OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Distributed Multi-User Secret Sharing with Multiple Secrets per User
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a distributed multi-user secret sharing (DMUSS) setting in which there is a dealer, $n$ storage nodes, and $m$ secrets. Each user demands a $t$-subset of $m$ secrets. Earlier work in this setting dealt with the case of $t=1$; in this work, we consider general $t$. The user downloads shares from the storage nodes based on the designed access structure and reconstructs its secrets. We identify a necessary condition on the access structures to ensure weak secrecy. We also make a connection between access structures for this problem and $t$-disjunct matrices. We apply various $t$-disjunct matrix constructions in this setting and compare their performance in terms of the number of storage nodes and communication complexity. We also derive bounds on the optimal communication complexity of a distributed secret sharing protocol. Finally, we characterize the capacity region of the DMUSS problem when the access structure is specified.
RoleEval: A Bilingual Role Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid evolution of large language models necessitates effective benchmarks for evaluating their role knowledge, which is essential for establishing connections with the real world and providing more immersive interactions. This paper introduces RoleEval, a bilingual benchmark designed to assess the memorization, utilization, and reasoning capabilities of role knowledge. RoleEval comprises RoleEval-Global (including internationally recognized characters) and RoleEval-Chinese (including characters popular in China), with 6,000 Chinese-English parallel multiple-choice questions focusing on 300 influential people and fictional characters drawn from a variety of domains including celebrities, anime, comics, movies, TV series, games, and fictions. These questions cover basic knowledge and multi-hop reasoning abilities, aiming to systematically probe various aspects such as personal information, relationships, abilities, and experiences of the characters. To maintain high standards, we perform a hybrid quality check process combining both automatic and human verification, ensuring that the questions are diverse, challenging, and discriminative. Our extensive evaluations with RoleEval across various open-source and proprietary large language models, under both the zero- and few-shot settings, reveal insightful findings. Notably, while GPT-4 outperforms other models on RoleEval-Global, Chinese large language models excel on RoleEval-Chinese, highlighting significant knowledge distribution differences. We expect that RoleEval would highlight the significance of assessing role knowledge for large language models across various languages and cultural settings.
Iterated Resultants and Rational Functions in Real Quantifier Elimination
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper builds and extends on the authors' previous work related to the algorithmic tool, Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition (CAD), and one of its core applications, Real Quantifier Elimination (QE). These topics are at the heart of symbolic computation and were first implemented in computer algebra systems decades ago, but have recently received renewed interest as part of the ongoing development of SMT solvers for non-linear real arithmetic. First, we consider the use of iterated univariate resultants in traditional CAD, and how this leads to inefficiencies, especially in the case of an input with multiple equational constraints. We reproduce the workshop paper [Davenport and England, 2023], adding important clarifications to our suggestions first made there to make use of multivariate resultants in the projection phase of CAD. We then consider an alternative approach to this problem first documented in [McCallum and Brown, 2009] which redefines the actual object under construction, albeit only in the case of two equational constraints. We correct an unhelpful typo and provide a proof missing from that paper. We finish by revising the topic of how to deal with SMT or Real QE problems expressed using rational functions (as opposed to the usual polynomial ones) noting that these are often found in industrial applications. We revisit a proposal made in [Uncu, Davenport and England, 2023] for doing this in the case of satisfiability, explaining why such an approach does not trivially extend to more complicated quantification structure and giving a suitable alternative.
Hyper-VolTran: Fast and Generalizable One-Shot Image to 3D Object Structure via HyperNetworks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Solving image-to-3D from a single view is an ill-posed problem, and current neural reconstruction methods addressing it through diffusion models still rely on scene-specific optimization, constraining their generalization capability. To overcome the limitations of existing approaches regarding generalization and consistency, we introduce a novel neural rendering technique. Our approach employs the signed distance function as the surface representation and incorporates generalizable priors through geometry-encoding volumes and HyperNetworks. Specifically, our method builds neural encoding volumes from generated multi-view inputs. We adjust the weights of the SDF network conditioned on an input image at test-time to allow model adaptation to novel scenes in a feed-forward manner via HyperNetworks. To mitigate artifacts derived from the synthesized views, we propose the use of a volume transformer module to improve the aggregation of image features instead of processing each viewpoint separately. Through our proposed method, dubbed as Hyper-VolTran, we avoid the bottleneck of scene-specific optimization and maintain consistency across the images generated from multiple viewpoints. Our experiments show the advantages of our proposed approach with consistent results and rapid generation.
