OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep functional multiple index models with an application to SER
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays a crucial role in advancing human-computer interaction and speech processing capabilities. We introduce a novel deep-learning architecture designed specifically for the functional data model known as the multiple-index functional model. Our key innovation lies in integrating adaptive basis layers and an automated data transformation search within the deep learning framework. Simulations for this new model show good performances. This allows us to extract features tailored for chunk-level SER, based on Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the benchmark IEMOCAP database, achieving good performance compared to existing methods.
Enhancing Privacy in Federated Learning through Local Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper we propose the federated learning algorithm Fed-PLT to overcome the challenges of (i) expensive communications and (ii) privacy preservation. We address (i) by allowing for both partial participation and local training, which significantly reduce the number of communication rounds between the central coordinator and computing agents. The algorithm matches the state of the art in the sense that the use of local training demonstrably does not impact accuracy. Additionally, agents have the flexibility to choose from various local training solvers, such as (stochastic) gradient descent and accelerated gradient descent. Further, we investigate how employing local training can enhance privacy, addressing point (ii). In particular, we derive differential privacy bounds and highlight their dependence on the number of local training epochs. We assess the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by comparing it to alternative techniques, considering both theoretical analysis and numerical results from a classification task.
Forest-ORE: Mining Optimal Rule Ensemble to interpret Random Forest models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Random Forest (RF) is well-known as an efficient ensemble learning method in terms of predictive performance. It is also considered a Black Box because of its hundreds of deep decision trees. This lack of interpretability can be a real drawback for acceptance of RF models in several real-world applications, especially those affecting one's lives, such as in healthcare, security, and law. In this work, we present Forest-ORE, a method that makes RF interpretable via an optimized rule ensemble (ORE) for local and global interpretation. Unlike other rule-based approaches aiming at interpreting the RF model, this method simultaneously considers several parameters that influence the choice of an interpretable rule ensemble. Existing methods often prioritize predictive performance over interpretability coverage and do not provide information about existing overlaps or interactions between rules. Forest-ORE uses a mixed-integer optimization program to build an ORE that considers the trade-off between predictive performance, interpretability coverage, and model size (size of the rule ensemble, rule lengths, and rule overlaps). In addition to providing an ORE competitive in predictive performance with RF, this method enriches the ORE through other rules that afford complementary information. It also enables monitoring of the rule selection process and delivers various metrics that can be used to generate a graphical representation of the final model. This framework is illustrated through an example, and its robustness is assessed through 36 benchmark datasets. A comparative analysis of well-known methods shows that Forest-ORE provides an excellent trade-off between predictive performance, interpretability coverage, and model size.
Depending on yourself when you should: Mentoring LLM with RL agents to become the master in cybersecurity games
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Integrating LLM and reinforcement learning (RL) agent effectively to achieve complementary performance is critical in high stake tasks like cybersecurity operations. In this study, we introduce SecurityBot, a LLM agent mentored by pre-trained RL agents, to support cybersecurity operations. In particularly, the LLM agent is supported with a profile module to generated behavior guidelines, a memory module to accumulate local experiences, a reflection module to re-evaluate choices, and an action module to reduce action space. Additionally, it adopts the collaboration mechanism to take suggestions from pre-trained RL agents, including a cursor for dynamic suggestion taken, an aggregator for multiple mentors' suggestions ranking and a caller for proactive suggestion asking. Building on the CybORG experiment framework, our experiences show that SecurityBot demonstrates significant performance improvement compared with LLM or RL standalone, achieving the complementary performance in the cybersecurity games.
