OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Baby Bear: Seeking a Just Right Rating Scale for Scalar Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Our goal is a mechanism for efficiently assigning scalar ratings to each of a large set of elements. For example, "what percent positive or negative is this product review?" When sample sizes are small, prior work has advocated for methods such as Best Worst Scaling (BWS) as being more robust than direct ordinal annotation ("Likert scales"). Here we first introduce IBWS, which iteratively collects annotations through Best-Worst Scaling, resulting in robustly ranked crowd-sourced data. While effective, IBWS is too expensive for large-scale tasks. Using the results of IBWS as a best-desired outcome, we evaluate various direct assessment methods to determine what is both cost-efficient and best correlating to a large scale BWS annotation strategy. Finally, we illustrate in the domains of dialogue and sentiment how these annotations can support robust learning-to-rank models.
ISAC-Fi: Enabling Full-fledged Monostatic Sensing over Wi-Fi Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Whereas Wi-Fi communications have been exploited for sensing purpose for over a decade, the bistatic or multistatic nature of Wi-Fi still poses multiple challenges, hampering real-life deployment of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) within Wi-Fi framework. In this paper, we aim to re-design WiFi so that monostatic sensing (mimicking radar) can be achieved over the multistatic communication infrastructure. Specifically, we propose, design, and implement ISAC-Fi as an ISAC-ready Wi-Fi prototype. We first present a novel self-interference cancellation scheme, in order to extract reflected (radio frequency) signals for sensing purpose in the face of transmissions. We then subtly revise existing Wi-Fi framework so as to seamlessly operate monostatic sensing under Wi-Fi communication standard. Finally, we offer two ISAC-Fi designs: while a USRP-based one emulates a totally re-designed ISAC-Fi device, another plug-andplay design allows for backward compatibility by attaching an extra module to an arbitrary Wi-Fi device. We perform extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of ISAC-Fi and also to demonstrate its superiority over existing Wi-Fi sensing proposals.
TeamLoRA: Boosting Low-Rank Adaptation with Expert Collaboration and Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA have effectively addressed GPU memory constraints during fine-tuning, their performance often falls short, especially in multidimensional task scenarios. To address this issue, one straightforward solution is to introduce task-specific LoRA modules as domain experts, leveraging the modeling of multiple experts' capabilities and thus enhancing the general capability of multi-task learning. Despite promising, these additional components often add complexity to the training and inference process, contravening the efficient characterization of PEFT designed for. Considering this, we introduce an innovative PEFT method, TeamLoRA, consisting of a collaboration and competition module for experts, and thus achieving the right balance of effectiveness and efficiency: (i) For collaboration, a novel knowledge-sharing and -organizing mechanism is devised to appropriately reduce the scale of matrix operations, thereby boosting the training and inference speed. (ii) For competition, we propose leveraging a game-theoretic interaction mechanism for experts, encouraging experts to transfer their domain-specific knowledge while facing diverse downstream tasks, and thus enhancing the performance. By doing so, TeamLoRA elegantly connects the experts as a "Team" with internal collaboration and competition, enabling a faster and more accurate PEFT paradigm for multi-task learning. To validate the superiority of TeamLoRA, we curate a comprehensive multi-task evaluation(CME) benchmark to thoroughly assess the capability of multi-task learning. Experiments conducted on our CME and other benchmarks indicate the effectiveness and efficiency of TeamLoRA. Our project is available at https://github.com/Lin-Tianwei/TeamLoRA.
3D-Aware Instance Segmentation and Tracking in Egocentric Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Egocentric videos present unique challenges for 3D scene understanding due to rapid camera motion, frequent object occlusions, and limited object visibility. This paper introduces a novel approach to instance segmentation and tracking in first-person video that leverages 3D awareness to overcome these obstacles. Our method integrates scene geometry, 3D object centroid tracking, and instance segmentation to create a robust framework for analyzing dynamic egocentric scenes. By incorporating spatial and temporal cues, we achieve superior performance compared to state-of-the-art 2D approaches. Extensive evaluations on the challenging EPIC Fields dataset demonstrate significant improvements across a range of tracking and segmentation consistency metrics. Specifically, our method outperforms the next best performing approach by $7$ points in Association Accuracy (AssA) and $4.5$ points in IDF1 score, while reducing the number of ID switches by $73\%$ to $80\%$ across various object categories. Leveraging our tracked instance segmentations, we showcase downstream applications in 3D object reconstruction and amodal video object segmentation in these egocentric settings.
