OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Distance-Restricted Explanations: Theoretical Underpinnings & Efficient Implementation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The uses of machine learning (ML) have snowballed in recent years. In many cases, ML models are highly complex, and their operation is beyond the understanding of human decision-makers. Nevertheless, some uses of ML models involve high-stakes and safety-critical applications. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) aims to help human decision-makers in understanding the operation of such complex ML models, thus eliciting trust in their operation. Unfortunately, the majority of past XAI work is based on informal approaches, that offer no guarantees of rigor. Unsurprisingly, there exists comprehensive experimental and theoretical evidence confirming that informal methods of XAI can provide human-decision makers with erroneous information. Logic-based XAI represents a rigorous approach to explainability; it is model-based and offers the strongest guarantees of rigor of computed explanations. However, a well-known drawback of logic-based XAI is the complexity of logic reasoning, especially for highly complex ML models. Recent work proposed distance-restricted explanations, i.e. explanations that are rigorous provided the distance to a given input is small enough. Distance-restricted explainability is tightly related with adversarial robustness, and it has been shown to scale for moderately complex ML models, but the number of inputs still represents a key limiting factor. This paper investigates novel algorithms for scaling up the performance of logic-based explainers when computing and enumerating ML model explanations with a large number of inputs.
Abnormal Respiratory Sound Identification Using Audio-Spectrogram Vision Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Respiratory disease, the third leading cause of deaths globally, is considered a high-priority ailment requiring significant research on identification and treatment. Stethoscope-recorded lung sounds and artificial intelligence-powered devices have been used to identify lung disorders and aid specialists in making accurate diagnoses. In this study, audio-spectrogram vision transformer (AS-ViT), a new approach for identifying abnormal respiration sounds, was developed. The sounds of the lungs are converted into visual representations called spectrograms using a technique called short-time Fourier transform (STFT). These images are then analyzed using a model called vision transformer to identify different types of respiratory sounds. The classification was carried out using the ICBHI 2017 database, which includes various types of lung sounds with different frequencies, noise levels, and backgrounds. The proposed AS-ViT method was evaluated using three metrics and achieved 79.1% and 59.8% for 60:40 split ratio and 86.4% and 69.3% for 80:20 split ratio in terms of unweighted average recall and overall scores respectively for respiratory sound detection, surpassing previous state-of-the-art results.
The Stiffness of 3-PRS PM Across Parasitic and Orientational Workspace
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the stiffness characteristics of the Sprint Z3 head, also known as 3-PRS Parallel Kinematics Machines, which are among the most extensively researched and viably successful manipulators for precision machining applications. Despite the wealth of research on these robotic manipulators, no previous work has demonstrated their stiffness performance within the parasitic motion space. Such an undesired motion influences their stiffness properties, as stiffness is configuration-dependent. Addressing this gap, this paper develops a stiffness model that accounts for both the velocity-level parasitic motion space and the regular workspace. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the stiffness characteristics of the manipulator across all considered spaces. The results indicate that the stiffness profile within the parasitic motion space is both shallower and the values are smaller when compared to the stiffness distribution across the orientation workspace. This implies that evaluating a manipulator's performance adequately requires assessing its ability to resist external loads during parasitic motion. Therefore, comprehending this aspect is crucial for redesigning components to enhance overall stiffness.
A Timely Survey on Vision Transformer for Deepfake Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the rapid advancement of deepfake technology has revolutionized content creation, lowering forgery costs while elevating quality. However, this progress brings forth pressing concerns such as infringements on individual rights, national security threats, and risks to public safety. To counter these challenges, various detection methodologies have emerged, with Vision Transformer (ViT)-based approaches showcasing superior performance in generality and efficiency. This survey presents a timely overview of ViT-based deepfake detection models, categorized into standalone, sequential, and parallel architectures. Furthermore, it succinctly delineates the structure and characteristics of each model. By analyzing existing research and addressing future directions, this survey aims to equip researchers with a nuanced understanding of ViT's pivotal role in deepfake detection, serving as a valuable reference for both academic and practical pursuits in this domain.
