OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RecGPT: Generative Personalized Prompts for Sequential Recommendation via ChatGPT Training Paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

ChatGPT has achieved remarkable success in natural language understanding. Considering that recommendation is indeed a conversation between users and the system with items as words, which has similar underlying pattern with ChatGPT, we design a new chat framework in item index level for the recommendation task. Our novelty mainly contains three parts: model, training and inference. For the model part, we adopt Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) as the sequential recommendation model and design a user modular to capture personalized information. For the training part, we adopt the two-stage paradigm of ChatGPT, including pre-training and fine-tuning. In the pre-training stage, we train GPT model by auto-regression. In the fine-tuning stage, we train the model with prompts, which include both the newly-generated results from the model and the user's feedback. For the inference part, we predict several user interests as user representations in an autoregressive manner. For each interest vector, we recall several items with the highest similarity and merge the items recalled by all interest vectors into the final result. We conduct experiments with both offline public datasets and online A/B test to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
ALERT: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models' Safety through Red Teaming
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

When building Large Language Models (LLMs), it is paramount to bear safety in mind and protect them with guardrails. Indeed, LLMs should never generate content promoting or normalizing harmful, illegal, or unethical behavior that may contribute to harm to individuals or society. This principle applies to both normal and adversarial use. In response, we introduce ALERT, a large-scale benchmark to assess safety based on a novel fine-grained risk taxonomy. It is designed to evaluate the safety of LLMs through red teaming methodologies and consists of more than 45k instructions categorized using our novel taxonomy. By subjecting LLMs to adversarial testing scenarios, ALERT aims to identify vulnerabilities, inform improvements, and enhance the overall safety of the language models. Furthermore, the fine-grained taxonomy enables researchers to perform an in-depth evaluation that also helps one to assess the alignment with various policies. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate 10 popular open- and closed-source LLMs and demonstrate that many of them still struggle to attain reasonable levels of safety.
Predictive Modelling of Air Quality Index (AQI) Across Diverse Cities and States of India using Machine Learning: Investigating the Influence of Punjab's Stubble Burning on AQI Variability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Air pollution is a common and serious problem nowadays and it cannot be ignored as it has harmful impacts on human health. To address this issue proactively, people should be aware of their surroundings, which means the environment where they survive. With this motive, this research has predicted the AQI based on different air pollutant concentrations in the atmosphere. The dataset used for this research has been taken from the official website of CPCB. The dataset has the air pollutant concentration from 22 different monitoring stations in different cities of Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab. This data is checked for null values and outliers. But, the most important thing to note is the correct understanding and imputation of such values rather than ignoring or doing wrong imputation. The time series data has been used in this research which is tested for stationarity using The Dickey-Fuller test. Further different ML models like CatBoost, XGBoost, Random Forest, SVM regressor, time series model SARIMAX, and deep learning model LSTM have been used to predict AQI. For the performance evaluation of different models, I used MSE, RMSE, MAE, and R2. It is observed that Random Forest performed better as compared to other models.
Securing Monolithic Kernels using Compartmentalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Monolithic operating systems, where all kernel functionality resides in a single, shared address space, are the foundation of most mainstream computer systems. However, a single flaw, even in a non-essential part of the kernel (e.g., device drivers), can cause the entire operating system to fall under an attacker's control. Kernel hardening techniques might prevent certain types of vulnerabilities, but they fail to address a fundamental weakness: the lack of intra-kernel security that safely isolates different parts of the kernel. We survey kernel compartmentalization techniques that define and enforce intra-kernel boundaries and propose a taxonomy that allows the community to compare and discuss future work. We also identify factors that complicate comparisons among compartmentalized systems, suggest new ways to compare future approaches with existing work meaningfully, and discuss emerging research directions.
Routing and Spectrum Allocation in Broadband Quantum Entanglement Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate resource allocation for quantum entanglement distribution over an optical network. We characterize and model a network architecture that employs a single broadband quasi-deterministic time-frequency heralded Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pair source, and develop a routing and spectrum allocation scheme for distributing entangled photon pairs over such a network. As our setting allows separately solving the routing and spectrum allocation problems, we first find an optimal polynomial-time routing algorithm. We then employ max-min fairness criterion for spectrum allocation, which presents an NP-hard problem. Thus, we focus on approximately-optimal schemes. We compare their performance by evaluating the max-min and median number of EPR-pair rates assigned by them, and the associated Jain index. We identify two polynomial-time approximation algorithms that perform well, or better than others under these metrics. We also investigate scalability by analyzing how the network size and connectivity affect performance using Watts-Strogatz random graphs. We find that a spectrum allocation approach that achieves higher minimum EPR-pair rate can perform significantly worse when the median EPR-pair rate, Jain index, and computational resources are considered. Additionally, we evaluate the effect of the source node placement on the performance.
