OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Distortion-Disentangled Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised learning is well known for its remarkable performance in representation learning and various downstream computer vision tasks. Recently, Positive-pair-Only Contrastive Learning (POCL) has achieved reliable performance without the need to construct positive-negative training sets. It reduces memory requirements by lessening the dependency on the batch size. The POCL method typically uses a single loss function to extract the distortion invariant representation (DIR) which describes the proximity of positive-pair representations affected by different distortions. This loss function implicitly enables the model to filter out or ignore the distortion variant representation (DVR) affected by different distortions. However, existing POCL methods do not explicitly enforce the disentanglement and exploitation of the actually valuable DVR. In addition, these POCL methods have been observed to be sensitive to augmentation strategies. To address these limitations, we propose a novel POCL framework named Distortion-Disentangled Contrastive Learning (DDCL) and a Distortion-Disentangled Loss (DDL). Our approach is the first to explicitly disentangle and exploit the DVR inside the model and feature stream to improve the overall representation utilization efficiency, robustness and representation ability. Experiments carried out demonstrate the superiority of our framework to Barlow Twins and Simsiam in terms of convergence, representation quality, and robustness on several benchmark datasets.
$π$-augmented pregroups and applications to linguistics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We enrich pregroups with a mapping which allows us to locally apply precyclic permutations to designated substrings. We prove a normalisation theorem for such algebraic structures and briefly formalise some known applications of pregroups to the analysis of clitic pronouns in certain natural languages.
TAEC: Unsupervised Action Segmentation with Temporal-Aware Embedding and Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal action segmentation in untrimmed videos has gained increased attention recently. However, annotating action classes and frame-wise boundaries is extremely time consuming and cost intensive, especially on large-scale datasets. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised approach for learning action classes from untrimmed video sequences. In particular, we propose a temporal embedding network that combines relative time prediction, feature reconstruction, and sequence-to-sequence learning, to preserve the spatial layout and sequential nature of the video features. A two-step clustering pipeline on these embedded feature representations then allows us to enforce temporal consistency within, as well as across videos. Based on the identified clusters, we decode the video into coherent temporal segments that correspond to semantically meaningful action classes. Our evaluation on three challenging datasets shows the impact of each component and, furthermore, demonstrates our state-of-the-art unsupervised action segmentation results.
Assistive Robot Teleoperation Using Behavior Trees
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Robotic assistance in robot arm teleoperation tasks has recently gained a lot of traction in industrial and domestic environment. A wide variety of input devices is used in such setups. Due to the noise in the input signals (e.g., Brain Computer Interface (BCI)) or delays due to environmental conditions (e.g., space robot teleoperation), users need assistive autonomy that keeps them in control while following predefined trajectories and avoids obstacles. This assistance calls for activity representations that are easy to define by the operator and able to take the dynamic world state into consideration. This paper represents Activities of Daily Living using Behavior Trees (BTs) whose inherent readability and modularity enables an end user to define new activities using a simple interface. To achieve this, we augment BTs with Shared Control Action Nodes, which guide the user's input on a trajectory facilitating and ensuring task execution.
ACoRe: Automated Goal-Conflict Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

System goals are the statements that, in the context of software requirements specification, capture how the software should behave. Many times, the understanding of stakeholders on what the system should do, as captured in the goals, can lead to different problems, from clearly contradicting goals, to more subtle situations in which the satisfaction of some goals inhibits the satisfaction of others. These latter issues, called goal divergences, are the subject of goal conflict analysis, which consists of identifying, assessing, and resolving divergences, as part of a more general activity known as goal refinement. While there exist techniques that, when requirements are expressed formally, can automatically identify and assess goal conflicts, there is currently no automated approach to support engineers in resolving identified divergences. In this paper, we present ACoRe, the first approach that automatically proposes potential resolutions to goal conflicts, in requirements specifications formally captured using linear-time temporal logic. ACoRe systematically explores syntactic modifications of the conflicting specifications, aiming at obtaining resolutions that disable previously identified conflicts, while preserving specification consistency. ACoRe integrates modern multi-objective search algorithms (in particular, NSGA-III, WBGA, and AMOSA) to produce resolutions that maintain coherence with the original conflicting specification, by searching for specifications that are either syntactically or semantically similar to the original specification. We assess ACoRe on 25 requirements specifications taken from the literature. We show that ACoRe can successfully produce various conflict resolutions for each of the analyzed case studies, including resolutions that resemble specification repairs manually provided as part of conflict analyses.