Improving the Real-Data Driven Network Evaluation Model for Digital Twin Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the emergence and proliferation of new forms of large-scale services such as smart homes, virtual reality/augmented reality, the increasingly complex networks are raising concerns about significant operational costs. As a result, the need for network management automation is emphasized, and Digital Twin Networks (DTN) technology is expected to become the foundation technology for autonomous networks. DTN has the advantage of being able to operate and system networks based on real-time collected data in a closed-loop system, and currently it is mainly designed for optimization scenarios. To improve network performance in optimization scenarios, it is necessary to select appropriate configurations and perform accurate performance evaluation based on real data. However, most network evaluation models currently use simulation data. Meanwhile, according to DTN standards documents, artificial intelligence (AI) models can ensure scalability, real-time performance, and accuracy in large-scale networks. Various AI research and standardization work is ongoing to optimize the use of DTN. When designing AI models, it is crucial to consider the characteristics of the data. This paper presents an autoencoder-based skip connected message passing neural network (AE-SMPN) as a network evaluation model using real network data. The model is created by utilizing graph neural network (GNN) with recurrent neural network (RNN) models to capture the spatiotemporal features of network data. Additionally, an AutoEncoder (AE) is employed to extract initial features. The neural network was trained using the real DTN dataset provided by the Barcelona Neural Networking Center (BNN-UPC), and the paper presents the analysis of the model structure along with experimental results.
Enhancing Gender-Inclusive Machine Translation with Neomorphemes and Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Machine translation (MT) models are known to suffer from gender bias, especially when translating into languages with extensive gendered morphology. Accordingly, they still fall short in using gender-inclusive language, also representative of non-binary identities. In this paper, we look at gender-inclusive neomorphemes, neologistic elements that avoid binary gender markings as an approach towards fairer MT. In this direction, we explore prompting techniques with large language models (LLMs) to translate from English into Italian using neomorphemes. So far, this area has been under-explored due to its novelty and the lack of publicly available evaluation resources. We fill this gap by releasing Neo-GATE, a resource designed to evaluate gender-inclusive en-it translation with neomorphemes. With Neo-GATE, we assess four LLMs of different families and sizes and different prompt formats, identifying strengths and weaknesses of each on this novel task for MT.
A Survey on Complexity Measures of Pseudo-Random Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Since the introduction of the Kolmogorov complexity of binary sequences in the 1960s, there have been significant advancements in the topic of complexity measures for randomness assessment, which are of fundamental importance in theoretical computer science and of practical interest in cryptography. This survey reviews notable research from the past four decades on the linear, quadratic and maximum-order complexities of pseudo-random sequences and their relations with Lempel-Ziv complexity, expansion complexity, 2-adic complexity, and correlation measures.
Falcon 7b for Software Mention Detection in Scholarly Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper aims to tackle the challenge posed by the increasing integration of software tools in research across various disciplines by investigating the application of Falcon-7b for the detection and classification of software mentions within scholarly texts. Specifically, the study focuses on solving Subtask I of the Software Mention Detection in Scholarly Publications (SOMD), which entails identifying and categorizing software mentions from academic literature. Through comprehensive experimentation, the paper explores different training strategies, including a dual-classifier approach, adaptive sampling, and weighted loss scaling, to enhance detection accuracy while overcoming the complexities of class imbalance and the nuanced syntax of scholarly writing. The findings highlight the benefits of selective labelling and adaptive sampling in improving the model's performance. However, they also indicate that integrating multiple strategies does not necessarily result in cumulative improvements. This research offers insights into the effective application of large language models for specific tasks such as SOMD, underlining the importance of tailored approaches to address the unique challenges presented by academic text analysis.
Exploring Graph-based Knowledge: Multi-Level Feature Distillation via Channels Relational Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In visual tasks, large teacher models capture essential features and deep information, enhancing performance. However, distilling this information into smaller student models often leads to performance loss due to structural differences and capacity limitations. To tackle this, we propose a distillation framework based on graph knowledge, including a multi-level feature alignment strategy and an attention-guided mechanism to provide a targeted learning trajectory for the student model. We emphasize spectral embedding (SE) as a key technique in our distillation process, which merges the student's feature space with the relational knowledge and structural complexities similar to the teacher network. This method captures the teacher's understanding in a graph-based representation, enabling the student model to more accurately mimic the complex structural dependencies present in the teacher model. Compared to methods that focus only on specific distillation areas, our strategy not only considers key features within the teacher model but also endeavors to capture the relationships and interactions among feature sets, encoding these complex pieces of information into a graph structure to understand and utilize the dynamic relationships among these pieces of information from a global perspective. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous feature distillation methods on the CIFAR-100, MS-COCO, and Pascal VOC datasets, proving its efficiency and applicability.