Not All Similarities Are Created Equal: Leveraging Data-Driven Biases to Inform GenAI Copyright Disputes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The advent of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) models, including GitHub Copilot, OpenAI GPT, and Stable Diffusion, has revolutionized content creation, enabling non-professionals to produce high-quality content across various domains. This transformative technology has led to a surge of synthetic content and sparked legal disputes over copyright infringement. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel approach that leverages the learning capacity of GenAI models for copyright legal analysis, demonstrated with GPT2 and Stable Diffusion models. Copyright law distinguishes between original expressions and generic ones (Scènes à faire), protecting the former and permitting reproduction of the latter. However, this distinction has historically been challenging to make consistently, leading to over-protection of copyrighted works. GenAI offers an unprecedented opportunity to enhance this legal analysis by revealing shared patterns in preexisting works. We propose a data-driven approach to identify the genericity of works created by GenAI, employing "data-driven bias" to assess the genericity of expressive compositions. This approach aids in copyright scope determination by utilizing the capabilities of GenAI to identify and prioritize expressive elements and rank them according to their frequency in the model's dataset. The potential implications of measuring expressive genericity for copyright law are profound. Such scoring could assist courts in determining copyright scope during litigation, inform the registration practices of Copyright Offices, allowing registration of only highly original synthetic works, and help copyright owners signal the value of their works and facilitate fairer licensing deals. More generally, this approach offers valuable insights to policymakers grappling with adapting copyright law to the challenges posed by the era of GenAI.
AniPortrait: Audio-Driven Synthesis of Photorealistic Portrait Animation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we propose AniPortrait, a novel framework for generating high-quality animation driven by audio and a reference portrait image. Our methodology is divided into two stages. Initially, we extract 3D intermediate representations from audio and project them into a sequence of 2D facial landmarks. Subsequently, we employ a robust diffusion model, coupled with a motion module, to convert the landmark sequence into photorealistic and temporally consistent portrait animation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AniPortrait in terms of facial naturalness, pose diversity, and visual quality, thereby offering an enhanced perceptual experience. Moreover, our methodology exhibits considerable potential in terms of flexibility and controllability, which can be effectively applied in areas such as facial motion editing or face reenactment. We release code and model weights at https://github.com/scutzzj/AniPortrait
Panonut360: A Head and Eye Tracking Dataset for Panoramic Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development and widespread application of VR/AR technology, maximizing the quality of immersive panoramic video services that match users' personal preferences and habits has become a long-standing challenge. Understanding the saliency region where users focus, based on data collected with HMDs, can promote multimedia encoding, transmission, and quality assessment. At the same time, large-scale datasets are essential for researchers and developers to explore short/long-term user behavior patterns and train AI models related to panoramic videos. However, existing panoramic video datasets often include low-frequency user head or eye movement data through short-term videos only, lacking sufficient data for analyzing users' Field of View (FoV) and generating video saliency regions. Driven by these practical factors, in this paper, we present a head and eye tracking dataset involving 50 users (25 males and 25 females) watching 15 panoramic videos. The dataset provides details on the viewport and gaze attention locations of users. Besides, we present some statistics samples extracted from the dataset. For example, the deviation between head and eye movements challenges the widely held assumption that gaze attention decreases from the center of the FoV following a Gaussian distribution. Our analysis reveals a consistent downward offset in gaze fixations relative to the FoV in experimental settings involving multiple users and videos. That's why we name the dataset Panonut, a saliency weighting shaped like a donut. Finally, we also provide a script that generates saliency distributions based on given head or eye coordinates and pre-generated saliency distribution map sets of each video from the collected eye tracking data. The dataset is available on website: https://dianvrlab.github.io/Panonut360/.
Leave No Patient Behind: Enhancing Medication Recommendation for Rare Disease Patients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Medication recommendation systems have gained significant attention in healthcare as a means of providing tailored and effective drug combinations based on patients' clinical information. However, existing approaches often suffer from fairness issues, as recommendations tend to be more accurate for patients with common diseases compared to those with rare conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel model called Robust and Accurate REcommendations for Medication (RAREMed), which leverages the pretrain-finetune learning paradigm to enhance accuracy for rare diseases. RAREMed employs a transformer encoder with a unified input sequence approach to capture complex relationships among disease and procedure codes. Additionally, it introduces two self-supervised pre-training tasks, namely Sequence Matching Prediction (SMP) and Self Reconstruction (SR), to learn specialized medication needs and interrelations among clinical codes. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that RAREMed provides accurate drug sets for both rare and common disease patients, thereby mitigating unfairness in medication recommendation systems.
