OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Generic Stochastic Hybrid Car-following Model Based on Approximate Bayesian Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Car following (CF) models are fundamental to describing traffic dynamics. However, the CF behavior of human drivers is highly stochastic and nonlinear. As a result, identifying the best CF model has been challenging and controversial despite decades of research. Introduction of automated vehicles has further complicated this matter as their CF controllers remain proprietary, though their behavior appears different than human drivers. This paper develops a stochastic learning approach to integrate multiple CF models, rather than relying on a single model. The framework is based on approximate Bayesian computation that probabilistically concatenates a pool of CF models based on their relative likelihood of describing observed behavior. The approach, while data-driven, retains physical tractability and interpretability. Evaluation results using two datasets show that the proposed approach can better reproduce vehicle trajectories for both human driven and automated vehicles than any single CF model considered.
Next-Step Hint Generation for Introductory Programming Using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models possess skills such as answering questions, writing essays or solving programming exercises. Since these models are easily accessible, researchers have investigated their capabilities and risks for programming education. This work explores how LLMs can contribute to programming education by supporting students with automated next-step hints. We investigate prompt practices that lead to effective next-step hints and use these insights to build our StAP-tutor. We evaluate this tutor by conducting an experiment with students, and performing expert assessments. Our findings show that most LLM-generated feedback messages describe one specific next step and are personalised to the student's code and approach. However, the hints may contain misleading information and lack sufficient detail when students approach the end of the assignment. This work demonstrates the potential for LLM-generated feedback, but further research is required to explore its practical implementation.
Generative AI in Writing Research Papers: A New Type of Algorithmic Bias and Uncertainty in Scholarly Work
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in research across all disciplines is becoming ubiquitous. However, this ubiquity is largely driven by hyperspecific AI models developed during scientific studies for accomplishing a well-defined, data-dense task. These AI models introduce apparent, human-recognizable biases because they are trained with finite, specific data sets and parameters. However, the efficacy of using large language models (LLMs) -- and LLM-powered generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT -- to assist the research process is currently indeterminate. These generative AI tools, trained on general and imperceptibly large datasets along with human feedback, present challenges in identifying and addressing biases. Furthermore, these models are susceptible to goal misgeneralization, hallucinations, and adversarial attacks such as red teaming prompts -- which can be unintentionally performed by human researchers, resulting in harmful outputs. These outputs are reinforced in research -- where an increasing number of individuals have begun to use generative AI to compose manuscripts. Efforts into AI interpretability lag behind development, and the implicit variations that occur when prompting and providing context to a chatbot introduce uncertainty and irreproducibility. We thereby find that incorporating generative AI in the process of writing research manuscripts introduces a new type of context-induced algorithmic bias and has unintended side effects that are largely detrimental to academia, knowledge production, and communicating research.
Teenagers and Artificial Intelligence: Bootcamp Experience and Lessons Learned
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as a game-changer in today's technology landscape. However, the integration of AI education in classroom curricula currently lags behind, leaving teenagers inadequately prepared for an imminent AI-driven future. In this pilot study, we designed a three-day bootcamp offered in the summer of 2023 to a cohort of 60 high school students. The curriculum was delivered in person through animated video content, easy-to-follow slides, interactive playgrounds, and quizzes. These were packaged in the early version of an online learning platform we are developing. Results from the post-bootcamp survey conveyed a 91.4% overall satisfaction. Despite the short bootcamp duration, 88.5% and 71.4% of teenagers responded that they had an improved understanding of AI concepts and programming, respectively. Overall, we found that employing diverse modalities effectively engaged students, and building foundational modules proved beneficial for introducing more complex topics. Furthermore, using Google Colab notebooks for coding assignments proved challenging to most students. Students' activity on the platform and their answers to quizzes showed proficient engagement and a grasp of the material. Our results strongly highlight the need for compelling and accessible AI education methods for the next generation and the potential for informal learning to fill the gap of providing early AI education to teenagers.