Designing Dynamic Robot Characters to Improve Robot-Human Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Socially Assistive Robots navigate highly sensible environments, which place high demands on safety and communication with users. The reasoning behind an SAR's actions must be transparent at any time to earn users' trust and acceptance. Although different communication modalities have been extensively studied, there is a lack of long-term studies investigating changes in users' communication needs over time. Considering two decades of research in Human-Robot Communication, we formulate the need to design dynamic robot personalities to unveil the full potential of SARs.
Dynamic Stashing Quantization for Efficient Transformer Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Unfortunately, the immense amount of computations and memory accesses required for LLM training makes them prohibitively expensive in terms of hardware cost, and thus challenging to deploy in use cases such as on-device learning. In this paper, motivated by the observation that LLM training is memory-bound, we propose a novel dynamic quantization strategy, termed Dynamic Stashing Quantization (DSQ), that puts a special focus on reducing the memory operations, but also enjoys the other benefits of low precision training, such as the reduced arithmetic cost. We conduct a thorough study on two translation tasks (trained-from-scratch) and three classification tasks (fine-tuning). DSQ reduces the amount of arithmetic operations by $20.95\times$ and the number of DRAM operations by $2.55\times$ on IWSLT17 compared to the standard 16-bit fixed-point, which is widely used in on-device learning.
National-scale 1-m resolution land-cover mapping for the entire China based on a low-cost solution and open-access data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Nowadays, many large-scale land-cover (LC) products have been released, however, current LC products for China either lack a fine resolution or nationwide coverage. With the rapid urbanization of China, there is an urgent need for creating a very-high-resolution (VHR) national-scale LC map for China. In this study, a novel 1-m resolution LC map of China covering $9,600,000 km^2$, called SinoLC-1, was produced by using a deep learning framework and multi-source open-access data. To efficiently generate the VHR national-scale LC map, firstly, the reliable LC labels were collected from three 10-m LC products and Open Street Map data. Secondly, the collected 10-m labels and 1-m Google Earth imagery were utilized in the proposed low-to-high (L2H) framework for training. With weak and self-supervised strategies, the L2H framework resolves the label noise brought by the mismatched resolution between training pairs and produces VHR results. Lastly, we compare the SinoLC-1 with five widely used products and validate it with a sample set including 10,6852 points and a statistical report collected from the government. The results show the SinoLC-1 achieved an OA of 74\% and a Kappa of 0.65. Moreover, as the first 1-m national-scale LC map for China, the SinoLC-1 shows overall acceptable results with the finest landscape details.
Refined Vision-Language Modeling for Fine-grained Multi-modal Pre-training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Fine-grained supervision based on object annotations has been widely used for vision and language pre-training (VLP). However, in real-world application scenarios, aligned multi-modal data is usually in the image-caption format, which only provides coarse-grained supervision. It is not only cost-expensive but also compute-expensive to collect object annotations and build object annotation pre-extractor for different scenarios. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained VLP scheme without object annotations from the linguistic perspective. First, we propose a homonym sentence rewriting (HSR) algorithm to provide token-level supervision. The algorithm replaces a verb/noun/adjective/quantifier word of the caption with its homonyms from WordNet. Correspondingly, we propose refined vision-language modeling (RVLM) framework to exploit the token-level supervision. Three refined tasks, i.e., refined image-text contrastive (RITC), refined image-text matching (RITM), and replace language modeling (RLM) are proposed to learn the fine-grained alignment. Extensive experiments on several downstream tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.
Prompt-Based Learning for Thread Structure Prediction in Cybersecurity Forums
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With recent trends indicating cyber crimes increasing in both frequency and cost, it is imperative to develop new methods that leverage data-rich hacker forums to assist in combating ever evolving cyber threats. Defining interactions within these forums is critical as it facilitates identifying highly skilled users, which can improve prediction of novel threats and future cyber attacks. We propose a method called Next Paragraph Prediction with Instructional Prompting (NPP-IP) to predict thread structures while grounded on the context around posts. This is the first time to apply an instructional prompting approach to the cybersecurity domain. We evaluate our NPP-IP with the Reddit dataset and Hacker Forums dataset that has posts and thread structures of real hacker forums' threads, and compare our method's performance with existing methods. The experimental evaluation shows that our proposed method can predict the thread structure significantly better than existing methods allowing for better social network prediction based on forum interactions.
