OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RFPPO: Motion Dynamic RRT based Fluid Field - PPO for Dynamic TF/TA Routing Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Existing local dynamic route planning algorithms, when directly applied to terrain following/terrain avoidance, or dynamic obstacle avoidance for large and medium-sized fixed-wing aircraft, fail to simultaneously meet the requirements of real-time performance, long-distance planning, and the dynamic constraints of large and medium-sized aircraft. To deal with this issue, this paper proposes the Motion Dynamic RRT based Fluid Field - PPO for dynamic TF/TA routing planning. Firstly, the action and state spaces of the proximal policy gradient algorithm are redesigned using disturbance flow fields and artificial potential field algorithms, establishing an aircraft dynamics model, and designing a state transition process based on this model. Additionally, a reward function is designed to encourage strategies for obstacle avoidance, terrain following, terrain avoidance, and safe flight. Experimental results on real DEM data demonstrate that our algorithm can complete long-distance flight tasks through collision-free trajectory planning that complies with dynamic constraints, without the need for prior global planning.
ST$^3$: Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Model by Spatial-Temporal Visual Token Trimming
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enhance their perceptual capabilities by integrating visual and textual information. However, processing the massive number of visual tokens incurs a significant computational cost. Existing analysis of the MLLM attention mechanisms remains shallow, leading to coarse-grain token pruning strategies that fail to effectively balance speed and accuracy. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of MLLM attention mechanisms with LLaVA. We find that numerous visual tokens and partial attention computations are redundant during the decoding process. Based on this insight, we propose Spatial-Temporal Visual Token Trimming ($\textbf{ST}^{3}$), a framework designed to accelerate MLLM inference without retraining. $\textbf{ST}^{3}$ consists of two primary components: 1) Progressive Visual Token Pruning (\textbf{PVTP}), which eliminates inattentive visual tokens across layers, and 2) Visual Token Annealing (\textbf{VTA}), which dynamically reduces the number of visual tokens in each layer as the generated tokens grow. Together, these techniques deliver around $\mathbf{2\times}$ faster inference with only about $\mathbf{30\%}$ KV cache memory compared to the original LLaVA, while maintaining consistent performance across various datasets. Crucially, $\textbf{ST}^{3}$ can be seamlessly integrated into existing pre-trained MLLMs, providing a plug-and-play solution for efficient inference.
Stable-TTS: Stable Speaker-Adaptive Text-to-Speech Synthesis via Prosody Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speaker-adaptive Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis has attracted considerable attention due to its broad range of applications, such as personalized voice assistant services. While several approaches have been proposed, they often exhibit high sensitivity to either the quantity or the quality of target speech samples. To address these limitations, we introduce Stable-TTS, a novel speaker-adaptive TTS framework that leverages a small subset of a high-quality pre-training dataset, referred to as prior samples. Specifically, Stable-TTS achieves prosody consistency by leveraging the high-quality prosody of prior samples, while effectively capturing the timbre of the target speaker. Additionally, it employs a prior-preservation loss during fine-tuning to maintain the synthesis ability for prior samples to prevent overfitting on target samples. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Stable-TTS even under limited amounts of and noisy target speech samples.
Federated Unlearning with Gradient Descent and Conflict Mitigation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) has received much attention in recent years. However, although clients are not required to share their data in FL, the global model itself can implicitly remember clients' local data. Therefore, it's necessary to effectively remove the target client's data from the FL global model to ease the risk of privacy leakage and implement ``the right to be forgotten". Federated Unlearning (FU) has been considered a promising way to remove data without full retraining. But the model utility easily suffers significant reduction during unlearning due to the gradient conflicts. Furthermore, when conducting the post-training to recover the model utility, the model is prone to move back and revert what has already been unlearned. To address these issues, we propose Federated Unlearning with Orthogonal Steepest Descent (FedOSD). We first design an unlearning Cross-Entropy loss to overcome the convergence issue of the gradient ascent. A steepest descent direction for unlearning is then calculated in the condition of being non-conflicting with other clients' gradients and closest to the target client's gradient. This benefits to efficiently unlearn and mitigate the model utility reduction. After unlearning, we recover the model utility by maintaining the achievement of unlearning. Finally, extensive experiments in several FL scenarios verify that FedOSD outperforms the SOTA FU algorithms in terms of unlearning and model utility.
