OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Finding an $ε$-close Variation of Parameters in Bayesian Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper addresses the $ε$-close parameter tuning problem for Bayesian Networks (BNs): find a minimal $ε$-close amendment of probability entries in a given set of (rows in) conditional probability tables that make a given quantitative constraint on the BN valid. Based on the state-of-the-art "region verification" techniques for parametric Markov chains, we propose an algorithm whose capabilities go beyond any existing techniques. Our experiments show that $ε$-close tuning of large BN benchmarks with up to 8 parameters is feasible. In particular, by allowing (i) varied parameters in multiple CPTs and (ii) inter-CPT parameter dependencies, we treat subclasses of parametric BNs that have received scant attention so far.
Unveiling the Potential of Counterfactuals Explanations in Employability
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), counterfactual explanations are known to give simple, short, and comprehensible justifications for complex model decisions. However, we are yet to see more applied studies in which they are applied in real-world cases. To fill this gap, this study focuses on showing how counterfactuals are applied to employability-related problems which involve complex machine learning algorithms. For these use cases, we use real data obtained from a public Belgian employment institution (VDAB). The use cases presented go beyond the mere application of counterfactuals as explanations, showing how they can enhance decision support, comply with legal requirements, guide controlled changes, and analyze novel insights.
Dynamic Structural Brain Network Construction by Hierarchical Prototype Embedding GCN using T1-MRI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Constructing structural brain networks using T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (T1-MRI) presents a significant challenge due to the lack of direct regional connectivity information. Current methods with T1-MRI rely on predefined regions or isolated pretrained location modules to obtain atrophic regions, which neglects individual specificity. Besides, existing methods capture global structural context only on the whole-image-level, which weaken correlation between regions and the hierarchical distribution nature of brain connectivity.We hereby propose a novel dynamic structural brain network construction method based on T1-MRI, which can dynamically localize critical regions and constrain the hierarchical distribution among them for constructing dynamic structural brain network. Specifically, we first cluster spatially-correlated channel and generate several critical brain regions as prototypes. Further, we introduce a contrastive loss function to constrain the prototypes distribution, which embed the hierarchical brain semantic structure into the latent space. Self-attention and GCN are then used to dynamically construct hierarchical correlations of critical regions for brain network and explore the correlation, respectively. Our method is evaluated on ADNI-1 and ADNI-2 databases for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) conversion prediction, and acheive the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our source code is available at http://github.com/*******.
A proof of imitation of Wasserstein inverse reinforcement learning for multi-objective optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We prove Wasserstein inverse reinforcement learning enables the learner's reward values to imitate the expert's reward values in a finite iteration for multi-objective optimizations. Moreover, we prove Wasserstein inverse reinforcement learning enables the learner's optimal solutions to imitate the expert's optimal solutions for multi-objective optimizations with lexicographic order.
Bridging the Gap: Enhancing the Utility of Synthetic Data via Post-Processing Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Acquiring and annotating suitable datasets for training deep learning models is challenging. This often results in tedious and time-consuming efforts that can hinder research progress. However, generative models have emerged as a promising solution for generating synthetic datasets that can replace or augment real-world data. Despite this, the effectiveness of synthetic data is limited by their inability to fully capture the complexity and diversity of real-world data. To address this issue, we explore the use of Generative Adversarial Networks to generate synthetic datasets for training classifiers that are subsequently evaluated on real-world images. To improve the quality and diversity of the synthetic dataset, we propose three novel post-processing techniques: Dynamic Sample Filtering, Dynamic Dataset Recycle, and Expansion Trick. In addition, we introduce a pipeline called Gap Filler (GaFi), which applies these techniques in an optimal and coordinated manner to maximise classification accuracy on real-world data. Our experiments show that GaFi effectively reduces the gap with real-accuracy scores to an error of 2.03%, 1.78%, and 3.99% on the Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 datasets, respectively. These results represent a new state of the art in Classification Accuracy Score and highlight the effectiveness of post-processing techniques in improving the quality of synthetic datasets.
Concurrent Gaussian elimination
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Working in a semi-constructive logical system that supports the extraction of concurrent programs, we extract a program inverting non-singular real valued matrices from a constructive proof based on Gaussian elimination. Concurrency is used for efficient pivoting, that is, for finding an entry that is apart from zero in a non-null vector of real numbers.