Semantic Approach to Quantifying the Consistency of Diffusion Model Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we identify the need for an interpretable, quantitative score of the repeatability, or consistency, of image generation in diffusion models. We propose a semantic approach, using a pairwise mean CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) score as our semantic consistency score. We applied this metric to compare two state-of-the-art open-source image generation diffusion models, Stable Diffusion XL and PixArt-α, and we found statistically significant differences between the semantic consistency scores for the models. Agreement between the Semantic Consistency Score selected model and aggregated human annotations was 94%. We also explored the consistency of SDXL and a LoRA-fine-tuned version of SDXL and found that the fine-tuned model had significantly higher semantic consistency in generated images. The Semantic Consistency Score proposed here offers a measure of image generation alignment, facilitating the evaluation of model architectures for specific tasks and aiding in informed decision-making regarding model selection.
Single-image driven 3d viewpoint training data augmentation for effective wine label recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Confronting the critical challenge of insufficient training data in the field of complex image recognition, this paper introduces a novel 3D viewpoint augmentation technique specifically tailored for wine label recognition. This method enhances deep learning model performance by generating visually realistic training samples from a single real-world wine label image, overcoming the challenges posed by the intricate combinations of text and logos. Classical Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) methods fall short in synthesizing such intricate content combination. Our proposed solution leverages time-tested computer vision and image processing strategies to expand our training dataset, thereby broadening the range of training samples for deep learning applications. This innovative approach to data augmentation circumvents the constraints of limited training resources. Using the augmented training images through batch-all triplet metric learning on a Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture, we can get the most discriminative embedding features for every wine label, enabling us to perform one-shot recognition of existing wine labels in the training classes or future newly collected wine labels unavailable in the training. Experimental results show a significant increase in recognition accuracy over conventional 2D data augmentation techniques.
Strongly Tail-Optimal Scheduling in the Light-Tailed M/G/1
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2024
Year: 2024

We study the problem of scheduling jobs in a queueing system, specifically an M/G/1 with light-tailed job sizes, to asymptotically optimize the response time tail. This means scheduling to make $\mathbf{P}[T > t]$, the chance a job's response time exceeds $t$, decay as quickly as possible in the $t \to \infty$ limit. For some time, the best known policy was First-Come First-Served (FCFS), which has an asymptotically exponential tail: $\mathbf{P}[T > t] \sim C e^{-γt}$. FCFS achieves the optimal *decay rate* $γ$, but its *tail constant* $C$ is suboptimal. Only recently have policies that improve upon FCFS's tail constant been discovered. But it is unknown what the optimal tail constant is, let alone what policy might achieve it. In this paper, we derive a closed-form expression for the optimal tail constant $C$, and we introduce *$γ$-Boost*, a new policy that achieves this optimal tail constant. Roughly speaking, $γ$-Boost operates similarly to FCFS, but it pretends that small jobs arrive earlier than their true arrival times. This significantly reduces the response time of small jobs without unduly delaying large jobs, improving upon FCFS's tail constant by up to 50% with only moderate job size variability, with even larger improvements for higher variability. While these results are for systems with full job size information, we also introduce and analyze a version of $γ$-Boost that works in settings with partial job size information, showing it too achieves significant gains over FCFS. Finally, we show via simulation that $γ$-Boost has excellent practical performance.