Early Warning Signals of Social Instabilities in Twitter Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The goal of this project is to create and study novel techniques to identify early warning signals for socially disruptive events, like riots, wars, or revolutions using only publicly available data on social media. Such techniques need to be robust enough to work on real-time data: to achieve this goal we propose a topological approach together with more standard BERT models. Indeed, topology-based algorithms, being provably stable against deformations and noise, seem to work well in low-data regimes. The general idea is to build a binary classifier that predicts if a given tweet is related to a disruptive event or not. The results indicate that the persistent-gradient approach is stable and even more performant than deep-learning-based anomaly detection algorithms. We also benchmark the generalisability of the methodology against out-of-samples tasks, with very promising results.
Supporting the Careers of Developers with Disabilities: Lessons from Zup Innovation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

People with still face discrimination, which creates significant obstacles to accessing higher education, ultimately hindering their access to high-skilled occupations. In this study we present Catalisa, an eight-month training camp (developed by Zup Innovation) that hires and trains people with disabilities as software developers. We interviewed 12 Catalisa participants to better understand their challenges and limitations regarding inclusion and accessibility. We offer four recommendations to improve inclusion and accessibility in Catalisa-like programs, that we hope could motive others to build a more inclusive and equitable workplace that benefits everyone.
Teleoperation of Soft Modular Robots: Study on Real-time Stability and Gait Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait diversity and real-time control, and onboard sensors to sense the surroundings are some of the common issues with soft-limbed robots. To overcome these limitations, we propose a spatially symmetric, topologically-stable, soft-limbed tetrahedral robot that can perform multiple locomotion gaits. We introduce a kinematic model, derive locomotion trajectories for different gaits, and design a teleoperation mechanism to enable real-time human-robot collaboration. We use the kinematic model to map teleoperation inputs and ensure smooth transitions between gaits. Additionally, we leverage the passive compliance and natural stability of the robot for toppling and obstacle navigation. Through experimental tests, we demonstrate the robot's ability to tackle various locomotion challenges, adapt to different situations, and navigate obstructed environments via teleoperation.
Presentation Attack Detection with Advanced CNN Models for Noncontact-based Fingerprint Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Touch-based fingerprint biometrics is one of the most popular biometric modalities with applications in several fields. Problems associated with touch-based techniques such as the presence of latent fingerprints and hygiene issues due to many people touching the same surface motivated the community to look for non-contact-based solutions. For the last few years, contactless fingerprint systems are on the rise and in demand because of the ability to turn any device with a camera into a fingerprint reader. Yet, before we can fully utilize the benefit of noncontact-based methods, the biometric community needs to resolve a few concerns such as the resiliency of the system against presentation attacks. One of the major obstacles is the limited publicly available data sets with inadequate spoof and live data. In this publication, we have developed a Presentation attack detection (PAD) dataset of more than 7500 four-finger images and more than 14,000 manually segmented single-fingertip images, and 10,000 synthetic fingertips (deepfakes). The PAD dataset was collected from six different Presentation Attack Instruments (PAI) of three different difficulty levels according to FIDO protocols, with five different types of PAI materials, and different smartphone cameras with manual focusing. We have utilized DenseNet-121 and NasNetMobile models and our proposed dataset to develop PAD algorithms and achieved PAD accuracy of Attack presentation classification error rate (APCER) 0.14\% and Bonafide presentation classification error rate (BPCER) 0.18\%. We have also reported the test results of the models against unseen spoof types to replicate uncertain real-world testing scenarios.
Understanding the Challenges and Opportunities of Pose-based Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Pose-based anomaly detection is a video-analysis technique for detecting anomalous events or behaviors by examining human pose extracted from the video frames. Utilizing pose data alleviates privacy and ethical issues. Also, computation-wise, the complexity of pose-based models is lower than pixel-based approaches. However, it introduces more challenges, such as noisy skeleton data, losing important pixel information, and not having enriched enough features. These problems are exacerbated by a lack of anomaly detection datasets that are good enough representatives of real-world scenarios. In this work, we analyze and quantify the characteristics of two well-known video anomaly datasets to better understand the difficulties of pose-based anomaly detection. We take a step forward, exploring the discriminating power of pose and trajectory for video anomaly detection and their effectiveness based on context. We believe these experiments are beneficial for a better comprehension of pose-based anomaly detection and the datasets currently available. This will aid researchers in tackling the task of anomaly detection with a more lucid perspective, accelerating the development of robust models with better performance.