Sparsifying Spiking Networks through Local Rhythms
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

It has been well-established that within conventional neural networks, many of the values produced at each layer are zero. In this work, I demonstrate that spiking neural networks can prevent the transmission of spikes representing values close to zero using local information. This can reduce the amount of energy required for communication and computation in these networks while preserving accuracy. Additionally, this demonstrates a novel application of biologically observed spiking rhythms.
Boosting Distress Support Dialogue Responses with Motivational Interviewing Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

AI-driven chatbots have become an emerging solution to address psychological distress. Due to the lack of psychotherapeutic data, researchers use dialogues scraped from online peer support forums to train them. But since the responses in such platforms are not given by professionals, they contain both conforming and non-conforming responses. In this work, we attempt to recognize these conforming and non-conforming response types present in online distress-support dialogues using labels adapted from a well-established behavioral coding scheme named Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) code and show how some response types could be rephrased into a more MI adherent form that can, in turn, enable chatbot responses to be more compliant with the MI strategy. As a proof of concept, we build several rephrasers by fine-tuning Blender and GPT3 to rephrase MI non-adherent "Advise without permission" responses into "Advise with permission". We show how this can be achieved with the construction of pseudo-parallel corpora avoiding costs for human labor. Through automatic and human evaluation we show that in the presence of less training data, techniques such as prompting and data augmentation can be used to produce substantially good rephrasings that reflect the intended style and preserve the content of the original text.
Object Re-Identification from Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Object re-identification (ReID) from images plays a critical role in application domains of image retrieval (surveillance, retail analytics, etc.) and multi-object tracking (autonomous driving, robotics, etc.). However, systems that additionally or exclusively perceive the world from depth sensors are becoming more commonplace without any corresponding methods for object ReID. In this work, we fill the gap by providing the first large-scale study of object ReID from point clouds and establishing its performance relative to image ReID. To enable such a study, we create two large-scale ReID datasets with paired image and LiDAR observations and propose a lightweight matching head that can be concatenated to any set or sequence processing backbone (e.g., PointNet or ViT), creating a family of comparable object ReID networks for both modalities. Run in Siamese style, our proposed point cloud ReID networks can make thousands of pairwise comparisons in real-time ($10$ Hz). Our findings demonstrate that their performance increases with higher sensor resolution and approaches that of image ReID when observations are sufficiently dense. Our strongest network trained at the largest scale achieves ReID accuracy exceeding $90\%$ for rigid objects and $85\%$ for deformable objects (without any explicit skeleton normalization). To our knowledge, we are the first to study object re-identification from real point cloud observations.
Can Deep Network Balance Copy-Move Forgery Detection and Distinguishment?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Copy-move forgery detection is a crucial research area within digital image forensics, as it focuses on identifying instances where objects in an image are duplicated and placed in different locations. The detection of such forgeries is particularly important in contexts where they can be exploited for malicious purposes. Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in distinguishing between the original and duplicated objects in copy-move forgeries, accompanied by the development of larger-scale datasets to facilitate this task. However, existing approaches to copy-move forgery detection and source/target differentiation often involve two separate steps or the design of individual end-to-end networks for each task. In this paper, we propose an innovative method that employs the transformer architecture in an end-to-end deep neural network. Our method aims to detect instances of copy-move forgery while simultaneously localizing the source and target regions. By utilizing this approach, we address the challenges posed by multi-object copy-move scenarios and report if there is a balance between the detection and differentiation tasks. To evaluate the performance of our proposed network, we conducted experiments on two publicly available copy-move datasets. The results and analysis aims to show the potential significance of our focus in balancing detection and distinguishment result and transferring the trained model in different datasets in the field.
MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Revolutionary advancements in Large Language Models have drastically reshaped our interactions with artificial intelligence systems. Despite this, a notable hindrance remains-the deficiency of a long-term memory mechanism within these models. This shortfall becomes increasingly evident in situations demanding sustained interaction, such as personal companion systems and psychological counseling. Therefore, we propose MemoryBank, a novel memory mechanism tailored for LLMs. MemoryBank enables the models to summon relevant memories, continually evolve through continuous memory updates, comprehend, and adapt to a user personality by synthesizing information from past interactions. To mimic anthropomorphic behaviors and selectively preserve memory, MemoryBank incorporates a memory updating mechanism, inspired by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve theory, which permits the AI to forget and reinforce memory based on time elapsed and the relative significance of the memory, thereby offering a human-like memory mechanism. MemoryBank is versatile in accommodating both closed-source models like ChatGPT and open-source models like ChatGLM. We exemplify application of MemoryBank through the creation of an LLM-based chatbot named SiliconFriend in a long-term AI Companion scenario. Further tuned with psychological dialogs, SiliconFriend displays heightened empathy in its interactions. Experiment involves both qualitative analysis with real-world user dialogs and quantitative analysis with simulated dialogs. In the latter, ChatGPT acts as users with diverse characteristics and generates long-term dialog contexts covering a wide array of topics. The results of our analysis reveal that SiliconFriend, equipped with MemoryBank, exhibits a strong capability for long-term companionship as it can provide emphatic response, recall relevant memories and understand user personality.