GenAI Mirage: The Impostor Bias and the Deepfake Detection Challenge in the Era of Artificial Illusions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper examines the impact of cognitive biases on decision-making in forensics and digital forensics, exploring biases such as confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and hindsight bias. It assesses existing methods to mitigate biases and improve decision-making, introducing the novel "Impostor Bias", which arises as a systematic tendency to question the authenticity of multimedia content, such as audio, images, and videos, often assuming they are generated by AI tools. This bias goes beyond evaluators' knowledge levels, as it can lead to erroneous judgments and false accusations, undermining the reliability and credibility of forensic evidence. Impostor Bias stems from an a priori assumption rather than an objective content assessment, and its impact is expected to grow with the increasing realism of AI-generated multimedia products. The paper discusses the potential causes and consequences of Impostor Bias, suggesting strategies for prevention and counteraction. By addressing these topics, this paper aims to provide valuable insights, enhance the objectivity and validity of forensic investigations, and offer recommendations for future research and practical applications to ensure the integrity and reliability of forensic practices.
Towards Flexible, Scalable, and Adaptive Multi-Modal Conditioned Face Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent progress in multi-modal conditioned face synthesis has enabled the creation of visually striking and accurately aligned facial images. Yet, current methods still face issues with scalability, limited flexibility, and a one-size-fits-all approach to control strength, not accounting for the differing levels of conditional entropy, a measure of unpredictability in data given some condition, across modalities. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel uni-modal training approach with modal surrogates, coupled with an entropy-aware modal-adaptive modulation, to support flexible, scalable, and scalable multi-modal conditioned face synthesis network. Our uni-modal training with modal surrogate that only leverage uni-modal data, use modal surrogate to decorate condition with modal-specific characteristic and serve as linker for inter-modal collaboration , fully learns each modality control in face synthesis process as well as inter-modal collaboration. The entropy-aware modal-adaptive modulation finely adjust diffusion noise according to modal-specific characteristics and given conditions, enabling well-informed step along denoising trajectory and ultimately leading to synthesis results of high fidelity and quality. Our framework improves multi-modal face synthesis under various conditions, surpassing current methods in image quality and fidelity, as demonstrated by our thorough experimental results.
Blockchain-Envisioned Post-Quantum Secure Sanitizable Signature for Audit Logs Management
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Audit logs are one of the most important tools for transparently tracking system events and maintaining continuous oversight in corporate organizations and enterprise business systems. There are many cases where the audit logs contain sensitive data, or the audit logs are enormous. In these situations, dealing with a subset of the data is more practical than the entire data set. To provide a secure solution to handle these issues, a sanitizable signature scheme (SSS) is a viable cryptographic primitive. Herein, we first present the first post-quantum secure multivariate-based SSS, namely Mul-SAN. Our proposed design provides unforgeability, privacy, immutability, signer accountability, and sanitizer accountability under the assumption that the MQ problem is NP-hard. Mul-SAN is very efficient and only requires computing field multiplications and additions over a finite field for its implementation. Mul-SAN presents itself as a practical method to partially delegate control of the authenticated data in avenues like the healthcare industry and government organizations. We also explore using Blockchain to provide a tamper-proof and robust audit log mechanism.
LeanVec: Searching vectors faster by making them fit
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Modern deep learning models have the ability to generate high-dimensional vectors whose similarity reflects semantic resemblance. Thus, similarity search, i.e., the operation of retrieving those vectors in a large collection that are similar to a given query, has become a critical component of a wide range of applications that demand highly accurate and timely answers. In this setting, the high vector dimensionality puts similarity search systems under compute and memory pressure, leading to subpar performance. Additionally, cross-modal retrieval tasks have become increasingly common, e.g., where a user inputs a text query to find the most relevant images for that query. However, these queries often have different distributions than the database embeddings, making it challenging to achieve high accuracy. In this work, we present LeanVec, a framework that combines linear dimensionality reduction with vector quantization to accelerate similarity search on high-dimensional vectors while maintaining accuracy. We present LeanVec variants for in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) queries. LeanVec-ID yields accuracies on par with those from recently introduced deep learning alternatives whose computational overhead precludes their usage in practice. LeanVec-OOD uses two novel techniques for dimensionality reduction that consider the query and database distributions to simultaneously boost the accuracy and the performance of the framework even further (even presenting competitive results when the query and database distributions match). All in all, our extensive and varied experimental results show that LeanVec produces state-of-the-art results, with up to 3.7x improvement in search throughput and up to 4.9x faster index build time over the state of the art.