Designing Ocean Vision AI: An Investigation of Community Needs for Imaging-based Ocean Conservation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Ocean scientists studying diverse organisms and phenomena increasingly rely on imaging devices for their research. These scientists have many tools to collect their data, but few resources for automated analysis. In this paper, we report on discussions with diverse stakeholders to identify community needs and develop a set of functional requirements for the ongoing development of ocean science-specific analysis tools. We conducted 36 in-depth interviews with individuals working in the Blue Economy space, revealing four central issues inhibiting the development of effective imaging analysis monitoring tools for marine science. We also identified twelve user archetypes that will engage with these services. Additionally, we held a workshop with 246 participants from 35 countries centered around FathomNet, a web-based open-source annotated image database for marine research. Findings from these discussions are being used to define the feature set and interface design of Ocean Vision AI, a suite of tools and services to advance observational capabilities of life in the ocean.
Verus: Verifying Rust Programs using Linear Ghost Types (extended version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

The Rust programming language provides a powerful type system that checks linearity and borrowing, allowing code to safely manipulate memory without garbage collection and making Rust ideal for developing low-level, high-assurance systems. For such systems, formal verification can be useful to prove functional correctness properties beyond type safety. This paper presents Verus, an SMT-based tool for formally verifying Rust programs. With Verus, programmers express proofs and specifications using the Rust language, allowing proofs to take advantage of Rust's linear types and borrow checking. We show how this allows proofs to manipulate linearly typed permissions that let Rust code safely manipulate memory, pointers, and concurrent resources. Verus organizes proofs and specifications using a novel mode system that distinguishes specifications, which are not checked for linearity and borrowing, from executable code and proofs, which are checked for linearity and borrowing. We formalize Verus' linearity, borrowing, and modes in a small lambda calculus, for which we prove type safety and termination of specifications and proofs. We demonstrate Verus on a series of examples, including pointer-manipulating code (an xor-based doubly linked list), code with interior mutability, and concurrent code.
A Lite Fireworks Algorithm with Fractal Dimension Constraint for Feature Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

As the use of robotics becomes more widespread, the huge amount of vision data leads to a dramatic increase in data dimensionality. Although deep learning methods can effectively process these high-dimensional vision data. Due to the limitation of computational resources, some special scenarios still rely on traditional machine learning methods. However, these high-dimensional visual data lead to great challenges for traditional machine learning methods. Therefore, we propose a Lite Fireworks Algorithm with Fractal Dimension constraint for feature selection (LFWA+FD) and use it to solve the feature selection problem driven by robot vision. The "LFWA+FD" focuses on searching the ideal feature subset by simplifying the fireworks algorithm and constraining the dimensionality of selected features by fractal dimensionality, which in turn reduces the approximate features and reduces the noise in the original data to improve the accuracy of the model. The comparative experimental results of two publicly available datasets from UCI show that the proposed method can effectively select a subset of features useful for model inference and remove a large amount of noise noise present in the original data to improve the performance.
Pohang Canal Dataset: A Multimodal Maritime Dataset for Autonomous Navigation in Restricted Waters
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a multimodal maritime dataset and the data collection procedure used to gather it, which aims to facilitate autonomous navigation in restricted water environments. The dataset comprises measurements obtained using various perception and navigation sensors, including a stereo camera, an infrared camera, an omnidirectional camera, three LiDARs, a marine radar, a global positioning system, and an attitude heading reference system. The data were collected along a 7.5-km-long route that includes a narrow canal, inner and outer ports, and near-coastal areas in Pohang, South Korea. The collection was conducted under diverse weather and visual conditions. The dataset and its detailed description are available for free download at https://sites.google.com/view/pohang-canal-dataset.
Evaluating the Robustness of Conversational Recommender Systems by Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are improving rapidly, according to the standard recommendation accuracy metrics. However, it is essential to make sure that these systems are robust in interacting with users including regular and malicious users who want to attack the system by feeding the system modified input data. In this paper, we propose an adversarial evaluation scheme including four scenarios in two categories and automatically generate adversarial examples to evaluate the robustness of these systems in the face of different input data. By executing these adversarial examples we can compare the ability of different conversational recommender systems to satisfy the user's preferences. We evaluate three CRSs by the proposed adversarial examples on two datasets. Our results show that none of these systems are robust and reliable to the adversarial examples.