OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ColibriUAV: An Ultra-Fast, Energy-Efficient Neuromorphic Edge Processing UAV-Platform with Event-Based and Frame-Based Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The interest in dynamic vision sensor (DVS)-powered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is raising, especially due to the microsecond-level reaction time of the bio-inspired event sensor, which increases robustness and reduces latency of the perception tasks compared to a RGB camera. This work presents ColibriUAV, a UAV platform with both frame-based and event-based cameras interfaces for efficient perception and near-sensor processing. The proposed platform is designed around Kraken, a novel low-power RISC-V System on Chip with two hardware accelerators targeting spiking neural networks and deep ternary neural networks.Kraken is capable of efficiently processing both event data from a DVS camera and frame data from an RGB camera. A key feature of Kraken is its integrated, dedicated interface with a DVS camera. This paper benchmarks the end-to-end latency and power efficiency of the neuromorphic and event-based UAV subsystem, demonstrating state-of-the-art event data with a throughput of 7200 frames of events per second and a power consumption of 10.7 \si{\milli\watt}, which is over 6.6 times faster and a hundred times less power-consuming than the widely-used data reading approach through the USB interface. The overall sensing and processing power consumption is below 50 mW, achieving latency in the milliseconds range, making the platform suitable for low-latency autonomous nano-drones as well.
Pure Spectral Graph Embeddings: Reinterpreting Graph Convolution for Top-N Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

The use of graph convolution in the development of recommender system algorithms has recently achieved state-of-the-art results in the collaborative filtering task (CF). While it has been demonstrated that the graph convolution operation is connected to a filtering operation on the graph spectral domain, the theoretical rationale for why this leads to higher performance on the collaborative filtering problem remains unknown. The presented work makes two contributions. First, we investigate the effect of using graph convolution throughout the user and item representation learning processes, demonstrating how the latent features learned are pushed from the filtering operation into the subspace spanned by the eigenvectors associated with the highest eigenvalues of the normalised adjacency matrix, and how vectors lying on this subspace are the optimal solutions for an objective function related to the sum of the prediction function over the training data. Then, we present an approach that directly leverages the eigenvectors to emulate the solution obtained through graph convolution, eliminating the requirement for a time-consuming gradient descent training procedure while also delivering higher performance on three real-world datasets.
Explainable Machine Learning for Categorical and Mixed Data with Lossless Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Building accurate and interpretable Machine Learning (ML) models for heterogeneous/mixed data is a long-standing challenge for algorithms designed for numeric data. This work focuses on developing numeric coding schemes for non-numeric attributes for ML algorithms to support accurate and explainable ML models, methods for lossless visualization of n-D non-numeric categorical data with visual rule discovery in these visualizations, and accurate and explainable ML models for categorical data. This study proposes a classification of mixed data types and analyzes their important role in Machine Learning. It presents a toolkit for enforcing interpretability of all internal operations of ML algorithms on mixed data with a visual data exploration on mixed data. A new Sequential Rule Generation (SRG) algorithm for explainable rule generation with categorical data is proposed and successfully evaluated in multiple computational experiments. This work is one of the steps to the full scope ML algorithms for mixed data supported by lossless visualization of n-D data in General Line Coordinates beyond Parallel Coordinates.
Intelligent gradient amplification for deep neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning models offer superior performance compared to other machine learning techniques for a variety of tasks and domains, but pose their own challenges. In particular, deep learning models require larger training times as the depth of a model increases, and suffer from vanishing gradients. Several solutions address these problems independently, but there have been minimal efforts to identify an integrated solution that improves the performance of a model by addressing vanishing gradients, as well as accelerates the training process to achieve higher performance at larger learning rates. In this work, we intelligently determine which layers of a deep learning model to apply gradient amplification to, using a formulated approach that analyzes gradient fluctuations of layers during training. Detailed experiments are performed for simpler and deeper neural networks using two different intelligent measures and two different thresholds that determine the amplification layers, and a training strategy where gradients are amplified only during certain epochs. Results show that our amplification offers better performance compared to the original models, and achieves accuracy improvement of around 2.5% on CIFAR- 10 and around 4.5% on CIFAR-100 datasets, even when the models are trained with higher learning rates.
Bandwidth Optimal Pipeline Schedule for Collective Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

We present a strongly polynomial-time algorithm to generate bandwidth optimal allgather/reduce-scatter on any network topology, with or without switches. Our algorithm constructs pipeline schedules achieving provably the best possible bandwidth performance on a given topology. To provide a universal solution, we model the network topology as a directed graph with heterogeneous link capacities and switches directly as vertices in the graph representation. The algorithm is strongly polynomial-time with respect to the topology size. This work heavily relies on previous graph theory work on edge-disjoint spanning trees and edge splitting. While we focus on allgather, the methods in this paper can be easily extended to generate schedules for reduce, broadcast, reduce-scatter, and allreduce.