Segment Change Model (SCM) for Unsupervised Change detection in VHR Remote Sensing Images: a Case Study of Buildings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The field of Remote Sensing (RS) widely employs Change Detection (CD) on very-high-resolution (VHR) images. A majority of extant deep-learning-based methods hinge on annotated samples to complete the CD process. Recently, the emergence of Vision Foundation Model (VFM) enables zero-shot predictions in particular vision tasks. In this work, we propose an unsupervised CD method named Segment Change Model (SCM), built upon the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). Our method recalibrates features extracted at different scales and integrates them in a top-down manner to enhance discriminative change edges. We further design an innovative Piecewise Semantic Attention (PSA) scheme, which can offer semantic representation without training, thereby minimize pseudo change phenomenon. Through conducting experiments on two public datasets, the proposed SCM increases the mIoU from 46.09% to 53.67% on the LEVIR-CD dataset, and from 47.56% to 52.14% on the WHU-CD dataset. Our codes are available at https://github.com/StephenApX/UCD-SCM.
Deterministic Minimum Steiner Cut in Maximum Flow Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We devise a deterministic algorithm for minimum Steiner cut, which uses $(\log n)^{O(1)}$ maximum flow calls and additional near-linear time. This algorithm improves on Li and Panigrahi's (FOCS 2020) algorithm, which uses $(\log n)^{O(1/ε^4)}$ maximum flow calls and additional $O(m^{1+ε})$ time, for $ε> 0$. Our algorithm thus shows that deterministic minimum Steiner cut can be solved in maximum flow time up to polylogarithmic factors, given any black-box deterministic maximum flow algorithm. Our main technical contribution is a novel deterministic graph decomposition method for terminal vertices that generalizes all existing $s$-strong partitioning methods, which we believe may have future applications.
TypeEvalPy: A Micro-benchmarking Framework for Python Type Inference Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In light of the growing interest in type inference research for Python, both researchers and practitioners require a standardized process to assess the performance of various type inference techniques. This paper introduces TypeEvalPy, a comprehensive micro-benchmarking framework for evaluating type inference tools. TypeEvalPy contains 154 code snippets with 845 type annotations across 18 categories that target various Python features. The framework manages the execution of containerized tools, transforms inferred types into a standardized format, and produces meaningful metrics for assessment. Through our analysis, we compare the performance of six type inference tools, highlighting their strengths and limitations. Our findings provide a foundation for further research and optimization in the domain of Python type inference.
Collatz-Weyl Generators: High Quality and High Throughput Parameterized Pseudorandom Number Generators
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the Collatz-Weyl Generators, a family of uniform pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) which are based on generalized Collatz mappings, derived from the Collatz conjecture and Weyl sequences. The high-quality statistical properties of our generators is demonstrated by the fact that they pass stringent randomness tests used by the research and standardization community. The proposed Collatz-Weyl Generators have a number of important properties, including solid mathematical foundations, enablement of high throughput and low latency implementation, small code and/or ASIC size, enablement of producing multiple independent streams and potential of support of cryptographic applications.
Complexity-Theoretic Implications of Multicalibration
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We present connections between the recent literature on multigroup fairness for prediction algorithms and classical results in computational complexity. Multiaccurate predictors are correct in expectation on each member of an arbitrary collection of pre-specified sets. Multicalibrated predictors satisfy a stronger condition: they are calibrated on each set in the collection. Multiaccuracy is equivalent to a regularity notion for functions defined by Trevisan, Tulsiani, and Vadhan (2009). They showed that, given a class $F$ of (possibly simple) functions, an arbitrarily complex function $g$ can be approximated by a low-complexity function $h$ that makes a small number of oracle calls to members of $F$, where the notion of approximation requires that $h$ cannot be distinguished from $g$ by members of $F$. This complexity-theoretic Regularity Lemma is known to have implications in different areas, including in complexity theory, additive number theory, information theory, graph theory, and cryptography. Starting from the stronger notion of multicalibration, we obtain stronger and more general versions of a number of applications of the Regularity Lemma, including the Hardcore Lemma, the Dense Model Theorem, and the equivalence of conditional pseudo-min-entropy and unpredictability. For example, we show that every boolean function (regardless of its hardness) has a small collection of disjoint hardcore sets, where the sizes of those hardcore sets are related to how balanced the function is on corresponding pieces of an efficient partition of the domain.