Intelligent Control in 6G Open RAN: Security Risk or Opportunity?
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) framework, emerging as the cornerstone for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile networks, heralds a transformative shift in radio access network architecture. As the adoption of Open RAN accelerates, ensuring its security becomes critical. The RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) plays a central role in Open RAN by improving network efficiency and flexibility. Nevertheless, it also brings about potential security risks that need careful scrutiny. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate the current state of RIC security comprehensively. This assessment is essential to gain a profound understanding of the security considerations associated with RIC. This survey combines a comprehensive analysis of RAN security, tracing its evolution from 2G to 5G, with an in-depth exploration of RIC security, marking the first comprehensive examination of its kind in the literature. Real-world security incidents involving RIC are vividly illustrated, providing practical insights. The study evaluates the security implications of the RIC within the 6G Open RAN context, addressing security vulnerabilities, mitigation strategies, and potential enhancements. It aims to guide stakeholders in the telecom industry toward a secure and dependable telecommunications infrastructure. The article serves as a valuable reference, shedding light on the RIC's crucial role within the broader network infrastructure and emphasizing security's paramount importance. This survey also explores the promising security opportunities that the RIC presents for enhancing network security and resilience in the context of 6G mobile networks. It outlines open issues, lessons learned, and future research directions in the domain of intelligent control in 6G open RAN, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of this dynamic landscape.
Drift Detection: Introducing Gaussian Split Detector
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Recent research yielded a wide array of drift detectors. However, in order to achieve remarkable performance, the true class labels must be available during the drift detection phase. This paper targets at detecting drift when the ground truth is unknown during the detection phase. To that end, we introduce Gaussian Split Detector (GSD) a novel drift detector that works in batch mode. GSD is designed to work when the data follow a normal distribution and makes use of Gaussian mixture models to monitor changes in the decision boundary. The algorithm is designed to handle multi-dimension data streams and to work without the ground truth labels during the inference phase making it pertinent for real world use. In an extensive experimental study on real and synthetic datasets, we evaluate our detector against the state of the art. We show that our detector outperforms the state of the art in detecting real drift and in ignoring virtual drift which is key to avoid false alarms.
Investigating Design Choices in Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures for General Audio Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses the problem of self-supervised general-purpose audio representation learning. We explore the use of Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) for this task, which consists of splitting an input mel-spectrogram into two parts (context and target), computing neural representations for each, and training the neural network to predict the target representations from the context representations. We investigate several design choices within this framework and study their influence through extensive experiments by evaluating our models on various audio classification benchmarks, including environmental sounds, speech and music downstream tasks. We focus notably on which part of the input data is used as context or target and show experimentally that it significantly impacts the model's quality. In particular, we notice that some effective design choices in the image domain lead to poor performance on audio, thus highlighting major differences between these two modalities.
DeVOS: Flow-Guided Deformable Transformer for Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The recent works on Video Object Segmentation achieved remarkable results by matching dense semantic and instance-level features between the current and previous frames for long-time propagation. Nevertheless, global feature matching ignores scene motion context, failing to satisfy temporal consistency. Even though some methods introduce local matching branch to achieve smooth propagation, they fail to model complex appearance changes due to the constraints of the local window. In this paper, we present DeVOS (Deformable VOS), an architecture for Video Object Segmentation that combines memory-based matching with motion-guided propagation resulting in stable long-term modeling and strong temporal consistency. For short-term local propagation, we propose a novel attention mechanism ADVA (Adaptive Deformable Video Attention), allowing the adaption of similarity search region to query-specific semantic features, which ensures robust tracking of complex shape and scale changes. DeVOS employs an optical flow to obtain scene motion features which are further injected to deformable attention as strong priors to learnable offsets. Our method achieves top-rank performance on DAVIS 2017 val and test-dev (88.1%, 83.0%), YouTube-VOS 2019 val (86.6%) while featuring consistent run-time speed and stable memory consumption
How Much You Ate? Food Portion Estimation on Spoons
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Monitoring dietary intake is a crucial aspect of promoting healthy living. In recent years, advances in computer vision technology have facilitated dietary intake monitoring through the use of images and depth cameras. However, the current state-of-the-art image-based food portion estimation algorithms assume that users take images of their meals one or two times, which can be inconvenient and fail to capture food items that are not visible from a top-down perspective, such as ingredients submerged in a stew. To address these limitations, we introduce an innovative solution that utilizes stationary user-facing cameras to track food items on utensils, not requiring any change of camera perspective after installation. The shallow depth of utensils provides a more favorable angle for capturing food items, and tracking them on the utensil's surface offers a significantly more accurate estimation of dietary intake without the need for post-meal image capture. The system is reliable for estimation of nutritional content of liquid-solid heterogeneous mixtures such as soups and stews. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the exceptional potential of our method as a non-invasive, user-friendly, and highly accurate dietary intake monitoring tool.
