OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning Robust Precipitation Forecaster by Temporal Frame Interpolation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly elevated weather prediction models. However, these models often falter in real-world scenarios due to their sensitivity to spatial-temporal shifts. This issue is particularly acute in weather forecasting, where models are prone to overfit to local and temporal variations, especially when tasked with fine-grained predictions. In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a robust precipitation forecasting model that demonstrates resilience against such spatial-temporal discrepancies. We introduce Temporal Frame Interpolation (TFI), a novel technique that enhances the training dataset by generating synthetic samples through interpolating adjacent frames from satellite imagery and ground radar data, thus improving the model's robustness against frame noise. Moreover, we incorporate a unique Multi-Level Dice (ML-Dice) loss function, leveraging the ordinal nature of rainfall intensities to improve the model's performance. Our approach has led to significant improvements in forecasting precision, culminating in our model securing \textit{1st place} in the transfer learning leaderboard of the \textit{Weather4cast'23} competition. This achievement not only underscores the effectiveness of our methodologies but also establishes a new standard for deep learning applications in weather forecasting. Our code and weights have been public on \url{https://github.com/Secilia-Cxy/UNetTFI}.
Vehicular Cooperative Maneuvers -- Quo Vaditis?
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Vehicles will not only get more and more automated, but they will also cooperate in new ways. Currently, human-driven vehicles begin to communicate with each other using vehicle-to-everything technology. Future vehicles will use communication to share sensor data and even negotiate cooperative maneuvers. This lets them learn more about the environment and improves traffic flow and passenger comfort as more predictable maneuvers are likely to lead to a smoother ride. This paper introduces the most important concepts around cooperative vehicular maneuvers. We also summarize currently open challenges and questions to answer before a deployment can begin. Afterward, we give some perspectives on the further evolution of cooperative maneuvers and beyond.
Advancing Medical Education through the cINnAMON Web Application
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The cINnAMON EUREKA Traditional project endeavours to revolutionize indoor lighting positioning and monitoring through the integration of intelligent devices and advanced sensor technologies. This article presents the prototypes developed for various project components and explores their potential application in medical education, particularly for aspiring healthcare professionals. The current variant of the intelligent bulb prototype offers a comparative analysis of the project's bulb against commercially available smart bulbs, shedding light on its superior efficiency and capabilities. Furthermore, the initial smart bracelet prototype showcases its ability to collect and analyse data from an array of built-in sensors, empowering medical students to evaluate fragility levels based on accelerometer, gyroscope, orientation, and heart rate data. Leveraging trilateration and optimization algorithms, the intelligent location module enables precise monitoring of individuals' positions within a building, enhancing medical students' understanding of patient localization in healthcare settings. In addition, the recognition of human activity module harnesses data from the bracelet's sensors to classify different activities, providing medical students with invaluable insights into patients' daily routines and mobility patterns. The user's personal profile module facilitates seamless user registration and access to the comprehensive services offered by the cINnAMON system, empowering medical students to collect patient data for analysis and aiding doctors in making informed healthcare decisions. With the telemonitoring system, medical students can remotely monitor patients by configuring sensors in their homes, thus enabling a deeper understanding of remote patient management.
PRS: Sharp Feature Priors for Resolution-Free Surface Remeshing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Surface reconstruction with preservation of geometric features is a challenging computer vision task. Despite significant progress in implicit shape reconstruction, state-of-the-art mesh extraction methods often produce aliased, perceptually distorted surfaces and lack scalability to high-resolution 3D shapes. We present a data-driven approach for automatic feature detection and remeshing that requires only a coarse, aliased mesh as input and scales to arbitrary resolution reconstructions. We define and learn a collection of surface-based fields to (1) capture sharp geometric features in the shape with an implicit vertexwise model and (2) approximate improvements in normals alignment obtained by applying edge-flips with an edgewise model. To support scaling to arbitrary complexity shapes, we learn our fields using local triangulated patches, fusing estimates on complete surface meshes. Our feature remeshing algorithm integrates the learned fields as sharp feature priors and optimizes vertex placement and mesh connectivity for maximum expected surface improvement. On a challenging collection of high-resolution shape reconstructions in the ABC dataset, our algorithm improves over state-of-the-art by 26% normals F-score and 42% perceptual $\text{RMSE}_{\text{v}}$.