Solar Irradiance Anticipative Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes an anticipative transformer-based model for short-term solar irradiance forecasting. Given a sequence of sky images, our proposed vision transformer encodes features of consecutive images, feeding into a transformer decoder to predict irradiance values associated with future unseen sky images. We show that our model effectively learns to attend only to relevant features in images in order to forecast irradiance. Moreover, the proposed anticipative transformer captures long-range dependencies between sky images to achieve a forecasting skill of 21.45 % on a 15 minute ahead prediction for a newly introduced dataset of all-sky images when compared to a smart persistence model.
SANE: The phases of gradient descent through Sharpness Adjusted Number of Effective parameters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Modern neural networks are undeniably successful. Numerous studies have investigated how the curvature of loss landscapes can affect the quality of solutions. In this work we consider the Hessian matrix during network training. We reiterate the connection between the number of "well-determined" or "effective" parameters and the generalisation performance of neural nets, and we demonstrate its use as a tool for model comparison. By considering the local curvature, we propose Sharpness Adjusted Number of Effective parameters (SANE), a measure of effective dimensionality for the quality of solutions. We show that SANE is robust to large learning rates, which represent learning regimes that are attractive but (in)famously unstable. We provide evidence and characterise the Hessian shifts across "loss basins" at large learning rates. Finally, extending our analysis to deeper neural networks, we provide an approximation to the full-network Hessian, exploiting the natural ordering of neural weights, and use this approximation to provide extensive empirical evidence for our claims.
Exploiting Explainability to Design Adversarial Attacks and Evaluate Attack Resilience in Hate-Speech Detection Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The advent of social media has given rise to numerous ethical challenges, with hate speech among the most significant concerns. Researchers are attempting to tackle this problem by leveraging hate-speech detection and employing language models to automatically moderate content and promote civil discourse. Unfortunately, recent studies have revealed that hate-speech detection systems can be misled by adversarial attacks, raising concerns about their resilience. While previous research has separately addressed the robustness of these models under adversarial attacks and their interpretability, there has been no comprehensive study exploring their intersection. The novelty of our work lies in combining these two critical aspects, leveraging interpretability to identify potential vulnerabilities and enabling the design of targeted adversarial attacks. We present a comprehensive and comparative analysis of adversarial robustness exhibited by various hate-speech detection models. Our study evaluates the resilience of these models against adversarial attacks using explainability techniques. To gain insights into the models' decision-making processes, we employ the Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) framework. Based on the explainability results obtained by LIME, we devise and execute targeted attacks on the text by leveraging the TextAttack tool. Our findings enhance the understanding of the vulnerabilities and strengths exhibited by state-of-the-art hate-speech detection models. This work underscores the importance of incorporating explainability in the development and evaluation of such models to enhance their resilience against adversarial attacks. Ultimately, this work paves the way for creating more robust and reliable hate-speech detection systems, fostering safer online environments and promoting ethical discourse on social media platforms.
Chatbots put to the test in math and logic problems: A preliminary comparison and assessment of ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4, and Google Bard
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A comparison between three chatbots which are based on large language models, namely ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4 and Google Bard is presented, focusing on their ability to give correct answers to mathematics and logic problems. In particular, we check their ability to Understand the problem at hand; Apply appropriate algorithms or methods for its solution; and Generate a coherent response and a correct answer. We use 30 questions that are clear, without any ambiguities, fully described with plain text only, and have a unique, well defined correct answer. The questions are divided into two sets of 15 each. The questions of Set A are 15 "Original" problems that cannot be found online, while Set B contains 15 "Published" problems that one can find online, usually with their solution. Each question is posed three times to each chatbot. The answers are recorded and discussed, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. It has been found that for straightforward arithmetic, algebraic expressions, or basic logic puzzles, chatbots may provide accurate solutions, although not in every attempt. However, for more complex mathematical problems or advanced logic tasks, their answers, although written in a usually "convincing" way, may not be reliable. Consistency is also an issue, as many times a chatbot will provide conflicting answers when given the same question more than once. A comparative quantitative evaluation of the three chatbots is made through scoring their final answers based on correctness. It was found that ChatGPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT-3.5 in both sets of questions. Bard comes third in the original questions of Set A, behind the other two chatbots, while it has the best performance (first place) in the published questions of Set B. This is probably because Bard has direct access to the internet, in contrast to ChatGPT chatbots which do not have any communication with the outside world.
