrinsic 3D consistency supervision and 3D geometry contrastive learning. Building upon prior skeleton-driven approaches that combine rigid deformation with non-rigid cloth dynamics, we first establish baseline avatars with fundamental 3D consistency. To enhance 3D consistency under sparse inputs, we introduce a Dynamic Avatar Adjustment (DAA) module, which refines deformed Gaussians by leveraging similar poses from the training set. By minimizing the rendering discrepancy between adjusted Gaussians and reference poses, DAA provides additional supervision for avatar reconstruction. We further maintain global 3D consistency through a novel geometry-aware contrastive learning strategy. While designed for sparse inputs, CHASE surpasses state-of-the-art methods across both full and sparse settings on ZJU-MoCap and H36M datasets, demonstrating that our enhanced 3D consistency leads to superior rendering quality.
GANPrompt: Enhancing Robustness in LLM-Based Recommendations with GAN-Enhanced Diversity Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in comprehending and generating natural language, with a growing prevalence in the domain of recommendation systems. However, LLMs still face a significant challenge called prompt sensitivity, which refers to that it is highly susceptible to the influence of prompt words. This inconsistency in response to minor alterations in prompt input may compromise the accuracy and resilience of recommendation models. To address this issue, this paper proposes GANPrompt, a multi-dimensional LLMs prompt diversity framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The framework enhances the model's adaptability and stability to diverse prompts by integrating GANs generation techniques with the deep semantic understanding capabilities of LLMs. GANPrompt first trains a generator capable of producing diverse prompts by analysing multidimensional user behavioural data. These diverse prompts are then used to train the LLMs to improve its performance in the face of unseen prompts. Furthermore, to ensure a high degree of diversity and relevance of the prompts, this study introduces a mathematical theory-based diversity constraint mechanism that optimises the generated prompts to ensure that they are not only superficially distinct, but also semantically cover a wide range of user intentions. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, especially in improving the adaptability and robustness of recommendation systems in complex and dynamic environments. The experimental results demonstrate that GANPrompt yields substantial enhancements in accuracy and robustness relative to existing state-of-the-art methodologies.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a potent tool for sequential decision-making and has achieved performance surpassing human capabilities across many challenging real-world tasks. As the extension of RL in the multi-agent system domain, multi-agent RL (MARL) not only need to learn the control policy but also requires consideration regarding interactions with all other agents in the environment, mutual influences among different system components, and the distribution of computational resources. This augments the complexity of algorithmic design and poses higher requirements on computational resources. Simultaneously, simulators are crucial to obtain realistic data, which is the fundamentals of RL. In this paper, we first propose a series of metrics of simulators and summarize the features of existing benchmarks. Second, to ease comprehension, we recall the foundational knowledge and then synthesize the recently advanced studies of MARL-related autonomous driving and intelligent transportation systems. Specifically, we examine their environmental modeling, state representation, perception units, and algorithm design. Conclusively, we discuss open challenges as well as prospects and opportunities. We hope this paper can help the researchers integrate MARL technologies and trigger more insightful ideas toward the intelligent and autonomous driving.
Conference Submission and Review Policies to Foster Responsible Computing Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This report by the CRA Working Group on Socially Responsible Computing outlines guidelines for ethical and responsible research practices in computing conferences. Key areas include avoiding harm, responsible vulnerability disclosure, ethics board review, obtaining consent, accurate reporting, managing financial conflicts of interest, and the use of generative AI. The report emphasizes the need for conference organizers to adopt clear policies to ensure responsible computing research and publication, highlighting the evolving nature of these guidelines as understanding and practices in the field advance.
MePT: Multi-Representation Guided Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have highlighted the significant potential of prompt tuning for adapting these models to a wide range of downstream tasks. However, existing prompt tuning methods typically map an image to a single representation, limiting the model's ability to capture the diverse ways an image can be described. To address this limitation, we investigate the impact of visual prompts on the model's generalization capability and introduce a novel method termed Multi-Representation Guided Prompt Tuning (MePT). Specifically, MePT employs a three-branch framework that focuses on diverse salient regions, uncovering the inherent knowledge within images which is crucial for robust generalization. Further, we employ efficient self-ensemble techniques to integrate these versatile image representations, allowing MePT to learn all conditional, marginal, and fine-grained distributions effectively. We validate the effectiveness of MePT through extensive experiments, demonstrating significant improvements on both base-to-novel class prediction and domain generalization tasks.
Dataset Distillation for Histopathology Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have exhibited remarkable success in the field of histopathology image analysis. On the other hand, the contemporary trend of employing large models and extensive datasets has underscored the significance of dataset distillation, which involves compressing large-scale datasets into a condensed set of synthetic samples, offering distinct advantages in improving training efficiency and streamlining downstream applications. In this work, we introduce a novel dataset distillation algorithm tailored for histopathology image datasets (Histo-DD), which integrates stain normalisation and model augmentation into the distillation progress. Such integration can substantially enhance the compatibility with histopathology images that are often characterised by high colour heterogeneity. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and the generated histopathology samples in both patch-level and slide-level classification tasks. The experimental results, carried out on three publicly available WSI datasets, including Camelyon16, TCGA-IDH, and UniToPath, demonstrate that the proposed Histo-DD can generate more informative synthetic patches than previous coreset selection and patch sampling methods. Moreover, the synthetic samples can preserve discriminative information, substantially reduce training efforts, and exhibit architecture-agnostic properties. These advantages indicate that synthetic samples can serve as an alternative to large-scale datasets.
Quantitative 3D Map Accuracy Evaluation Hardware and Algorithm for LiDAR(-Inertial) SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Accuracy evaluation of a 3D pointcloud map is crucial for the development of autonomous driving systems. In this work, we propose a user-independent software/hardware system that can quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of a 3D pointcloud map acquired from LiDAR(-Inertial) SLAM. We introduce a LiDAR target that functions robustly in the outdoor environment, while remaining observable by LiDAR. We also propose a software algorithm that automatically extracts representative points and calculates the accuracy of the 3D pointcloud map by leveraging GPS position data. This methodology overcomes the limitations of the manual selection method, that its result varies between users. Furthermore, two different error metrics, relative and absolute errors, are introduced to analyze the accuracy from different perspectives. Our implementations are available at: https://github.com/SangwooJung98/3D_Map_Evaluation
Mutation Strength Adaptation of the $(μ/μ_I, λ)$-ES for Large Population Sizes on the Sphere Function
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The mutation strength adaptation properties of a multi-recombinative $(μ/μ_I, λ)$-ES are studied for isotropic mutations. To this end, standard implementations of cumulative step-size adaptation (CSA) and mutative self-adaptation ($σ$SA) are investigated experimentally and theoretically by assuming large population sizes ($μ$) in relation to the search space dimensionality ($N$). The adaptation is characterized in terms of the scale-invariant mutation strength on the sphere in relation to its maximum achievable value for positive progress. %The results show how the different $σ$-adaptation variants behave as $μ$ and $N$ are varied. Standard CSA-variants show notably different adaptation properties and progress rates on the sphere, becoming slower or faster as $μ$ or $N$ are varied. This is shown by investigating common choices for the cumulation and damping parameters. Standard $σ$SA-variants (with default learning parameter settings) can achieve faster adaptation and larger progress rates compared to the CSA. However, it is shown how self-adaptation affects the progress rate levels negatively. Furthermore, differences regarding the adaptation and stability of $σ$SA with log-normal and normal mutation sampling are elaborated.