Docling Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This technical report introduces Docling, an easy to use, self-contained, MIT-licensed open-source package for PDF document conversion. It is powered by state-of-the-art specialized AI models for layout analysis (DocLayNet) and table structure recognition (TableFormer), and runs efficiently on commodity hardware in a small resource budget. The code interface allows for easy extensibility and addition of new features and models.
Forecasting Attacker Actions using Alert-driven Attack Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

While intrusion detection systems form the first line-of-defense against cyberattacks, they often generate an overwhelming volume of alerts, leading to alert fatigue among security operations center (SOC) analysts. Alert-driven attack graphs (AGs) have been developed to reduce alert fatigue by automatically discovering attack paths in intrusion alerts. However, they only work in offline settings and cannot prioritize critical attack paths. This paper builds an action forecasting capability on top of the existing alert-driven AG framework for predicting the next likely attacker action given a sequence of observed actions, thus enabling analysts to prioritize non-trivial attack paths. We also modify the framework to build AGs in real time, as new alerts are triggered. This way, we convert alert-driven AGs into an early warning system that enables analysts to circumvent ongoing attacks and break the cyber killchain. We propose an expectation maximization approach to forecast future actions in a reversed suffix-based probabilistic deterministic finite automaton (rSPDFA). By utilizing three real-world intrusion and endpoint alert datasets, we empirically demonstrate that the best performing rSPDFA achieves an average top-3 accuracy of 67.27%, which reflects a 57.17% improvement over three baselines, on average. We also invite six SOC analysts to use the evolving AGs in two scenarios. Their responses suggest that the action forecasts help them prioritize critical incidents, while the evolving AGs enable them to choose countermeasures in real-time.
LCE: A Framework for Explainability of DNNs for Ultrasound Image Based on Concept Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Explaining the decisions of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for medical images has become increasingly important. Existing attribution methods have difficulty explaining the meaning of pixels while existing concept-based methods are limited by additional annotations or specific model structures that are difficult to apply to ultrasound images. In this paper, we propose the Lesion Concept Explainer (LCE) framework, which combines attribution methods with concept-based methods. We introduce the Segment Anything Model (SAM), fine-tuned on a large number of medical images, for concept discovery to enable a meaningful explanation of ultrasound image DNNs. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of both faithfulness and understandability. We point out deficiencies in the popular faithfulness evaluation metrics and propose a new evaluation metric. Our evaluation of public and private breast ultrasound datasets (BUSI and FG-US-B) shows that LCE performs well compared to commonly-used explainability methods. Finally, we also validate that LCE can consistently provide reliable explanations for more meaningful fine-grained diagnostic tasks in breast ultrasound.
$p$SVM: Soft-margin SVMs with $p$-norm Hinge Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) based on hinge loss have been extensively discussed and applied to various binary classification tasks. These SVMs achieve a balance between margin maximization and the minimization of slack due to outliers. Although many efforts have been dedicated to enhancing the performance of SVMs with hinge loss, studies on $p$SVMs, soft-margin SVMs with $p$-norm hinge loss, remain relatively scarce. In this paper, we explore the properties, performance, and training algorithms of $p$SVMs. We first derive the generalization bound of $p$SVMs, then formulate the dual optimization problem, comparing it with the traditional approach. Furthermore, we discuss a generalized version of the Sequential Minimal Optimization (SMO) algorithm, $p$SMO, to train our $p$SVM model. Comparative experiments on various datasets, including binary and multi-class classification tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our $p$SVM model and the $p$SMO method. Code is available at https://github.com/CoderBak/pSVM.
Active Learning for Identifying Disaster-Related Tweets: A Comparison with Keyword Filtering and Generic Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Information from social media can provide essential information for emergency response during natural disasters in near real-time. However, it is difficult to identify the disaster-related posts among the large amounts of unstructured data available. Previous methods often use keyword filtering, topic modelling or classification-based techniques to identify such posts. Active Learning (AL) presents a promising sub-field of Machine Learning (ML) that has not been used much in the field of text classification of social media content. This study therefore investigates the potential of AL for identifying disaster-related Tweets. We compare a keyword filtering approach, a RoBERTa model fine-tuned with generic data from CrisisLex, a base RoBERTa model trained with AL and a fine-tuned RoBERTa model trained with AL regarding classification performance. For testing, data from CrisisLex and manually labelled data from the 2021 flood in Germany and the 2023 Chile forest fires were considered. The results show that generic fine-tuning combined with 10 rounds of AL outperformed all other approaches. Consequently, a broadly applicable model for the identification of disaster-related Tweets could be trained with very little labelling effort. The model can be applied to use cases beyond this study and provides a useful tool for further research in social media analysis.