A Simple LLM Framework for Long-Range Video Question-Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present LLoVi, a language-based framework for long-range video question-answering (LVQA). Unlike prior long-range video understanding methods, which are often costly and require specialized long-range video modeling design (e.g., memory queues, state-space layers, etc.), our approach uses a frame/clip-level visual captioner (e.g., BLIP2, LaViLa, LLaVA) coupled with a Large Language Model (GPT-3.5, GPT-4) leading to a simple yet surprisingly effective LVQA framework. Specifically, we decompose short and long-range modeling aspects of LVQA into two stages. First, we use a short-term visual captioner to generate textual descriptions of short video clips (0.5-8s in length) densely sampled from a long input video. Afterward, an LLM aggregates the densely extracted short-term captions to perform long-range temporal reasoning needed to understand the whole video and answer a question. To analyze what makes our simple framework so effective, we thoroughly evaluate various components of our system. Our empirical analysis reveals that the choice of the visual captioner and LLM is critical for good LVQA performance. Furthermore, we show that a specialized prompt that asks the LLM first to summarize the noisy short-term visual captions and then answer a given input question leads to a significant LVQA performance boost. On EgoSchema, which is best known as a very long-form video question-answering benchmark, our method achieves 50.3% accuracy, outperforming the previous best-performing approach by 18.1% (absolute gain). In addition, our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.1% and 3.1% on NeXT-QA and IntentQA. We also extend LLoVi to grounded LVQA and show that it outperforms all prior methods on the NeXT-GQA dataset. We will release our code at https://github.com/CeeZh/LLoVi.
Classifier-free graph diffusion for molecular property targeting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This work focuses on the task of property targeting: that is, generating molecules conditioned on target chemical properties to expedite candidate screening for novel drug and materials development. DiGress is a recent diffusion model for molecular graphs whose distinctive feature is allowing property targeting through classifier-based (CB) guidance. While CB guidance may work to generate molecular-like graphs, we hint at the fact that its assumptions apply poorly to the chemical domain. Based on this insight we propose a classifier-free DiGress (FreeGress), which works by directly injecting the conditioning information into the training process. CF guidance is convenient given its less stringent assumptions and since it does not require to train an auxiliary property regressor, thus halving the number of trainable parameters in the model. We empirically show that our model yields up to 79% improvement in Mean Absolute Error with respect to DiGress on property targeting tasks on QM9 and ZINC-250k benchmarks. As an additional contribution, we propose a simple yet powerful approach to improve chemical validity of generated samples, based on the observation that certain chemical properties such as molecular weight correlate with the number of atoms in molecules.
Comparing roughness maps generated by five roughness descriptors for LiDAR-derived digital elevation models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Terrain surface roughness, often described abstractly, poses challenges in quantitative characterisation with various descriptors found in the literature. This study compares five commonly used roughness descriptors, exploring correlations among their quantified terrain surface roughness maps across three terrains with distinct spatial variations. Additionally, the study investigates the impacts of spatial scales and interpolation methods on these correlations. Dense point cloud data obtained through Light Detection and Ranging technique are used in this study. The findings highlight both global pattern similarities and local pattern distinctions in the derived roughness maps, emphasizing the significance of incorporating multiple descriptors in studies where local roughness values play a crucial role in subsequent analyses. The spatial scales were found to have a smaller impact on rougher terrain, while interpolation methods had minimal influence on roughness maps derived from different descriptors.
Efficient optimization-based trajectory planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This research addresses the increasing demand for advanced navigation systems capable of operating within confined surroundings. A significant challenge in this field is developing an efficient planning framework that can generalize across various types of collision avoidance missions. Utilizing numerical optimal control techniques, this study proposes a unified optimization-based planning framework to meet these demands. We focus on handling two collision avoidance problems, i.e., the object not colliding with obstacles and not colliding with boundaries of the constrained region. The object or obstacle is denoted as a union of convex polytopes and ellipsoids, and the constrained region is denoted as an intersection of such convex sets. Using these representations, collision avoidance can be approached by formulating explicit constraints that separate two convex sets, or ensure that a convex set is contained in another convex set, referred to as separating constraints and containing constraints, respectively. We propose to use the hyperplane separation theorem to formulate differentiable separating constraints, and utilize the S-procedure and geometrical methods to formulate smooth containing constraints. We state that compared to the state of the art, the proposed formulations allow a considerable reduction in nonlinear program size and geometry-based initialization in auxiliary variables used to formulate collision avoidance constraints. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed unified planning framework is evaluated in two contexts, autonomous parking in tractor-trailer vehicles and overtaking on curved lanes. The results in both cases exhibit an improved computational performance compared to existing methods.