YAD: Leveraging T5 for Improved Automatic Diacritization of Yorùbá Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we present Yorùbá automatic diacritization (YAD) benchmark dataset for evaluating Yorùbá diacritization systems. In addition, we pre-train text-to-text transformer, T5 model for Yorùbá and showed that this model outperform several multilingually trained T5 models. Lastly, we showed that more data and larger models are better at diacritization for Yorùbá
Decentralized Unlabeled Multi-Agent Navigation in Continuous Space
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we study the problem where a group of mobile agents needs to reach a set of goal locations, but it does not matter which agent reaches a specific goal. Unlike most of the existing works on this topic that typically assume the existence of the centralized planner (or controller) and limit the agents' moves to a predefined graph of locations and transitions between them, in this work we focus on the decentralized scenarios, when each agent acts individually relying only on local observations/communications and is free to move in arbitrary direction at any time. Our iterative approach involves agents individually selecting goals, exchanging them, planning paths, and at each time step choose actions that balance between progressing along the paths and avoiding collisions. The proposed method is shown to be complete under specific assumptions on how agents progress towards their current goals, and our empirical evaluation demonstrates its superiority over a baseline decentralized navigation approach in success rate (i.e. is able to solve more problem instances under a given time limit) and a comparison with the centralized TSWAP algorithm reveals its efficiency in minimizing trajectory lengths for mission accomplishment.
A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Autoencoder Framework for End-to-End Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates the application of quantum machine learning to End-to-End (E2E) communication systems in wireless fading scenarios. We introduce a novel hybrid quantum-classical autoencoder architecture that combines parameterized quantum circuits with classical deep neural networks (DNNs). Specifically, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical autoencoder (QAE) framework to optimize the E2E communication system. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed hybrid system, and reveal that it is the first work that can achieve comparable block error rate (BLER) performance to classical DNN-based and conventional channel coding schemes, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters. Additionally, the proposed QAE exhibits steady and superior BLER convergence over the classical autoencoder baseline.
Few-shot Algorithm Assurance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In image classification tasks, deep learning models are vulnerable to image distortion. For successful deployment, it is important to identify distortion levels under which the model is usable i.e. its accuracy stays above a stipulated threshold. We refer to this problem as Model Assurance under Image Distortion, and formulate it as a classification task. Given a distortion level, our goal is to predict if the model's accuracy on the set of distorted images is greater than a threshold. We propose a novel classifier based on a Level Set Estimation (LSE) algorithm, which uses the LSE's mean and variance functions to form the classification rule. We further extend our method to a "few sample" setting where we can only acquire few real images to perform the model assurance process. Our idea is to generate extra synthetic images using a novel Conditional Variational Autoencoder model with two new loss functions. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our classification method significantly outperforms strong baselines on five benchmark image datasets.
HindiLLM: Large Language Model for Hindi
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The advancements in the Large Language Model (LLM) have helped in solving several problems related to language processing. Most of the researches have focused on the English language only, because of its popularity and abundance on the internet. However, a high-performance language model for Hindi and other Indic languages is lacking in the literature. In this work, we have pre-trained two autoregressive LLM models for the Hindi language, namely HindiLLM-Small and HindiLLM-Medium. We use a two-step process comprising unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. First, we create a large and high-quality text corpus for unsupervised pre-training. Next, we train a Byte-Pair Encoding, named HindiLLM tokenizer, using the pre-training text data. We then perform training on the unlabeled data, known as the pre-training step, to get the HindiLLM base models. Furthermore, we perform fine-tuning of the HindiLLM base models for different tasks like sentiment analysis, text classification, natural language inference, and multiple choice question-answer on popular labeled datasets to measure the real-world performance. The evaluation shows that the HindiLLM-based fine-tuned models outperform several models in most of the language related tasks.
Left-handed representation in top 100 male professional tennis players: Multi-disciplinary perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

A commonly held opinion is that left-handed tennis players are overrepresented compared to the percentage of left-handers within the general population. This study provides the domain insights supported by data analysis that could help inform the decision of parents and coaches considering whether a child should start playing tennis as left- or right-handed when there is no strong arm-handed dominance. Compared to the commonly cited figure of about 10% of left-handed male population, data analysis from the official ATP web site for the top 100 ranked tennis players over the past decades (1985-2016) shows evidence of overrepresentation of left-handed elite tennis players (about 15%). The insights and data analysis can inform the handedness decision, advance coaching and strategic game concepts, enhance media coverage/analytics, left-handed facts and statistics, and inform tennis equipment manufacturing.