Data Scarcity in Recommendation Systems: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

The prevalence of online content has led to the widespread adoption of recommendation systems (RSs), which serve diverse purposes such as news, advertisements, and e-commerce recommendations. Despite their significance, data scarcity issues have significantly impaired the effectiveness of existing RS models and hindered their progress. To address this challenge, the concept of knowledge transfer, particularly from external sources like pre-trained language models, emerges as a potential solution to alleviate data scarcity and enhance RS development. However, the practice of knowledge transfer in RSs is intricate. Transferring knowledge between domains introduces data disparities, and the application of knowledge transfer in complex RS scenarios can yield negative consequences if not carefully designed. Therefore, this article contributes to this discourse by addressing the implications of data scarcity on RSs and introducing various strategies, such as data augmentation, self-supervised learning, transfer learning, broad learning, and knowledge graph utilization, to mitigate this challenge. Furthermore, it delves into the challenges and future direction within the RS domain, offering insights that are poised to facilitate the development and implementation of robust RSs, particularly when confronted with data scarcity. We aim to provide valuable guidance and inspiration for researchers and practitioners, ultimately driving advancements in the field of RS.
Artificial intelligence in social science: A study based on bibliometrics analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is gradually changing the planet. Data digitisation, computing infrastructure and machine learning are helping AI tools to spread across all sectors of society. This article presents the results of a bibliometric analysis of AI-related publications in the social sciences over the last ten years (2013-2022). Most of the historical publications are taken into consideration with the aim of identifying research relevance and trends in this field. The results indicate that more than 19,408 articles have been published, 85% from 2008 to 2022, showing that research in this field is increasing significantly year on year. Clear domains or disciplines of research related to AI within the social sciences can be grouped into sub-areas such as law and legal reasoning, education, economics, and ethics. The United States is the country that publishes the most (20%), followed by China (13%). The influence of AI on society is inevitable and the advances can generate great opportunities for innovation and new jobs, but in the medium term it is necessary to adequately face this transition, setting regulations and reviewing the challenges of ethics and responsibility.
A Review of Repository Level Prompting for LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

As coding challenges become more complex, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to notable successes, such as achieving a 94.6\% solve rate on the HumanEval benchmark. Concurrently, there is an increasing commercial push for repository-level inline code completion tools, such as GitHub Copilot and Tab Nine, aimed at enhancing developer productivity. This paper delves into the transition from individual coding problems to repository-scale solutions, presenting a thorough review of the current literature on effective LLM prompting for code generation at the repository level. We examine approaches that will work with black-box LLMs such that they will be useful and applicable to commercial use cases, and their applicability in interpreting code at a repository scale. We juxtapose the Repository-Level Prompt Generation technique with RepoCoder, an iterative retrieval and generation method, to highlight the trade-offs inherent in each approach and to establish best practices for their application in cutting-edge coding benchmarks. The interplay between iterative refinement of prompts and the development of advanced retrieval systems forms the core of our discussion, offering a pathway to significantly improve LLM performance in code generation tasks. Insights from this study not only guide the application of these methods but also chart a course for future research to integrate such techniques into broader software engineering contexts.
Focus on Your Instruction: Fine-grained and Multi-instruction Image Editing by Attention Modulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, diffusion-based methods, like InstructPix2Pix (IP2P), have achieved effective instruction-based image editing, requiring only natural language instructions from the user. However, these methods often inadvertently alter unintended areas and struggle with multi-instruction editing, resulting in compromised outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce the Focus on Your Instruction (FoI), a method designed to ensure precise and harmonious editing across multiple instructions without extra training or test-time optimization. In the FoI, we primarily emphasize two aspects: (1) precisely extracting regions of interest for each instruction and (2) guiding the denoising process to concentrate within these regions of interest. For the first objective, we identify the implicit grounding capability of IP2P from the cross-attention between instruction and image, then develop an effective mask extraction method. For the second objective, we introduce a cross attention modulation module for rough isolation of target editing regions and unrelated regions. Additionally, we introduce a mask-guided disentangle sampling strategy to further ensure clear region isolation. Experimental results demonstrate that FoI surpasses existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, especially excelling in multi-instruction editing task.
From-Ground-To-Objects: Coarse-to-Fine Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation of Dynamic Objects with Ground Contact Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation (DE) is an approach to learning depth without costly depth ground truths. However, it often struggles with moving objects that violate the static scene assumption during training. To address this issue, we introduce a coarse-to-fine training strategy leveraging the ground contacting prior based on the observation that most moving objects in outdoor scenes contact the ground. In the coarse training stage, we exclude the objects in dynamic classes from the reprojection loss calculation to avoid inaccurate depth learning. To provide precise supervision on the depth of the objects, we present a novel Ground-contacting-prior Disparity Smoothness Loss (GDS-Loss) that encourages a DE network to align the depth of the objects with their ground-contacting points. Subsequently, in the fine training stage, we refine the DE network to learn the detailed depth of the objects from the reprojection loss, while ensuring accurate DE on the moving object regions by employing our regularization loss with a cost-volume-based weighting factor. Our overall coarse-to-fine training strategy can easily be integrated with existing DE methods without any modifications, significantly enhancing DE performance on challenging Cityscapes and KITTI datasets, especially in the moving object regions.
