OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recommender models excel at providing domain-specific item recommendations by leveraging extensive user behavior data. Despite their ability to act as lightweight domain experts, they struggle to perform versatile tasks such as providing explanations and engaging in conversations. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) represent a significant step towards artificial general intelligence, showcasing remarkable capabilities in instruction comprehension, commonsense reasoning, and human interaction. However, LLMs lack the knowledge of domain-specific item catalogs and behavioral patterns, particularly in areas that diverge from general world knowledge, such as online e-commerce. Finetuning LLMs for each domain is neither economic nor efficient. In this paper, we bridge the gap between recommender models and LLMs, combining their respective strengths to create a versatile and interactive recommender system. We introduce an efficient framework called \textbf{InteRecAgent}, which employs LLMs as the brain and recommender models as tools. We first outline a minimal set of essential tools required to transform LLMs into InteRecAgent. We then propose an efficient workflow within InteRecAgent for task execution, incorporating key components such as memory components, dynamic demonstration-augmented task planning, and reflection. InteRecAgent enables traditional recommender systems, such as those ID-based matrix factorization models, to become interactive systems with a natural language interface through the integration of LLMs. Experimental results on several public datasets show that InteRecAgent achieves satisfying performance as a conversational recommender system, outperforming general-purpose LLMs. The source code of InteRecAgent is released at https://aka.ms/recagent.
MS23D: A 3D Object Detection Method Using Multi-Scale Semantic Feature Points to Construct 3D Feature Layer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

LiDAR point clouds can effectively depict the motion and posture of objects in three-dimensional space. Many studies accomplish the 3D object detection by voxelizing point clouds. However, in autonomous driving scenarios, the sparsity and hollowness of point clouds create some difficulties for voxel-based methods. The sparsity of point clouds makes it challenging to describe the geometric features of objects. The hollowness of point clouds poses difficulties for the aggregation of 3D features. We propose a two-stage 3D object detection framework, called MS23D. (1) We propose a method using voxel feature points from multi-branch to construct the 3D feature layer. Using voxel feature points from different branches, we construct a relatively compact 3D feature layer with rich semantic features. Additionally, we propose a distance-weighted sampling method, reducing the loss of foreground points caused by downsampling and allowing the 3D feature layer to retain more foreground points. (2) In response to the hollowness of point clouds, we predict the offsets between deep-level feature points and the object's centroid, making them as close as possible to the object's centroid. This enables the aggregation of these feature points with abundant semantic features. For feature points from shallow-level, we retain them on the object's surface to describe the geometric features of the object. To validate our approach, we evaluated its effectiveness on both the KITTI and ONCE datasets.
BTSeg: Barlow Twins Regularization for Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce BTSeg (Barlow Twins regularized Segmentation), an innovative, semi-supervised training approach enhancing semantic segmentation models in order to effectively tackle adverse weather conditions without requiring additional labeled training data. Images captured at similar locations but under varying adverse conditions are regarded as manifold representation of the same scene, thereby enabling the model to conceptualize its understanding of the environment. BTSeg shows cutting-edge performance for the new challenging ACG benchmark and sets a new state-of-the-art for weakly-supervised domain adaptation for the ACDC dataset. To support further research, we have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/BTSeg .
Learning to Taste: A Multimodal Wine Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present WineSensed, a large multimodal wine dataset for studying the relations between visual perception, language, and flavor. The dataset encompasses 897k images of wine labels and 824k reviews of wines curated from the Vivino platform. It has over 350k unique bottlings, annotated with year, region, rating, alcohol percentage, price, and grape composition. We obtained fine-grained flavor annotations on a subset by conducting a wine-tasting experiment with 256 participants who were asked to rank wines based on their similarity in flavor, resulting in more than 5k pairwise flavor distances. We propose a low-dimensional concept embedding algorithm that combines human experience with automatic machine similarity kernels. We demonstrate that this shared concept embedding space improves upon separate embedding spaces for coarse flavor classification (alcohol percentage, country, grape, price, rating) and aligns with the intricate human perception of flavor.