Analytically Informed Inverse Kinematics Solution at Singularities
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Near kinematic singularities of a serial manipulator, the inverse kinematics (IK) problem becomes ill-conditioned, which poses computational problems for the numerical solution. Computational methods to tackle this issue are based on various forms of a pseudoinverse (PI) solution to the velocity IK problem. The damped least squares (DLS) method provides a robust solution with controllable convergence rate. However, at singularities, it may not even be possible to solve the IK problem using any PI solution when certain end-effector motions are prescribed. To overcome this problem, an analytically informed inverse kinematics (AI-IK) method is proposed. The key step of the method is an explicit description of the tangent aspect of singular motions (the analytic part) to deduce a perturbation that yields a regular configuration. The latter serves as start configuration for the iterative solution (the numeric part). Numerical results are reported for a 7-DOF Kuka iiwa.
AmalREC: A Dataset for Relation Extraction and Classification Leveraging Amalgamation of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Existing datasets for relation classification and extraction often exhibit limitations such as restricted relation types and domain-specific biases. This work presents a generic framework to generate well-structured sentences from given tuples with the help of Large Language Models (LLMs). This study has focused on the following major questions: (i) how to generate sentences from relation tuples, (ii) how to compare and rank them, (iii) can we combine strengths of individual methods and amalgamate them to generate an even bette quality of sentences, and (iv) how to evaluate the final dataset? For the first question, we employ a multifaceted 5-stage pipeline approach, leveraging LLMs in conjunction with template-guided generation. We introduce Sentence Evaluation Index(SEI) that prioritizes factors like grammatical correctness, fluency, human-aligned sentiment, accuracy, and complexity to answer the first part of the second question. To answer the second part of the second question, this work introduces a SEI-Ranker module that leverages SEI to select top candidate generations. The top sentences are then strategically amalgamated to produce the final, high-quality sentence. Finally, we evaluate our dataset on LLM-based and SOTA baselines for relation classification. The proposed dataset features 255 relation types, with 15K sentences in the test set and around 150k in the train set organized in, significantly enhancing relational diversity and complexity. This work not only presents a new comprehensive benchmark dataset for RE/RC task, but also compare different LLMs for generation of quality sentences from relational tuples.
Single-image reflection removal via self-supervised diffusion models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Reflections often degrade the visual quality of images captured through transparent surfaces, and reflection removal methods suffers from the shortage of paired real-world samples.This paper proposes a hybrid approach that combines cycle-consistency with denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM) to effectively remove reflections from single images without requiring paired training data. The method introduces a Reflective Removal Network (RRN) that leverages DDPMs to model the decomposition process and recover the transmission image, and a Reflective Synthesis Network (RSN) that re-synthesizes the input image using the separated components through a nonlinear attention-based mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the SIR$^2$, Flash-Based Reflection Removal (FRR) Dataset, and a newly introduced Museum Reflection Removal (MRR) dataset, showing superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Exploiting NOMA Transmissions in Multi-UAV-assisted Wireless Networks: From Aerial-RIS to Mode-switching UAVs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we consider an aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS)-assisted wireless network, where multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) collect data from ground users (GUs) by using the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) method. The ARIS provides enhanced channel controllability to improve the NOMA transmissions and reduce the co-channel interference among UAVs. We also propose a novel dual-mode switching scheme, where each UAV equipped with both an ARIS and a radio frequency (RF) transceiver can adaptively perform passive reflection or active transmission. We aim to maximize the overall network throughput by jointly optimizing the UAVs' trajectory planning and operating modes, the ARIS's passive beamforming, and the GUs' transmission control strategies. We propose an optimization-driven hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (O-HDRL) method to decompose it into a series of subproblems. Specifically, the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) adjusts the UAVs' trajectory planning and mode switching strategies, while the passive beamforming and transmission control strategies are tackled by the optimization methods. Numerical results reveal that the O-HDRL efficiently improves the learning stability and reward performance compared to the benchmark methods. Meanwhile, the dual-mode switching scheme is verified to achieve a higher throughput performance compared to the fixed ARIS scheme.
On Extremal Properties of k-CNF: Capturing Threshold Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a basic question on the expressiveness of $k$-CNF formulas: How well can $k$-CNF formulas capture threshold functions? Specifically, what is the largest number of assignments (of Hamming weight $t$) accepted by a $k$-CNF formula that only accepts assignments of weight at least $t$? Among others, we provide the following results: - While an optimal solution is known for $t \leq n/k$, the problem remains open for $t > n/k$. We formulate a (monotone) version of the problem as an extremal hypergraph problem and show that for $t = n-k$, the problem is exactly the Turán problem. - For $t = αn$ with constant $α$, we provide a construction and show its optimality for $2$-CNF. Optimality of the construction for $k>2$ would give improved lower bounds for depth-$3$ circuits.