WoW -- A System for Self-Service Collaborative Design Workshops
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In many working environments, users have to solve complex problems relying on large and multi-source data. Such problems require several experts to collaborate on solving them, or a single analyst to reconcile multiple complementary standpoints. Previous research has shown that wall-sized displays supports different collaboration styles, based most often on abstract tasks as proxies of real work. We present the design and implementation of WoW, short for ``Workspace on Wall'', a multi-user Web-based portal for collaborative meetings and workshops in multi-surface environments. We report on a two-year effort spanning context inquiry studies, system design iterations, development, and real testing rounds targeting design engineers in the tire industry. The pneumatic tires found on the market result from a highly collaborative and iterative development process that reconciles conflicting constraints through a series of product design workshops. WoW was found to be a flexible solution to build multi-view set-ups in a self-service manner and an effective means to access more content at once. Our users also felt more engaged in their collaborative problem-solving work using WoW than in conventional meeting rooms.
Data Augmentation of Contrastive Learning is Estimating Positive-incentive Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Inspired by the idea of Positive-incentive Noise (Pi-Noise or $π$-Noise) that aims at learning the reliable noise beneficial to tasks, we scientifically investigate the connection between contrastive learning and $π$-noise in this paper. By converting the contrastive loss to an auxiliary Gaussian distribution to quantitatively measure the difficulty of the specific contrastive model under the information theory framework, we properly define the task entropy, the core concept of $π$-noise, of contrastive learning. It is further proved that the predefined data augmentation in the standard contrastive learning paradigm can be regarded as a kind of point estimation of $π$-noise. Inspired by the theoretical study, a framework that develops a $π$-noise generator to learn the beneficial noise (instead of estimation) as data augmentations for contrast is proposed. The designed framework can be applied to diverse types of data and is also completely compatible with the existing contrastive models. From the visualization, we surprisingly find that the proposed method successfully learns effective augmentations.
SZU-AFS Antispoofing System for the ASVspoof 5 Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the SZU-AFS anti-spoofing system, designed for Track 1 of the ASVspoof 5 Challenge under open conditions. The system is built with four stages: selecting a baseline model, exploring effective data augmentation (DA) methods for fine-tuning, applying a co-enhancement strategy based on gradient norm aware minimization (GAM) for secondary fine-tuning, and fusing logits scores from the two best-performing fine-tuned models. The system utilizes the Wav2Vec2 front-end feature extractor and the AASIST back-end classifier as the baseline model. During model fine-tuning, three distinct DA policies have been investigated: single-DA, random-DA, and cascade-DA. Moreover, the employed GAM-based co-enhancement strategy, designed to fine-tune the augmented model at both data and optimizer levels, helps the Adam optimizer find flatter minima, thereby boosting model generalization. Overall, the final fusion system achieves a minDCF of 0.115 and an EER of 4.04% on the evaluation set.
Control by Adding Players to Change or Maintain the Shapley-Shubik or the Penrose-Banzhaf Power Index in Weighted Voting Games Is Complete for NP^PP
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Weighted voting games are a well-known and useful class of succinctly representable simple games that have many real-world applications, e.g., to model collective decision-making in legislative bodies or shareholder voting. Among the structural control types being analyzing, one is control by adding players to weighted voting games, so as to either change or to maintain a player's power in the sense of the (probabilistic) Penrose-Banzhaf power index or the Shapley-Shubik power index. For the problems related to this control, the best known lower bound is PP-hardness, where PP is "probabilistic polynomial time," and the best known upper bound is the class NP^PP, i.e., the class NP with a PP oracle. We optimally raise this lower bound by showing NP^PP-hardness of all these problems for the Penrose-Banzhaf and the Shapley-Shubik indices, thus establishing completeness for them in that class. Our proof technique may turn out to be useful for solving other open problems related to weighted voting games with such a complexity gap as well.
The Fairness-Quality Trade-off in Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Fairness in clustering has been considered extensively in the past; however, the trade-off between the two objectives -- e.g., can we sacrifice just a little in the quality of the clustering to significantly increase fairness, or vice-versa? -- has rarely been addressed. We introduce novel algorithms for tracing the complete trade-off curve, or Pareto front, between quality and fairness in clustering problems; that is, computing all clusterings that are not dominated in both objectives by other clusterings. Unlike previous work that deals with specific objectives for quality and fairness, we deal with all objectives for fairness and quality in two general classes encompassing most of the special cases addressed in previous work. Our algorithm must take exponential time in the worst case as the Pareto front itself can be exponential. Even when the Pareto front is polynomial, our algorithm may take exponential time, and we prove that this is inevitable unless P = NP. However, we also present a new polynomial-time algorithm for computing the entire Pareto front when the cluster centers are fixed, and for perhaps the most natural fairness objective: minimizing the sum, over all clusters, of the imbalance between the two groups in each cluster.