Sustainability in Computing Education: A Systematic Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Research shows that the global society as organized today, with our current technological and economic system, is impossible to sustain. We are living in the Anthropocene, an era in which human activities in highly industrialized countries are responsible for overshooting several planetary boundaries, with poorer communities contributing least to the problems but being impacted the most. At the same time, technical and economic gains fail to provide society at large with equal opportunities and improved quality of life. This paper describes approaches taken in computing education to address the issue of sustainability. It presents results of a systematic review of literature on sustainability in computing education. From a set of 572 publications extracted from six large digital libraries plus snowballing, we distilled and analyzed the 90 relevant primary studies. Using an inductive and deductive thematic analysis, we study 1) conceptions of sustainability, computing, and education, 2) implementations of sustainability in computing education, and 3) research on sustainability in computing education. We present a framework capturing learning objectives and outcomes as well as pedagogical methods for sustainability in computing education. These results can be mapped to existing standards and curricula in future work. We find that only a few of the articles engage with the challenges as calling for drastic systemic change, along with radically new understandings of computing and education. We suggest that future research should connect to the substantial body of critical theory such as feminist theory of science and technology. Existing research on sustainability in computing education may be considered as rather immature as the majority of articles are experience reports with limited empirical research.
Cache-Oblivious Parallel Convex Hull in the Binary Forking Model
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We present two cache-oblivious sorting-based convex hull algorithms in the Binary Forking Model. The first is an algorithm for a presorted set of points which achieves $O(n)$ work, $O(\log n)$ span, and $O(n/B)$ serial cache complexity, where $B$ is the cache line size. These are all optimal worst-case bounds for cache-oblivious algorithms in the Binary Forking Model. The second adapts Cole and Ramachandran's cache-oblivious sorting algorithm, matching its properties including achieving $O(n \log n)$ work, $O(\log n \log \log n)$ span, and $O(n/B \log_M n)$ serial cache complexity. Here $M$ is the size of the private cache.
To Re-transmit or Not to Re-transmit for Freshness
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a time slotted communication network with a base station (BS) and a user. At each time slot a fresh update packet arrives at the BS with probability $p>0$. When the BS transmits an update packet for the first time, it goes through with a success probability of $q_1$. In all subsequent re-transmissions, the packet goes through with a success probability of $q_2$ where $q_2>q_1$, due to the accumulation of observations at the receiver used to decode the packet. When the packet goes through the first time, the age of the user drops to 1, while when the packet goes through in subsequent transmissions, the age of the user drops to the age of the packet since its generation. Thus, when the BS is in the process of re-transmitting an old packet, if it receives a new packet, it has to decide whether to re-transmit the old packet with higher probability of successful transmission but resulting in higher age, or to transmit the new packet which will result in a lower age upon successful reception but this will happen with lower probability. In this paper, we provide an optimal algorithm to solve this problem.
Extracting Blockchain Concepts from Text
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Blockchains provide a mechanism through which mutually distrustful remote parties can reach consensus on the state of a ledger of information. With the great acceleration with which this space is developed, the demand for those seeking to learn about blockchain also grows. Being a technical subject, it can be quite intimidating to start learning. For this reason, the main objective of this project was to apply machine learning models to extract information from whitepapers and academic articles focused on the blockchain area to organize this information and aid users to navigate the space.
Scratch Copilot Evaluation: Assessing AI-Assisted Creative Coding for Families
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

How can AI enhance creative coding experiences for families? This study explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) in helping families with creative coding using Scratch. Based on our previous user study involving a prototype AI assistant, we devised three evaluation scenarios to determine if LLMs could help families comprehend game code, debug programs, and generate new ideas for future projects. We utilized 22 Scratch projects for each scenario and generated responses from LLMs with and without practice tasks, resulting in 120 creative coding support scenario datasets. In addition, the authors independently evaluated their precision, pedagogical value, and age-appropriate language. Our findings show that LLMs achieved an overall success rate of more than 80\% on the different tasks and evaluation criteria. This research offers valuable information on using LLMs for creative family coding and presents design guidelines for future AI-supported coding applications. Our evaluation framework, together with our labeled evaluation data, is publicly available.