A Multiparty Homomorphic Encryption Approach to Confidential Federated Kaplan Meier Survival Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of healthcare data has expanded opportunities for collaborative research, yet stringent privacy regulations hinder pooling sensitive patient records. We propose a \emph{multiparty homomorphic encryption-based} framework for \emph{privacy-preserving federated Kaplan--Meier survival analysis}, offering native floating-point support, a theoretical model, and explicit reconstruction-attack mitigation. Compared to prior work, our framework ensures encrypted federated survival estimates closely match centralized outcomes, supported by formal utility-loss bounds that demonstrate convergence as aggregation and decryption noise diminish. Extensive experiments on the NCCTG Lung Cancer and synthetic Breast Cancer datasets confirm low \emph{mean absolute error (MAE)} and \emph{root mean squared error (RMSE)}, indicating negligible deviations between encrypted and non-encrypted survival curves. Log-rank and numerical accuracy tests reveal \emph{no significant difference} between federated encrypted and non-encrypted analyses, preserving statistical validity. A reconstruction-attack evaluation shows smaller federations (2--3 providers) with overlapping data between the institutions are vulnerable, a challenge mitigated by multiparty encryption. Larger federations (5--50 sites) degrade reconstruction accuracy further, with encryption improving confidentiality. Despite an 8--19$\times$ computational overhead, threshold-based homomorphic encryption is \emph{feasible for moderate-scale deployments}, balancing security and runtime. By providing robust privacy guarantees alongside high-fidelity survival estimates, our framework advances the state-of-the art in secure multi-institutional survival analysis.
Bayesian Networks and Proof-Nets: a proof-theoretical account of Bayesian Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

We uncover a strong correspondence between Bayesian Networks and (Multiplicative) Linear Logic Proof-Nets, relating the two as a representation of a joint probability distribution and at the level of computation, so yielding a proof-theoretical account of Bayesian Inference.
NetFlowGen: Leveraging Generative Pre-training for Network Traffic Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding the traffic dynamics in networks is a core capability for automated systems to monitor and analyze networking behaviors, reducing expensive human efforts and economic risks through tasks such as traffic classification, congestion prediction, and attack detection. However, it is still challenging to accurately model network traffic with machine learning approaches in an efficient and broadly applicable manner. Task-specific models trained from scratch are used for different networking applications, which limits the efficiency of model development and generalization of model deployment. Furthermore, while networking data is abundant, high-quality task-specific labels are often insufficient for training individual models. Large-scale self-supervised learning on unlabeled data provides a natural pathway for tackling these challenges. We propose to pre-train a general-purpose machine learning model to capture traffic dynamics with only traffic data from NetFlow records, with the goal of fine-tuning for different downstream tasks with small amount of labels. Our presented NetFlowGen framework goes beyond a proof-of-concept for network traffic pre-training and addresses specific challenges such as unifying network feature representations, learning from large unlabeled traffic data volume, and testing on real downstream tasks in DDoS attack detection. Experiments demonstrate promising results of our pre-training framework on capturing traffic dynamics and adapting to different networking tasks.
Impact of Cognitive Load on Human Trust in Hybrid Human-Robot Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Human trust plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of human-robot collaboration. Despite its significance, the development and maintenance of an optimal trust level are obstructed by the complex nature of influencing factors and their mechanisms. This study investigates the effects of cognitive load on human trust within the context of a hybrid human-robot collaboration task. An experiment is conducted where the humans and the robot, acting as team members, collaboratively construct pyramids with differentiated levels of task complexity. Our findings reveal that cognitive load exerts diverse impacts on human trust in the robot. Notably, there is an increase in human trust under conditions of high cognitive load. Furthermore, the rewards for performance are substantially higher in tasks with high cognitive load compared to those with low cognitive load, and a significant correlation exists between human trust and the failure risk of performance in tasks with low and medium cognitive load. By integrating interdependent task steps, this research emphasizes the unique dynamics of hybrid human-robot collaboration scenarios. The insights gained not only contribute to understanding how cognitive load influences trust but also assist developers in optimizing collaborative target selection and designing more effective human-robot interfaces in such environments.