SoloPose: One-Shot Kinematic 3D Human Pose Estimation with Video Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While recent two-stage many-to-one deep learning models have demonstrated great success in 3D human pose estimation, such models are inefficient ways to detect 3D key points in a sequential video relative to one-shot and many-to-many models. Another key drawback of two-stage and many-to-one models is that errors in the first stage will be passed onto the second stage. In this paper, we introduce SoloPose, a novel one-shot, many-to-many spatio-temporal transformer model for kinematic 3D human pose estimation of video. SoloPose is further fortified by HeatPose, a 3D heatmap based on Gaussian Mixture Model distributions that factors target key points as well as kinematically adjacent key points. Finally, we address data diversity constraints with the 3D AugMotion Toolkit, a methodology to augment existing 3D human pose datasets, specifically by projecting four top public 3D human pose datasets (Humans3.6M, MADS, AIST Dance++, MPI INF 3DHP) into a novel dataset (Humans7.1M) with a universal coordinate system. Extensive experiments are conducted on Human3.6M as well as the augmented Humans7.1M dataset, and SoloPose demonstrates superior results relative to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Operator-learning-inspired Modeling of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs), one of the most influential works of the differential equation-based deep learning, are to continuously generalize residual networks and opened a new field. They are currently utilized for various downstream tasks, e.g., image classification, time series classification, image generation, etc. Its key part is how to model the time-derivative of the hidden state, denoted dh(t)/dt. People have habitually used conventional neural network architectures, e.g., fully-connected layers followed by non-linear activations. In this paper, however, we present a neural operator-based method to define the time-derivative term. Neural operators were initially proposed to model the differential operator of partial differential equations (PDEs). Since the time-derivative of NODEs can be understood as a special type of the differential operator, our proposed method, called branched Fourier neural operator (BFNO), makes sense. In our experiments with general downstream tasks, our method significantly outperforms existing methods.
Online Restless Multi-Armed Bandits with Long-Term Fairness Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) have been widely used to model sequential decision making problems with constraints. The decision maker (DM) aims to maximize the expected total reward over an infinite horizon under an "instantaneous activation constraint" that at most B arms can be activated at any decision epoch, where the state of each arm evolves stochastically according to a Markov decision process (MDP). However, this basic model fails to provide any fairness guarantee among arms. In this paper, we introduce RMAB-F, a new RMAB model with "long-term fairness constraints", where the objective now is to maximize the long term reward while a minimum long-term activation fraction for each arm must be satisfied. For the online RMAB-F setting (i.e., the underlying MDPs associated with each arm are unknown to the DM), we develop a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm named Fair-UCRL. We prove that Fair-UCRL ensures probabilistic sublinear bounds on both the reward regret and the fairness violation regret. Compared with off-the-shelf RL methods, our Fair-UCRL is much more computationally efficient since it contains a novel exploitation that leverages a low-complexity index policy for making decisions. Experimental results further demonstrate the effectiveness of our Fair-UCRL.
DeepCalliFont: Few-shot Chinese Calligraphy Font Synthesis by Integrating Dual-modality Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Few-shot font generation, especially for Chinese calligraphy fonts, is a challenging and ongoing problem. With the help of prior knowledge that is mainly based on glyph consistency assumptions, some recently proposed methods can synthesize high-quality Chinese glyph images. However, glyphs in calligraphy font styles often do not meet these assumptions. To address this problem, we propose a novel model, DeepCalliFont, for few-shot Chinese calligraphy font synthesis by integrating dual-modality generative models. Specifically, the proposed model consists of image synthesis and sequence generation branches, generating consistent results via a dual-modality representation learning strategy. The two modalities (i.e., glyph images and writing sequences) are properly integrated using a feature recombination module and a rasterization loss function. Furthermore, a new pre-training strategy is adopted to improve the performance by exploiting large amounts of uni-modality data. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method to other state-of-the-art approaches in the task of few-shot Chinese calligraphy font synthesis. The source code can be found at https://github.com/lsflyt-pku/DeepCalliFont.