Data-Agnostic Model Poisoning against Federated Learning: A Graph Autoencoder Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a novel, data-agnostic, model poisoning attack on Federated Learning (FL), by designing a new adversarial graph autoencoder (GAE)-based framework. The attack requires no knowledge of FL training data and achieves both effectiveness and undetectability. By listening to the benign local models and the global model, the attacker extracts the graph structural correlations among the benign local models and the training data features substantiating the models. The attacker then adversarially regenerates the graph structural correlations while maximizing the FL training loss, and subsequently generates malicious local models using the adversarial graph structure and the training data features of the benign ones. A new algorithm is designed to iteratively train the malicious local models using GAE and sub-gradient descent. The convergence of FL under attack is rigorously proved, with a considerably large optimality gap. Experiments show that the FL accuracy drops gradually under the proposed attack and existing defense mechanisms fail to detect it. The attack can give rise to an infection across all benign devices, making it a serious threat to FL.
ArthModel: Enhance Arithmetic Skills to Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the great success of ChatGPT, the research of large language models has become increasingly popular. However, the models have several limitations, such as toxicity and pool performance of arithmetic solving. Meanwhile, LLM may have some potential abilities that have yet to be exploited. In this paper, we choose a different way to enhance the arithmetic ability of LLM. We propose to train LLM to generate a postfix expression related to the arithmetic problem and incorporate it with small pretrained models. Moreover, this small model transfers the token embeddings into real dense numbers and invokes native functions of a deep learning platform to get the correct answer. To generate the final result, we propose prompt injection for adding the result outputs by the small model to LLM. This work provides different ways of thinking, training and using a language model. The codes and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/eteced/arithmetic_finetuning_v1}.
SATHUR: Self Augmenting Task Hallucinal Unified Representation for Generalized Class Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) is inspired by the human ability to learn new classes without forgetting previous ones. CIL becomes more challenging in real-world scenarios when the samples in each incremental step are imbalanced. This creates another branch of problem, called Generalized Class Incremental Learning (GCIL) where each incremental step is structured more realistically. Grow When Required (GWR) network, a type of Self-Organizing Map (SOM), dynamically create and remove nodes and edges for adaptive learning. GWR performs incremental learning from feature vectors extracted by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which acts as a feature extractor. The inherent ability of GWR to form distinct clusters, each corresponding to a class in the feature vector space, regardless of the order of samples or class imbalances, is well suited to achieving GCIL. To enhance GWR's classification performance, a high-quality feature extractor is required. However, when the convolutional layers are adapted at each incremental step, the GWR nodes corresponding to prior knowledge are subject to near-invalidation. This work introduces the Self Augmenting Task Hallucinal Unified Representation (SATHUR), which re-initializes the GWR network at each incremental step, aligning it with the current feature extractor. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art GCIL methods on CIFAR-100 and CORe50 datasets.
Detailed Human-Centric Text Description-Driven Large Scene Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Text-driven large scene image synthesis has made significant progress with diffusion models, but controlling it is challenging. While using additional spatial controls with corresponding texts has improved the controllability of large scene synthesis, it is still challenging to faithfully reflect detailed text descriptions without user-provided controls. Here, we propose DetText2Scene, a novel text-driven large-scale image synthesis with high faithfulness, controllability, and naturalness in a global context for the detailed human-centric text description. Our DetText2Scene consists of 1) hierarchical keypoint-box layout generation from the detailed description by leveraging large language model (LLM), 2) view-wise conditioned joint diffusion process to synthesize a large scene from the given detailed text with LLM-generated grounded keypoint-box layout and 3) pixel perturbation-based pyramidal interpolation to progressively refine the large scene for global coherence. Our DetText2Scene significantly outperforms prior arts in text-to-large scene synthesis qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating strong faithfulness with detailed descriptions, superior controllability, and excellent naturalness in a global context.
Pose Estimation and Tracking for ASIST
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Aircraft Ship Integrated Secure and Traverse (ASIST) is a system designed to arrest helicopters safely and efficiently on ships. Originally, a precision Helicopter Position Sensing Equipment (HPSE) tracked and monitored the position of the helicopter relative to the Rapid Securing Device (RSD). However, using the HPSE component was determined to be infeasible in the transition of the ASIST system due to the hardware installation requirements. As a result, sailors track the position of the helicopters with their eyes with no sensor or artificially intelligent decision aid. Manually tracking the helicopter takes additional time and makes recoveries more difficult, especially at high sea states. Performing recoveries without the decision aid leads to higher uncertainty and cognitive load. PETA (Pose Estimation and Tracking for ASIST) is a research effort to create a helicopter tracking system prototype without hardware installation requirements for ASIST system operators. Its overall goal is to improve situational awareness and reduce operator uncertainty with respect to the aircrafts position relative to the RSD, and consequently increase the allowable landing area. The authors produced a prototype system capable of tracking helicopters with respect to the RSD. The software included a helicopter pose estimation component, camera pose estimation component, and a user interface component. PETA demonstrated the potential for state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms Faster R-CNN and HRNet (High-Resolution Network) to be used to estimate the pose of helicopters in real-time, returning ASIST to its originally intended capability. PETA also demonstrated that traditional methods of encoder-decoders could be used to estimate the orientation of the helicopter and could be used to confirm the output from HRNet.