Optical Flow Based Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects for Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate velocity estimation of surrounding moving objects and their trajectories are critical elements of perception systems in Automated/Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) with a direct impact on their safety. These are non-trivial problems due to the diverse types and sizes of such objects and their dynamic and random behaviour. Recent point cloud based solutions often use Iterative Closest Point (ICP) techniques, which are known to have certain limitations. For example, their computational costs are high due to their iterative nature, and their estimation error often deteriorates as the relative velocities of the target objects increase (>2 m/sec). Motivated by such shortcomings, this paper first proposes a novel Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects (DATMO) for AVs based on an optical flow technique, which is proven to be computationally efficient and highly accurate for such problems. \textcolor{black}{This is achieved by representing the driving scenario as a vector field and applying vector calculus theories to ensure spatiotemporal continuity.} We also report the results of a comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed DATMO technique, carried out in this study using synthetic and real-world data. The results of this study demonstrate the superiority of the proposed technique, compared to the DATMO techniques in the literature, in terms of estimation accuracy and processing time in a wide range of relative velocities of moving objects. Finally, we evaluate and discuss the sensitivity of the estimation error of the proposed DATMO technique to various system and environmental parameters, as well as the relative velocities of the moving objects.
A survey on road safety and traffic efficiency vehicular applications based on C-V2X technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the use of cellular network technologies to provide communication-based applications to vehicles has received considerable attention. 3GPP, the standardization body responsible for cellular networks specifications, is developing technologies to meet the requirements of vehicular communication applications, and the research community is testing and validating the ability of those technologies to implement different applications. This survey presents the body of work dealing with the use of cellular technologies to implement communication-based applications for the connected vehicle. We focus on basic and advanced road safety and traffic efficiency applications, which are critically important for the future of vehicular networks. We start by describing the different cellular-related technologies that have a role to play in providing services to the connected vehicle, propose a classification of types of communication used in vehicular applications, and then apply this classification to organize and present recent research work on the topic. Finally, we identify the main challenges in the use of cellular technologies to develop applications for the connected vehicle.
An AI-Native Runtime for Multi-Wearable Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The miniaturization of AI accelerators is paving the way for next-generation wearable applications within wearable technologies. We introduce Mojito, an AI-native runtime with advanced MLOps designed to facilitate the development and deployment of these applications on wearable devices. It emphasizes the necessity of dynamic orchestration of distributed resources equipped with ultra-low-power AI accelerators to overcome challenges associated with unpredictable runtime environments. Through its innovative approaches, Mojito demonstrates how future wearable technologies can evolve to be more autonomous.
Superior and Pragmatic Talking Face Generation with Teacher-Student Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Talking face generation technology creates talking videos from arbitrary appearance and motion signal, with the "arbitrary" offering ease of use but also introducing challenges in practical applications. Existing methods work well with standard inputs but suffer serious performance degradation with intricate real-world ones. Moreover, efficiency is also an important concern in deployment. To comprehensively address these issues, we introduce SuperFace, a teacher-student framework that balances quality, robustness, cost and editability. We first propose a simple but effective teacher model capable of handling inputs of varying qualities to generate high-quality results. Building on this, we devise an efficient distillation strategy to acquire an identity-specific student model that maintains quality with significantly reduced computational load. Our experiments validate that SuperFace offers a more comprehensive solution than existing methods for the four mentioned objectives, especially in reducing FLOPs by 99\% with the student model. SuperFace can be driven by both video and audio and allows for localized facial attributes editing.
Towards Explaining Hypercomplex Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Hypercomplex neural networks are gaining increasing interest in the deep learning community. The attention directed towards hypercomplex models originates from several aspects, spanning from purely theoretical and mathematical characteristics to the practical advantage of lightweight models over conventional networks, and their unique properties to capture both global and local relations. In particular, a branch of these architectures, parameterized hypercomplex neural networks (PHNNs), has also gained popularity due to their versatility across a multitude of application domains. Nonetheless, only few attempts have been made to explain or interpret their intricacies. In this paper, we propose inherently interpretable PHNNs and quaternion-like networks, thus without the need for any post-hoc method. To achieve this, we define a type of cosine-similarity transform within the parameterized hypercomplex domain. This PHB-cos transform induces weight alignment with relevant input features and allows to reduce the model into a single linear transform, rendering it directly interpretable. In this work, we start to draw insights into how this unique branch of neural models operates. We observe that hypercomplex networks exhibit a tendency to concentrate on the shape around the main object of interest, in addition to the shape of the object itself. We provide a thorough analysis, studying single neurons of different layers and comparing them against how real-valued networks learn. The code of the paper is available at https://github.com/ispamm/HxAI.