AttrSeg: Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Attribute Decomposition-Aggregation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is a challenging task that requires segmenting novel object categories at inference time. Recent studies have explored vision-language pre-training to handle this task, but suffer from unrealistic assumptions in practical scenarios, i.e., low-quality textual category names. For example, this paradigm assumes that new textual categories will be accurately and completely provided, and exist in lexicons during pre-training. However, exceptions often happen when encountering ambiguity for brief or incomplete names, new words that are not present in the pre-trained lexicons, and difficult-to-describe categories for users. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel attribute decomposition-aggregation framework, AttrSeg, inspired by human cognition in understanding new concepts. Specifically, in the decomposition stage, we decouple class names into diverse attribute descriptions to complement semantic contexts from multiple perspectives. Two attribute construction strategies are designed: using large language models for common categories, and involving manually labeling for human-invented categories. In the aggregation stage, we group diverse attributes into an integrated global description, to form a discriminative classifier that distinguishes the target object from others. One hierarchical aggregation architecture is further proposed to achieve multi-level aggregations, leveraging the meticulously designed clustering module. The final results are obtained by computing the similarity between aggregated attributes and images embeddings. To evaluate the effectiveness, we annotate three types of datasets with attribute descriptions, and conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies. The results show the superior performance of attribute decomposition-aggregation.
LLM in the Shell: Generative Honeypots
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Honeypots are essential tools in cybersecurity for early detection, threat intelligence gathering, and analysis of attacker's behavior. However, most of them lack the required realism to engage and fool human attackers long-term. Being easy to distinguish honeypots strongly hinders their effectiveness. This can happen because they are too deterministic, lack adaptability, or lack deepness. This work introduces shelLM, a dynamic and realistic software honeypot based on Large Language Models that generates Linux-like shell output. We designed and implemented shelLM using cloud-based LLMs. We evaluated if shelLM can generate output as expected from a real Linux shell. The evaluation was done by asking cybersecurity researchers to use the honeypot and give feedback if each answer from the honeypot was the expected one from a Linux shell. Results indicate that shelLM can create credible and dynamic answers capable of addressing the limitations of current honeypots. ShelLM reached a TNR of 0.90, convincing humans it was consistent with a real Linux shell. The source code and prompts for replicating the experiments have been publicly available.
SortedNet: A Scalable and Generalized Framework for Training Modular Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks (DNNs) must cater to a variety of users with different performance needs and budgets, leading to the costly practice of training, storing, and maintaining numerous user/task-specific models. There are solutions in the literature to deal with single dynamic or many-in-one models instead of many individual networks; however, they suffer from significant drops in performance, lack of generalization across different model architectures or different dimensions (e.g. depth, width, attention blocks), heavy model search requirements during training, and training a limited number of sub-models. To address these limitations, we propose SortedNet, a generalized and scalable training solution to harness the inherent modularity of DNNs. Thanks to a generalized nested architecture (which we refer as \textit{sorted} architecture in this paper) with shared parameters and its novel update scheme combining random sub-model sampling and a new gradient accumulation mechanism, SortedNet enables the training of sub-models simultaneously along with the training of the main model (without any significant extra training or inference overhead), simplifies dynamic model selection, customizes deployment during inference, and reduces the model storage requirement significantly. The versatility and scalability of SortedNet are validated through various architectures and tasks, including LLaMA, BERT, RoBERTa (NLP tasks), ResNet and MobileNet (image classification) demonstrating its superiority over existing dynamic training methods. For example, we introduce a novel adaptive self-speculative approach based on sorted-training to accelerate large language models decoding. Moreover, SortedNet is able to train 160 sub-models at once, achieving at least 96\% of the original model's performance.
A Complete Dependency Pair Framework for Almost-Sure Innermost Termination of Probabilistic Term Rewriting
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, the well-known dependency pair (DP) framework was adapted to a dependency tuple framework in order to prove almost-sure innermost termination (iAST) of probabilistic term rewrite systems. While this approach was incomplete, in this paper, we improve it into a complete criterion for iAST by presenting a new, more elegant definition of DPs for probabilistic term rewriting. Based on this, we extend the probabilistic DP framework by new transformations. Our implementation in the tool AProVE shows that they increase its power considerably.
Denture reinforcement via topology optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

We present a computational design method that optimizes the reinforcement of dentures and increases the stiffness of dentures. Our approach optimally places reinforcement in the denture, which modern multi-material three-dimensional printers could implement. The study focuses on reducing denture displacement by identifying regions that require reinforcement (E-glass material) with the help of topology optimization. Our method is applied to a three-dimensional complete lower jaw denture. We compare the displacement results of a non-reinforced denture and a reinforced denture that has two materials. The comparison results indicate that there is a decrease in the displacement in the reinforced denture. Considering node-based displacement distribution, the reinforcement reduces the displacement magnitudes in the reinforced denture compared to the non-reinforced denture. The study guides dental technicians on where to automatically place reinforcement in the fabrication process, helping them save time and reduce material usage.