"Don't forget to put the milk back!" Dataset for Enabling Embodied Agents to Detect Anomalous Situations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Home robots intend to make their users lives easier. Our work assists in this goal by enabling robots to inform their users of dangerous or unsanitary anomalies in their home. Some examples of these anomalies include the user leaving their milk out, forgetting to turn off the stove, or leaving poison accessible to children. To move towards enabling home robots with these abilities, we have created a new dataset, which we call SafetyDetect. The SafetyDetect dataset consists of 1000 anomalous home scenes, each of which contains unsafe or unsanitary situations for an agent to detect. Our approach utilizes large language models (LLMs) alongside both a graph representation of the scene and the relationships between the objects in the scene. Our key insight is that this connected scene graph and the object relationships it encodes enables the LLM to better reason about the scene -- especially as it relates to detecting dangerous or unsanitary situations. Our most promising approach utilizes GPT-4 and pursues a categorization technique where object relations from the scene graph are classified as normal, dangerous, unsanitary, or dangerous for children. This method is able to correctly identify over 90% of anomalous scenarios in the SafetyDetect Dataset. Additionally, we conduct real world experiments on a ClearPath TurtleBot where we generate a scene graph from visuals of the real world scene, and run our approach with no modification. This setup resulted in little performance loss. The SafetyDetect Dataset and code will be released to the public upon this papers publication.
Vehicle-to-Vehicle Charging: Model, Complexity, and Heuristics
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs) poses challenges for electricity grids to accommodate or mitigate peak demand. Vehicle-to-Vehicle Charging (V2VC) has been recently adopted by popular EVs, posing new opportunities and challenges to the management and operation of EVs. We present a novel V2VC model that allows decision-makers to take V2VC into account when optimizing their EV operations. We show that optimizing V2VC is NP-Complete and find that even small problem instances are computationally challenging. We propose R-V2VC, a heuristic that takes advantage of the resulting totally unimodular constraint matrix to efficiently solve problems of realistic sizes. Our results demonstrate that R-V2VC presents a linear growth in the solution time as the problem size increases, while achieving solutions of optimal or near-optimal quality. R-V2VC can be used for real-world operations and to study what-if scenarios when evaluating the costs and benefits of V2VC.
Uncertainty Quantification in Detecting Choroidal Metastases on MRI via Evolutionary Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Uncertainty quantification plays a vital role in facilitating the practical implementation of AI in radiology by addressing growing concerns around trustworthiness. Given the challenges associated with acquiring large, annotated datasets in this field, there is a need for methods that enable uncertainty quantification in small data AI approaches tailored to radiology images. In this study, we focused on uncertainty quantification within the context of the small data evolutionary strategies-based technique of deep neuroevolution (DNE). Specifically, we employed DNE to train a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with MRI images of the eyes for binary classification. The goal was to distinguish between normal eyes and those with metastatic tumors called choroidal metastases. The training set comprised 18 images with choroidal metastases and 18 without tumors, while the testing set contained a tumor-to-normal ratio of 15:15. We trained CNN model weights via DNE for approximately 40,000 episodes, ultimately reaching a convergence of 100% accuracy on the training set. We saved all models that achieved maximal training set accuracy. Then, by applying these models to the testing set, we established an ensemble method for uncertainty quantification.The saved set of models produced distributions for each testing set image between the two classes of normal and tumor-containing. The relative frequencies permitted uncertainty quantification of model predictions. Intriguingly, we found that subjective features appreciated by human radiologists explained images for which uncertainty was high, highlighting the significance of uncertainty quantification in AI-driven radiological analyses.
WROOM: An Autonomous Driving Approach for Off-Road Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Off-road navigation is a challenging problem both at the planning level to get a smooth trajectory and at the control level to avoid flipping over, hitting obstacles, or getting stuck at a rough patch. There have been several recent works using classical approaches involving depth map prediction followed by smooth trajectory planning and using a controller to track it. We design an end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) system for an autonomous vehicle in off-road environments using a custom-designed simulator in the Unity game engine. We warm-start the agent by imitating a rule-based controller and utilize Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to improve the policy based on a reward that incorporates Control Barrier Functions (CBF), facilitating the agent's ability to generalize effectively to real-world scenarios. The training involves agents concurrently undergoing domain-randomized trials in various environments. We also propose a novel simulation environment to replicate off-road driving scenarios and deploy our proposed approach on a real buggy RC car. Videos and additional results: https://sites.google.com/view/wroom-utd/home
ChangeAnywhere: Sample Generation for Remote Sensing Change Detection via Semantic Latent Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Remote sensing change detection (CD) is a pivotal technique that pinpoints changes on a global scale based on multi-temporal images. With the recent expansion of deep learning, supervised deep learning-based CD models have shown satisfactory performance. However, CD sample labeling is very time-consuming as it is densely labeled and requires expert knowledge. To alleviate this problem, we introduce ChangeAnywhere, a novel CD sample generation method using the semantic latent diffusion model and single-temporal images. Specifically, ChangeAnywhere leverages the relative ease of acquiring large single-temporal semantic datasets to generate large-scale, diverse, and semantically annotated bi-temporal CD datasets. ChangeAnywhere captures the two essentials of CD samples, i.e., change implies semantically different, and non-change implies reasonable change under the same semantic constraints. We generated ChangeAnywhere-100K, the largest synthesis CD dataset with 100,000 pairs of CD samples based on the proposed method. The ChangeAnywhere-100K significantly improved both zero-shot and few-shot performance on two CD benchmark datasets for various deep learning-based CD models, as demonstrated by transfer experiments. This paper delineates the enormous potential of ChangeAnywhere for CD sample generation and demonstrates the subsequent enhancement of model performance. Therefore, ChangeAnywhere offers a potent tool for remote sensing CD. All codes and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/tangkai-RS/ChangeAnywhere.