Self-Clustering Hierarchical Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Extensible Cooperation Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has been successful in solving many cooperative challenges. However, classic non-hierarchical MARL algorithms still cannot address various complex multi-agent problems that require hierarchical cooperative behaviors. The cooperative knowledge and policies learned in non-hierarchical algorithms are implicit and not interpretable, thereby restricting the integration of existing knowledge. This paper proposes a novel hierarchical MARL model called Hierarchical Cooperation Graph Learning (HCGL) for solving general multi-agent problems. HCGL has three components: a dynamic Extensible Cooperation Graph (ECG) for achieving self-clustering cooperation; a group of graph operators for adjusting the topology of ECG; and an MARL optimizer for training these graph operators. HCGL's key distinction from other MARL models is that the behaviors of agents are guided by the topology of ECG instead of policy neural networks. ECG is a three-layer graph consisting of an agent node layer, a cluster node layer, and a target node layer. To manipulate the ECG topology in response to changing environmental conditions, four graph operators are trained to adjust the edge connections of ECG dynamically. The hierarchical feature of ECG provides a unique approach to merge primitive actions (actions executed by the agents) and cooperative actions (actions executed by the clusters) into a unified action space, allowing us to integrate fundamental cooperative knowledge into an extensible interface. In our experiments, the HCGL model has shown outstanding performance in multi-agent benchmarks with sparse rewards. We also verify that HCGL can easily be transferred to large-scale scenarios with high zero-shot transfer success rates.
Heracles: A Hybrid SSM-Transformer Model for High-Resolution Image and Time-Series Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Transformers have revolutionized image modeling tasks with adaptations like DeIT, Swin, SVT, Biformer, STVit, and FDVIT. However, these models often face challenges with inductive bias and high quadratic complexity, making them less efficient for high-resolution images. State space models (SSMs) such as Mamba, V-Mamba, ViM, and SiMBA offer an alternative to handle high resolution images in computer vision tasks. These SSMs encounter two major issues. First, they become unstable when scaled to large network sizes. Second, although they efficiently capture global information in images, they inherently struggle with handling local information. To address these challenges, we introduce Heracles, a novel SSM that integrates a local SSM, a global SSM, and an attention-based token interaction module. Heracles leverages a Hartely kernel-based state space model for global image information, a localized convolutional network for local details, and attention mechanisms in deeper layers for token interactions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that Heracles-C-small achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet dataset with 84.5\% top-1 accuracy. Heracles-C-Large and Heracles-C-Huge further improve accuracy to 85.9\% and 86.4\%, respectively. Additionally, Heracles excels in transfer learning tasks on datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Oxford Flowers, and Stanford Cars, and in instance segmentation on the MSCOCO dataset. Heracles also proves its versatility by achieving state-of-the-art results on seven time-series datasets, showcasing its ability to generalize across domains with spectral data, capturing both local and global information. The project page is available at this link.\url{https://github.com/badripatro/heracles}
State of the art applications of deep learning within tracking and detecting marine debris: A survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning techniques have been explored within the marine litter problem for approximately 20 years but the majority of the research has developed rapidly in the last five years. We provide an in-depth, up to date, summary and analysis of 28 of the most recent and significant contributions of deep learning in marine debris. From cross referencing the research paper results, the YOLO family significantly outperforms all other methods of object detection but there are many respected contributions to this field that have categorically agreed that a comprehensive database of underwater debris is not currently available for machine learning. Using a small dataset curated and labelled by us, we tested YOLOv5 on a binary classification task and found the accuracy was low and the rate of false positives was high; highlighting the importance of a comprehensive database. We conclude this survey with over 40 future research recommendations and open challenges.
Large Language Models for Education: A Survey and Outlook
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought in a new era of possibilities in the realm of education. This survey paper summarizes the various technologies of LLMs in educational settings from multifaceted perspectives, encompassing student and teacher assistance, adaptive learning, and commercial tools. We systematically review the technological advancements in each perspective, organize related datasets and benchmarks, and identify the risks and challenges associated with deploying LLMs in education. Furthermore, we outline future research opportunities, highlighting the potential promising directions. Our survey aims to provide a comprehensive technological picture for educators, researchers, and policymakers to harness the power of LLMs to revolutionize educational practices and foster a more effective personalized learning environment.