A shape-based heuristic for the detection of urban block artifacts in street networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Street networks are ubiquitous components of cities, guiding their development and enabling movement from place to place; street networks are also the critical components of many urban analytical methods. However, their graph representation is often designed primarily for transportation purposes. This representation is less suitable for other use cases where transportation networks need to be simplified as a mandatory pre-processing step, e.g., in the case of morphological analysis, visual navigation, or drone flight routing. While the urgent demand for automated pre-processing methods comes from various fields, it is still an unsolved challenge. In this article, we tackle this challenge by proposing a cheap computational heuristic for the identification of "face artifacts", i.e., geometries that are enclosed by transportation edges but do not represent urban blocks. The heuristic is based on combining the frequency distributions of shape compactness metrics and area measurements of street network face polygons. We test our method on 131 globally sampled large cities and show that it successfully identifies face artifacts in 89\% of analyzed cities. Our heuristic of detecting artifacts caused by data being collected for another purpose is the first step towards an automated street network simplification workflow. Moreover, the proposed face artifact index uncovers differences in structural rules guiding the development of cities in different world regions.
Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Adaptive Image Transmission over MIMO Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a vision transformer (ViT)-based deep joint source and channel coding (DeepJSCC) scheme for wireless image transmission over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels, denoted as DeepJSCC-MIMO. We consider DeepJSCC-MIMO for adaptive image transmission in both open-loop and closed-loop MIMO systems. The novel DeepJSCC-MIMO architecture surpasses the classical separation-based benchmarks with robustness to channel estimation errors and showcases remarkable flexibility in adapting to diverse channel conditions and antenna numbers without requiring retraining. Specifically, by harnessing the self-attention mechanism of ViT, DeepJSCC-MIMO intelligently learns feature mapping and power allocation strategies tailored to the unique characteristics of the source image and prevailing channel conditions. Extensive numerical experiments validate the significant improvements in transmission quality achieved by DeepJSCC-MIMO for both open-loop and closed-loop MIMO systems across a wide range of scenarios. Moreover, DeepJSCC-MIMO exhibits robustness to varying channel conditions, channel estimation errors, and different antenna numbers, making it an appealing solution for emerging semantic communication systems.
Structured Radial Basis Function Network: Modelling Diversity for Multiple Hypotheses Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-modal problems can be effectively addressed using multiple hypothesis frameworks, but integrating these frameworks into learning models poses significant challenges. This paper introduces a Structured Radial Basis Function Network (s-RBFN) as an ensemble of multiple hypothesis predictors for regression. During the training of the predictors, first the centroidal Voronoi tessellations are formed based on their losses and the true labels, representing geometrically the set of multiple hypotheses. Then, the trained predictors are used to compute a structured dataset with their predictions, including centers and scales for the basis functions. A radial basis function network, with each basis function focused on a particular hypothesis, is subsequently trained using this structured dataset for multiple hypotheses prediction. The s-RBFN is designed to train efficiently while controlling diversity in ensemble learning parametrically. The least-squares approach for training the structured ensemble model provides a closed-form solution for multiple hypotheses and structured predictions. During the formation of the structured dataset, a parameter is employed to avoid mode collapse by controlling tessellation shapes. This parameter provides a mechanism to balance diversity and generalization performance for the s-RBFN. The empirical validation on two multivariate prediction datasets-air quality and energy appliance predictions-demonstrates the superior generalization performance and computational efficiency of the structured ensemble model compared to other models and their single-hypothesis counterparts.
Approximating Fair $k$-Min-Sum-Radii in Euclidean Space
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The $k$-center problem is a classical clustering problem in which one is asked to find a partitioning of a point set $P$ into $k$ clusters such that the maximum radius of any cluster is minimized. It is well-studied. But what if we add up the radii of the clusters instead of only considering the cluster with maximum radius? This natural variant is called the $k$-min-sum-radii problem. It has become the subject of more and more interest in recent years, inspiring the development of approximation algorithms for the $k$-min-sum-radii problem in its plain version as well as in constrained settings. We study the problem for Euclidean spaces $\mathbb{R}^d$ of arbitrary dimension but assume the number $k$ of clusters to be constant. In this case, a PTAS for the problem is known (see Bandyapadhyay, Lochet and Saurabh, SoCG, 2023). Our aim is to extend the knowledge base for $k$-min-sum-radii to the domain of fair clustering. We study several group fairness constraints, such as the one introduced by Chierichetti et al. (NeurIPS, 2017). In this model, input points have an additional attribute (e.g., colors such as red and blue), and clusters have to preserve the ratio between different attribute values (e.g., have the same fraction of red and blue points as the ground set). Different variants of this general idea have been studied in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, no approximative results for the fair $k$-min-sum-radii problem are known, despite the immense amount of work on the related fair $k$-center problem. We propose a PTAS for the fair $k$-min-sum-radii problem in Euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension for the case of constant $k$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first PTAS for the problem. It works for different notions of group fairness.