Handling Cost and Constraints with Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

By reusing data throughout training, off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms offer improved sample efficiency relative to on-policy approaches. For continuous action spaces, the most popular methods for off-policy learning include policy improvement steps where a learned state-action ($Q$) value function is maximized over selected batches of data. These updates are often paired with regularization to combat associated overestimation of $Q$ values. With an eye toward safety, we revisit this strategy in environments with "mixed-sign" reward functions; that is, with reward functions that include independent positive (incentive) and negative (cost) terms. This setting is common in real-world applications, and may be addressed with or without constraints on the cost terms. We find the combination of function approximation and a term that maximizes $Q$ in the policy update to be problematic in such environments, because systematic errors in value estimation impact the contributions from the competing terms asymmetrically. This results in overemphasis of either incentives or costs and may severely limit learning. We explore two remedies to this issue. First, consistent with prior work, we find that periodic resetting of $Q$ and policy networks can be used to reduce value estimation error and improve learning in this setting. Second, we formulate novel off-policy actor-critic methods for both unconstrained and constrained learning that do not explicitly maximize $Q$ in the policy update. We find that this second approach, when applied to continuous action spaces with mixed-sign rewards, consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods augmented by resetting. We further find that our approach produces agents that are both competitive with popular methods overall and more reliably competent on frequently-studied control problems that do not have mixed-sign rewards.
DAOS as HPC Storage: Exploring Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

This work in progress paper outlines research looking at the performance impact of using different storage interfaces to access the high performance object store DAOS. We demonstrate that using DAOS through a FUSE based filesystem interface can provide high performance, but there are impacts when choosing what I/O library or interface to utilises, with HDF5 exhibiting the highest impact. However, this varied depending on what type of I/O operations were undertaken.
Routing-Guided Learned Product Quantization for Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Given a vector dataset $\mathcal{X}$, a query vector $\vec{x}_q$, graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) aims to build a proximity graph (PG) as an index of $\mathcal{X}$ and approximately return vectors with minimum distances to $\vec{x}_q$ by searching over the PG index. It suffers from the large-scale $\mathcal{X}$ because a PG with full vectors is too large to fit into the memory, e.g., a billion-scale $\mathcal{X}$ in 128 dimensions would consume nearly 600 GB memory. To solve this, Product Quantization (PQ) integrated graph-based ANNS is proposed to reduce the memory usage, using smaller compact codes of quantized vectors in memory instead of the large original vectors. Existing PQ methods do not consider the important routing features of PG, resulting in low-quality quantized vectors that affect the ANNS's effectiveness. In this paper, we present an end-to-end Routing-guided learned Product Quantization (RPQ) for graph-based ANNS. It consists of (1) a \textit{differentiable quantizer} used to make the standard discrete PQ differentiable to suit for back-propagation of end-to-end learning, (2) a \textit{sampling-based feature extractor} used to extract neighborhood and routing features of a PG, and (3) a \textit{multi-feature joint training module} with two types of feature-aware losses to continuously optimize the differentiable quantizer. As a result, the inherent features of a PG would be embedded into the learned PQ, generating high-quality quantized vectors. Moreover, we integrate our RPQ with the state-of-the-art DiskANN and existing popular PGs to improve their performance. Comprehensive experiments on real-world large-scale datasets (from 1M to 1B) demonstrate RPQ's superiority, e.g., 1.7$\times$-4.2$\times$ improvement on QPS at the same recall@10 of 95\%.