Image to Pseudo-Episode: Boosting Few-Shot Segmentation by Unlabeled Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to train a model which can segment the object from novel classes with a few labeled samples. The insufficient generalization ability of models leads to unsatisfactory performance when the models lack enough labeled data from the novel classes. Considering that there are abundant unlabeled data available, it is promising to improve the generalization ability by exploiting these various data. For leveraging unlabeled data, we propose a novel method, named Image to Pseudo-Episode (IPE), to generate pseudo-episodes from unlabeled data. Specifically, our method contains two modules, i.e., the pseudo-label generation module and the episode generation module. The former module generates pseudo-labels from unlabeled images by the spectral clustering algorithm, and the latter module generates pseudo-episodes from pseudo-labeled images by data augmentation methods. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-$5^i$ and COCO-$20^i$ demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance for FSS.
CinePile: A Long Video Question Answering Dataset and Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Current datasets for long-form video understanding often fall short of providing genuine long-form comprehension challenges, as many tasks derived from these datasets can be successfully tackled by analyzing just one or a few random frames from a video. To address this issue, we present a novel dataset and benchmark, CinePile, specifically designed for authentic long-form video understanding. This paper details our innovative approach for creating a question-answer dataset, utilizing advanced LLMs with human-in-the-loop and building upon human-generated raw data. Our comprehensive dataset comprises 305,000 multiple-choice questions (MCQs), covering various visual and multimodal aspects, including temporal comprehension, understanding human-object interactions, and reasoning about events or actions within a scene. Additionally, we fine-tuned open-source Video-LLMs on the training split and evaluated both open-source and proprietary video-centric LLMs on the test split of our dataset. The findings indicate that although current models underperform compared to humans, fine-tuning these models can lead to significant improvements in their performance.
Theorizing Deception: A Scoping Review of Theory in Research on Dark Patterns and Deceptive Design
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The issue of dark patterns and deceptive designs (DPs) in everyday interfaces and interactions continues to grow. DPs are manipulative and malicious elements within user interfaces that deceive users into making unintended choices. In parallel, research on DPs has significantly increased over the past two decades. As the field has matured, epistemological gaps have also become a salient and pressing concern. In this scoping review, we assessed the academic work so far -- 51 papers between 2014 to 2023 -- to identify the state of theory in DP research. We identified the key theories employed, examined how these theories have been referenced, and call for enhancing the incorporation of theory into DP research. We also propose broad theoretical foundations to establish a comprehensive and solid base for contextualizing and informing future DP research from a variety of theoretical scopes and lenses.
CLIP with Quality Captions: A Strong Pretraining for Vision Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

CLIP models perform remarkably well on zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks. But recent studies have shown that learnt representations in CLIP are not well suited for dense prediction tasks like object detection, semantic segmentation or depth estimation. More recently, multi-stage training methods for CLIP models was introduced to mitigate the weak performance of CLIP on downstream tasks. In this work, we find that simply improving the quality of captions in image-text datasets improves the quality of CLIP's visual representations, resulting in significant improvement on downstream dense prediction vision tasks. In fact, we find that CLIP pretraining with good quality captions can surpass recent supervised, self-supervised and weakly supervised pretraining methods. We show that when CLIP model with ViT-B/16 as image encoder is trained on well aligned image-text pairs it obtains 12.1% higher mIoU and 11.5% lower RMSE on semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks over recent state-of-the-art Masked Image Modeling (MIM) pretraining methods like Masked Autoencoder (MAE). We find that mobile architectures also benefit significantly from CLIP pretraining. A recent mobile vision architecture, MCi2, with CLIP pretraining obtains similar performance as Swin-L, pretrained on ImageNet-22k for semantic segmentation task while being 6.1$\times$ smaller. Moreover, we show that improving caption quality results in $10\times$ data efficiency when finetuning for dense prediction tasks.