Index-aware learning of circuits
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Electrical circuits are present in a variety of technologies, making their design an important part of computer aided engineering. The growing number of parameters that affect the final design leads to a need for new approaches to quantify their impact. Machine learning may play a key role in this regard, however current approaches often make suboptimal use of existing knowledge about the system at hand. In terms of circuits, their description via modified nodal analysis is well-understood. This particular formulation leads to systems of differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) which bring with them a number of peculiarities, e.g. hidden constraints that the solution needs to fulfill. We use the recently introduced dissection index that can decouple a given system of DAEs into ordinary differential equations, only depending on differential variables, and purely algebraic equations, that describe the relations between differential and algebraic variables. The idea is to then only learn the differential variables and reconstruct the algebraic ones using the relations from the decoupling. This approach guarantees that the algebraic constraints are fulfilled up to the accuracy of the nonlinear system solver, and it may also reduce the learning effort as only the differential variables need to be learned.
SEPAL: Spatial Gene Expression Prediction from Local Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Spatial transcriptomics is an emerging technology that aligns histopathology images with spatially resolved gene expression profiling. It holds the potential for understanding many diseases but faces significant bottlenecks such as specialized equipment and domain expertise. In this work, we present SEPAL, a new model for predicting genetic profiles from visual tissue appearance. Our method exploits the biological biases of the problem by directly supervising relative differences with respect to mean expression, and leverages local visual context at every coordinate to make predictions using a graph neural network. This approach closes the gap between complete locality and complete globality in current methods. In addition, we propose a novel benchmark that aims to better define the task by following current best practices in transcriptomics and restricting the prediction variables to only those with clear spatial patterns. Our extensive evaluation in two different human breast cancer datasets indicates that SEPAL outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods and other mechanisms of including spatial context.
Worst-Case Input Generation for Concurrent Programs under Non-Monotone Resource Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Worst-case input generation aims to automatically generate inputs that exhibit the worst-case performance of programs. It has several applications, and can, for example, detect vulnerabilities to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. However, it is non-trivial to generate worst-case inputs for concurrent programs, particularly for resources like memory where the peak cost depends on how processes are scheduled. This article presents the first sound worst-case input generation algorithm for concurrent programs under non-monotone resource metrics like memory. The key insight is to leverage resource-annotated session types and symbolic execution. Session types describe communication protocols on channels in process calculi. Equipped with resource annotations, resource-annotated session types not only encode cost bounds but also indicate how many resources can be reused and transferred between processes. This information is critical for identifying a worst-case execution path during symbolic execution. The algorithm is sound: if it returns any input, it is guaranteed to be a valid worst-case input. The algorithm is also relatively complete: as long as resource-annotated session types are sufficiently expressive and the background theory for SMT solving is decidable, a worst-case input is guaranteed to be returned. A simple case study of a web server's memory usage demonstrates the utility of the worst-case input generation algorithm.
Implicit Neural Image Stitching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing frameworks for image stitching often provide visually reasonable stitchings. However, they suffer from blurry artifacts and disparities in illumination, depth level, etc. Although the recent learning-based stitchings relax such disparities, the required methods impose sacrifice of image qualities failing to capture high-frequency details for stitched images. To address the problem, we propose a novel approach, implicit Neural Image Stitching (NIS) that extends arbitrary-scale super-resolution. Our method estimates Fourier coefficients of images for quality-enhancing warps. Then, the suggested model blends color mismatches and misalignment in the latent space and decodes the features into RGB values of stitched images. Our experiments show that our approach achieves improvement in resolving the low-definition imaging of the previous deep image stitching with favorable accelerated image-enhancing methods. Our source code is available at https://github.com/minshu-kim/NIS.