SLiC-HF: Sequence Likelihood Calibration with Human Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Learning from human feedback has been shown to be effective at aligning language models with human preferences. Past work has often relied on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which optimizes the language model using reward scores assigned from a reward model trained on human preference data. In this work we show how the recently introduced Sequence Likelihood Calibration (SLiC), can also be used to effectively learn from human preferences (SLiC-HF). Furthermore, we demonstrate this can be done with human feedback data collected for a different model, similar to off-policy, offline RL data. Automatic and human evaluation experiments on the TL;DR summarization task show that SLiC-HF significantly improves supervised fine-tuning baselines. Furthermore, SLiC-HF presents a competitive alternative to the PPO RLHF implementation used in past work while being much simpler to implement, easier to tune and more computationally efficient in practice.
Rethinking the Open-Loop Evaluation of End-to-End Autonomous Driving in nuScenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Modern autonomous driving systems are typically divided into three main tasks: perception, prediction, and planning. The planning task involves predicting the trajectory of the ego vehicle based on inputs from both internal intention and the external environment, and manipulating the vehicle accordingly. Most existing works evaluate their performance on the nuScenes dataset using the L2 error and collision rate between the predicted trajectories and the ground truth. In this paper, we reevaluate these existing evaluation metrics and explore whether they accurately measure the superiority of different methods. Specifically, we design an MLP-based method that takes raw sensor data (e.g., past trajectory, velocity, etc.) as input and directly outputs the future trajectory of the ego vehicle, without using any perception or prediction information such as camera images or LiDAR. Our simple method achieves similar end-to-end planning performance on the nuScenes dataset with other perception-based methods, reducing the average L2 error by about 20%. Meanwhile, the perception-based methods have an advantage in terms of collision rate. We further conduct in-depth analysis and provide new insights into the factors that are critical for the success of the planning task on nuScenes dataset. Our observation also indicates that we need to rethink the current open-loop evaluation scheme of end-to-end autonomous driving in nuScenes. Codes are available at https://github.com/E2E-AD/AD-MLP.
Model-Contrastive Federated Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated domain adaptation (FDA) aims to collaboratively transfer knowledge from source clients (domains) to the related but different target client, without communicating the local data of any client. Moreover, the source clients have different data distributions, leading to extremely challenging in knowledge transfer. Despite the recent progress in FDA, we empirically find that existing methods can not leverage models of heterogeneous domains and thus they fail to achieve excellent performance. In this paper, we propose a model-based method named FDAC, aiming to address {\bf F}ederated {\bf D}omain {\bf A}daptation based on {\bf C}ontrastive learning and Vision Transformer (ViT). In particular, contrastive learning can leverage the unlabeled data to train excellent models and the ViT architecture performs better than convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in extracting adaptable features. To the best of our knowledge, FDAC is the first attempt to learn transferable representations by manipulating the latent architecture of ViT under the federated setting. Furthermore, FDAC can increase the target data diversity by compensating from each source model with insufficient knowledge of samples and features, based on domain augmentation and semantic matching. Extensive experiments on several real datasets demonstrate that FDAC outperforms all the comparative methods in most conditions. Moreover, FDCA can also improve communication efficiency which is another key factor in the federated setting.
LPMM: Intuitive Pose Control for Neural Talking-Head Model via Landmark-Parameter Morphable Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

While current talking head models are capable of generating photorealistic talking head videos, they provide limited pose controllability. Most methods require specific video sequences that should exactly contain the head pose desired, being far from user-friendly pose control. Three-dimensional morphable models (3DMM) offer semantic pose control, but they fail to capture certain expressions. We present a novel method that utilizes parametric control of head orientation and facial expression over a pre-trained neural-talking head model. To enable this, we introduce a landmark-parameter morphable model (LPMM), which offers control over the facial landmark domain through a set of semantic parameters. Using LPMM, it is possible to adjust specific head pose factors, without distorting other facial attributes. The results show our approach provides intuitive rig-like control over neural talking head models, allowing both parameter and image-based inputs.