Model-free Learning of Corridor Clearance: A Near-term Deployment Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

An emerging public health application of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies is to reduce response times of emergency medical service (EMS) by indirectly coordinating traffic. Therefore, in this work we study the CAV-assisted corridor clearance for EMS vehicles from a short term deployment perspective. Existing research on this topic often overlooks the impact of EMS vehicle disruptions on regular traffic, assumes 100% CAV penetration, relies on real-time traffic signal timing data and queue lengths at intersections, and makes various assumptions about traffic settings when deriving optimal model-based CAV control strategies. However, these assumptions pose significant challenges for near-term deployment and limit the real-world applicability of such methods. To overcome these challenges and enhance real-world applicability in near-term, we propose a model-free approach employing deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for designing CAV control strategies, showing its reduced overhead in designing and greater scalability and performance compared to model-based methods. Our qualitative analysis highlights the complexities of designing scalable EMS corridor clearance controllers for diverse traffic settings in which DRL controller provides ease of design compared to the model-based methods. In numerical evaluations, the model-free DRL controller outperforms the model-based counterpart by improving traffic flow and even improving EMS travel times in scenarios when a single CAV is present. Across 19 considered settings, the learned DRL controller excels by 25% in reducing the travel time in six instances, achieving an average improvement of 9%. These findings underscore the potential and promise of model-free DRL strategies in advancing EMS response and traffic flow coordination, with a focus on practical near-term deployment.
Self-supervised Adaptive Weighting for Cooperative Perception in V2V Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Perception of the driving environment is critical for collision avoidance and route planning to ensure driving safety. Cooperative perception has been widely studied as an effective approach to addressing the shortcomings of single-vehicle perception. However, the practical limitations of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications have not been adequately investigated. In particular, current cooperative fusion models rely on supervised models and do not address dynamic performance degradation caused by arbitrary channel impairments. In this paper, a self-supervised adaptive weighting model is proposed for intermediate fusion to mitigate the adverse effects of channel distortion. The performance of cooperative perception is investigated in different system settings. Rician fading and imperfect channel state information (CSI) are also considered. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed adaptive weighting algorithm significantly outperforms the benchmarks without weighting. Visualization examples validate that the proposed weighting algorithm can flexibly adapt to various channel conditions. Moreover, the adaptive weighting algorithm demonstrates good generalization to untrained channels and test datasets from different domains.
Unveiling Passive and Active EMF Exposure in Large-Scale Cellular Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

With the development of fifth-generation (5G) networks, the number of user equipments (UE) increases dramatically. However, the potential health risks from electromagnetic fields (EMF) tend to be a public concern. Generally, EMF exposure-related analysis mainly considers the passive exposure from base stations (BSs) and active exposure that results from the user's personal devices while communicating. However, the passive radiation that is generated by nearby devices of other users is typically ignored. In fact, with the increase in the density of UE, their passive exposure to human bodies can no longer be ignored. In this work, we propose a stochastic geometry framework to analyze the EMF exposure from active and passive radiation sources. In particular, considering a typical user, we account for their exposure to EMF from BSs, their own UE, and other UE. We derive the distribution of the Exposure index (EI) and the coverage probability for two typical models for spatial distributions of UE, i.e., \textit{i)} a Poisson point process (PPP); \textit{ii)} a Matern cluster process. Also, we show the trade-off between the EMF exposure and the coverage probability. Our numerical results suggest that the passive exposure from other users is non-negligible compared to the exposure from BSs when user density is $10^2$ times higher than BS density, and non-negligible compared to active exposure from the user's own UE when user density is $10^5$ times the BS density.
DeepArt: A Benchmark to Advance Fidelity Research in AI-Generated Content
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores the image synthesis capabilities of GPT-4, a leading multi-modal large language model. We establish a benchmark for evaluating the fidelity of texture features in images generated by GPT-4, comprising manually painted pictures and their AI-generated counterparts. The contributions of this study are threefold: First, we provide an in-depth analysis of the fidelity of image synthesis features based on GPT-4, marking the first such study on this state-of-the-art model. Second, the quantitative and qualitative experiments fully reveals the limitations of the GPT-4 model in image synthesis. Third, we have compiled a unique benchmark of manual drawings and corresponding GPT-4-generated images, introducing a new task to advance fidelity research in AI-generated content (AIGC). The dataset is available at: \url{https://github.com/rickwang28574/DeepArt}.