The Practimum-Optimum Algorithm for Manufacturing Scheduling: A Paradigm Shift Leading to Breakthroughs in Scale and Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The Practimum-Optimum (P-O) algorithm represents a paradigm shift in developing automatic optimization products for complex real-life business problems such as large-scale manufacturing scheduling. It leverages deep business domain expertise to create a group of virtual human expert (VHE) agents with different "schools of thought" on how to create high-quality schedules. By computerizing them into algorithms, P-O generates many valid schedules at far higher speeds than human schedulers are capable of. Initially, these schedules can also be local optimum peaks far away from high-quality schedules. By submitting these schedules to a reinforced machine learning algorithm (RL), P-O learns the weaknesses and strengths of each VHE schedule, and accordingly derives reward and punishment changes in the Demand Set that will modify the relative priorities for time and resource allocation that jobs received in the prior iteration that led to the current state of the schedule. These cause the core logic of the VHE algorithms to explore, in the subsequent iteration, substantially different parts of the schedules universe and potentially find higher-quality schedules. Using the hill climbing analogy, this may be viewed as a big jump, shifting from a given local peak to a faraway promising start point equipped with knowledge embedded in the demand set for future iterations. This is a fundamental difference from most contemporary algorithms, which spend considerable time on local micro-steps restricted to the neighbourhoods of local peaks they visit. This difference enables a breakthrough in scale and performance for fully automatic manufacturing scheduling in complex organizations. The P-O algorithm is at the heart of Plataine Scheduler that, in one click, routinely schedules 30,000-50,000 tasks for real-life complex manufacturing operations.
Understanding cyclists' perception of driverless vehicles through eye-tracking and interviews
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

As automated vehicles (AVs) become increasingly popular, the question arises as to how cyclists will interact with such vehicles. This study investigated (1) whether cyclists spontaneously notice if a vehicle is driverless, (2) how well they perform a driver-detection task when explicitly instructed, and (3) how they carry out these tasks. Using a Wizard-of-Oz method, 37 participants cycled a designated route and encountered an AV multiple times in two experimental sessions. In Session 1, participants cycled the route uninstructed, while in Session 2, they were instructed to verbally report whether they detected the presence or absence of a driver. Additionally, we recorded participants' gaze behaviour with eye-tracking and their responses in post-session interviews. The interviews revealed that 30% of the cyclists spontaneously mentioned the absence of a driver (Session 1), and when instructed (Session 2), they detected the absence and presence of the driver with 93% accuracy. The eye-tracking data showed that cyclists looked more frequently and for longer at the vehicle in Session 2 compared to Session 1. Additionally, participants exhibited intermittent sampling of the vehicle, and they looked at the area in front of the vehicle when it was far away and towards the windshield region when it was closer. The post-session interviews also indicated that participants were curious, but felt safe, and reported a need to receive information about the AV's driving state. In conclusion, cyclists can detect the absence of a driver in the AV, and this detection may influence their perception of safety. Further research is needed to explore these findings in real-world traffic conditions.
FFAA: Multimodal Large Language Model based Explainable Open-World Face Forgery Analysis Assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of deepfake technologies has sparked widespread public concern, particularly as face forgery poses a serious threat to public information security. However, the unknown and diverse forgery techniques, varied facial features and complex environmental factors pose significant challenges for face forgery analysis. Existing datasets lack descriptive annotations of these aspects, making it difficult for models to distinguish between real and forged faces using only visual information amid various confounding factors. In addition, existing methods fail to yield user-friendly and explainable results, hindering the understanding of the model's decision-making process. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Open-World Face Forgery Analysis VQA (OW-FFA-VQA) task and its corresponding benchmark. To tackle this task, we first establish a dataset featuring a diverse collection of real and forged face images with essential descriptions and reliable forgery reasoning. Based on this dataset, we introduce FFAA: Face Forgery Analysis Assistant, consisting of a fine-tuned Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) and Multi-answer Intelligent Decision System (MIDS). By integrating hypothetical prompts with MIDS, the impact of fuzzy classification boundaries is effectively mitigated, enhancing model robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only provides user-friendly and explainable results but also significantly boosts accuracy and robustness compared to previous methods.