Can training neural language models on a curriculum with developmentally plausible data improve alignment with human reading behavior?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The use of neural language models to model human behavior has met with mixed success. While some work has found that the surprisal estimates from these models can be used to predict a wide range of human neural and behavioral responses, other work studying more complex syntactic phenomena has found that these surprisal estimates generate incorrect behavioral predictions. This paper explores the extent to which the misalignment between empirical and model-predicted behavior can be minimized by training models on more developmentally plausible data, such as in the BabyLM Challenge. We trained teacher language models on the BabyLM "strict-small" dataset and used sentence level surprisal estimates from these teacher models to create a curriculum. We found tentative evidence that our curriculum made it easier for models to acquire linguistic knowledge from the training data: on the subset of tasks in the BabyLM challenge suite evaluating models' grammatical knowledge of English, models first trained on the BabyLM data curriculum and then on a few randomly ordered training epochs performed slightly better than models trained on randomly ordered epochs alone. This improved linguistic knowledge acquisition did not result in better alignment with human reading behavior, however: models trained on the BabyLM dataset (with or without a curriculum) generated predictions that were as misaligned with human behavior as models trained on larger less curated datasets. This suggests that training on developmentally plausible datasets alone is likely insufficient to generate language models capable of accurately predicting human language processing.
Unsupervised learning architecture based on neural Darwinism and Hopfield networks recognizes symbols with high accuracy
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces a novel unsupervised learning paradigm inspired by Gerald Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection ("Neural Darwinism"). The presented automaton learns to recognize arbitrary symbols (e.g., letters of an alphabet) when they are presented repeatedly, as they are when children learn to read. On a second hierarchical level, the model creates abstract categories representing the learnt symbols. The fundamental computational unit are simple McCulloch-Pitts neurons arranged into fully-connected groups (Hopfield networks with randomly initialized weights), which are "selected", in an evolutionary sense, through symbol presentation. The learning process is fully tractable and easily interpretable for humans, in contrast to most neural network architectures. Computational properties of Hopfield networks enabling pattern recognition are discussed. In simulations, the model achieves high accuracy in learning the letters of the Latin alphabet, presented as binary patterns on a grid. This paper is a proof of concept with no claims to state-of-the-art performance in letter recognition, but hopefully inspires new thinking in bio-inspired machine learning.
Distributed Global Structure-from-Motion with a Deep Front-End
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While initial approaches to Structure-from-Motion (SfM) revolved around both global and incremental methods, most recent applications rely on incremental systems to estimate camera poses due to their superior robustness. Though there has been tremendous progress in SfM `front-ends' powered by deep models learned from data, the state-of-the-art (incremental) SfM pipelines still rely on classical SIFT features, developed in 2004. In this work, we investigate whether leveraging the developments in feature extraction and matching helps global SfM perform on par with the SOTA incremental SfM approach (COLMAP). To do so, we design a modular SfM framework that allows us to easily combine developments in different stages of the SfM pipeline. Our experiments show that while developments in deep-learning based two-view correspondence estimation do translate to improvements in point density for scenes reconstructed with global SfM, none of them outperform SIFT when comparing with incremental SfM results on a range of datasets. Our SfM system is designed from the ground up to leverage distributed computation, enabling us to parallelize computation on multiple machines and scale to large scenes.
Convergence of Nonconvex PnP-ADMM with MMSE Denoisers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Plug-and-Play Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (PnP-ADMM) is a widely-used algorithm for solving inverse problems by integrating physical measurement models and convolutional neural network (CNN) priors. PnP-ADMM has been theoretically proven to converge for convex data-fidelity terms and nonexpansive CNNs. It has however been observed that PnP-ADMM often empirically converges even for expansive CNNs. This paper presents a theoretical explanation for the observed stability of PnP-ADMM based on the interpretation of the CNN prior as a minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) denoiser. Our explanation parallels a similar argument recently made for the iterative shrinkage/thresholding algorithm variant of PnP (PnP-ISTA) and relies on the connection between MMSE denoisers and proximal operators. We also numerically evaluate the performance gap between PnP-ADMM using a nonexpansive DnCNN denoiser and expansive DRUNet denoiser, thus motivating the use of expansive CNNs.
Motion-Conditioned Image Animation for Video Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce MoCA, a Motion-Conditioned Image Animation approach for video editing. It leverages a simple decomposition of the video editing problem into image editing followed by motion-conditioned image animation. Furthermore, given the lack of robust evaluation datasets for video editing, we introduce a new benchmark that measures edit capability across a wide variety of tasks, such as object replacement, background changes, style changes, and motion edits. We present a comprehensive human evaluation of the latest video editing methods along with MoCA, on our proposed benchmark. MoCA establishes a new state-of-the-art, demonstrating greater human preference win-rate, and outperforming notable recent approaches including Dreamix (63%), MasaCtrl (75%), and Tune-A-Video (72%), with especially significant improvements for motion edits.