Approximate Cluster-Based Sparse Document Retrieval with Segmented Maximum Term Weights
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper revisits cluster-based retrieval that partitions the inverted index into multiple groups and skips the index partially at cluster and document levels during online inference using a learned sparse representation. It proposes an approximate search scheme with two parameters to control the rank-safeness competitiveness of pruning with segmented maximum term weights within each cluster. Cluster-level maximum weight segmentation allows an improvement in the rank score bound estimation and threshold-based pruning to be approximately adaptive to bound estimation tightness, resulting in better relevance and efficiency. The experiments with MS MARCO passage ranking and BEIR datasets demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed scheme with a comparison to the baselines. This paper presents the design of this approximate retrieval scheme with rank-safeness analysis, compares clustering and segmentation options, and reports evaluation results.
PM2: A New Prompting Multi-modal Model Paradigm for Few-shot Medical Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Few-shot learning has been successfully applied to medical image classification as only very few medical examples are available for training. Due to the challenging problem of limited number of annotated medical images, image representations should not be solely derived from a single image modality which is insufficient for characterizing concept classes. In this paper, we propose a new prompting multi-modal model paradigm on medical image classification based on multi-modal foundation models, called PM2. Besides image modality,PM2 introduces another supplementary text input, known as prompt, to further describe corresponding image or concept classes and facilitate few-shot learning across diverse modalities. To better explore the potential of prompt engineering, we empirically investigate five distinct prompt schemes under the new paradigm. Furthermore, linear probing in multi-modal models acts as a linear classification head taking as input only class token, which ignores completely merits of rich statistics inherent in high-level visual tokens. Thus, we alternatively perform a linear classification on feature distribution of visual tokens and class token simultaneously. To effectively mine such rich statistics, a global covariance pooling with efficient matrix power normalization is used to aggregate visual tokens. Then we study and combine two classification heads. One is shared for class token of image from vision encoder and prompt representation encoded by text encoder. The other is to classification on feature distribution of visual tokens from vision encoder. Extensive experiments on three medical datasets show that our PM2 significantly outperforms counterparts regardless of prompt schemes and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Trustworthy Multimodal Fusion for Sentiment Analysis in Ordinal Sentiment Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal video sentiment analysis aims to integrate multiple modal information to analyze the opinions and attitudes of speakers. Most previous work focuses on exploring the semantic interactions of intra- and inter-modality. However, these works ignore the reliability of multimodality, i.e., modalities tend to contain noise, semantic ambiguity, missing modalities, etc. In addition, previous multimodal approaches treat different modalities equally, largely ignoring their different contributions. Furthermore, existing multimodal sentiment analysis methods directly regress sentiment scores without considering ordinal relationships within sentiment categories, with limited performance. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a trustworthy multimodal sentiment ordinal network (TMSON) to improve performance in sentiment analysis. Specifically, we first devise a unimodal feature extractor for each modality to obtain modality-specific features. Then, an uncertainty distribution estimation network is customized, which estimates the unimodal uncertainty distributions. Next, Bayesian fusion is performed on the learned unimodal distributions to obtain multimodal distributions for sentiment prediction. Finally, an ordinal-aware sentiment space is constructed, where ordinal regression is used to constrain the multimodal distributions. Our proposed TMSON outperforms baselines on multimodal sentiment analysis tasks, and empirical results demonstrate that TMSON is capable of reducing uncertainty to obtain more robust predictions.