Identification of stormwater control strategies and their associated uncertainties using Bayesian Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Dynamic control is emerging as an effective methodology for operating stormwater systems under stress from rapidly evolving weather patterns. Informed by rainfall predictions and real-time sensor measurements, control assets in the stormwater network can be dynamically configured to tune the behavior of the stormwater network to reduce the risk of urban flooding, equalize flows to the water reclamation facilities, and protect the receiving water bodies. However, developing such control strategies requires significant human and computational resources, and a methodology does not yet exist for quantifying the risks associated with implementing these control strategies. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce a Bayesian Optimization-based approach for identifying stormwater control strategies and estimating the associated uncertainties. We evaluate the efficacy of this approach in identifying viable control strategies in a simulated environment on real-world inspired combined and separated stormwater networks. We demonstrate the computational efficiency of the proposed approach by comparing it against a Genetic algorithm. Furthermore, we extend the Bayesian Optimization-based approach to quantify the uncertainty associated with the identified control strategies and evaluate it on a synthetic stormwater network. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever stormwater control methodology that quantifies uncertainty associated with the identified control actions. This Bayesian optimization-based stormwater control methodology is an off-the-shelf control approach that can be applied to control any stormwater network as long we have access to the rainfall predictions, and there exists a model for simulating the behavior of the stormwater network.
Enhanced Chart Understanding in Vision and Language Task via Cross-modal Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language(V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over 8% performance gains.
Diffusion-Stego: Training-free Diffusion Generative Steganography via Message Projection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Generative steganography is the process of hiding secret messages in generated images instead of cover images. Existing studies on generative steganography use GAN or Flow models to obtain high hiding message capacity and anti-detection ability over cover images. However, they create relatively unrealistic stego images because of the inherent limitations of generative models. We propose Diffusion-Stego, a generative steganography approach based on diffusion models which outperform other generative models in image generation. Diffusion-Stego projects secret messages into latent noise of diffusion models and generates stego images with an iterative denoising process. Since the naive hiding of secret messages into noise boosts visual degradation and decreases extracted message accuracy, we introduce message projection, which hides messages into noise space while addressing these issues. We suggest three options for message projection to adjust the trade-off between extracted message accuracy, anti-detection ability, and image quality. Diffusion-Stego is a training-free approach, so we can apply it to pre-trained diffusion models which generate high-quality images, or even large-scale text-to-image models, such as Stable diffusion. Diffusion-Stego achieved a high capacity of messages (3.0 bpp of binary messages with 98% accuracy, and 6.0 bpp with 90% accuracy) as well as high quality (with a FID score of 2.77 for 1.0 bpp on the FFHQ 64$\times$64 dataset) that makes it challenging to distinguish from real images in the PNG format.
Adaptive Conditional Quantile Neural Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Neural processes are a family of probabilistic models that inherit the flexibility of neural networks to parameterize stochastic processes. Despite providing well-calibrated predictions, especially in regression problems, and quick adaptation to new tasks, the Gaussian assumption that is commonly used to represent the predictive likelihood fails to capture more complicated distributions such as multimodal ones. To overcome this limitation, we propose Conditional Quantile Neural Processes (CQNPs), a new member of the neural processes family, which exploits the attractive properties of quantile regression in modeling the distributions irrespective of their form. By introducing an extension of quantile regression where the model learns to focus on estimating informative quantiles, we show that the sampling efficiency and prediction accuracy can be further enhanced. Our experiments with real and synthetic datasets demonstrate substantial improvements in predictive performance compared to the baselines, and better modeling of heterogeneous distributions' characteristics such as multimodality.
VVC Extension Scheme for Object Detection Using Contrast Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, video analysis using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely used, due to the remarkable development of image recognition technology using deep learning. In 2019, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) has started standardization of Video Coding for Machines (VCM) as a video coding technology for image recognition. In the framework of VCM, both higher image recognition accuracy and video compression performance are required. In this paper, we propose an extention scheme of video coding for object detection using Versatile Video Coding (VVC). Unlike video for human vision, video used for object detection does not require a large image size or high contrast. Since downsampling of the image can reduce the amount of information to be transmitted. Due to the decrease in image contrast, entropy of the image becomes smaller. Therefore, in our proposed scheme, the original image is reduced in size and contrast, then coded with VVC encoder to achieve high compression performance. Then, the output image from the VVC decoder is restored to its original image size using the bicubic method. Experimental results show that the proposed video coding scheme achieves better coding performance than regular VVC in terms of object detection accuracy.
The Alternating-Time μ-Calculus With Disjunctive Explicit Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Alternating-time temporal logic (ATL) and its extensions, including the alternating-time $μ$-calculus (AMC), serve the specification of the strategic abilities of coalitions of agents in concurrent game structures. The key ingredient of the logic are path quantifiers specifying that some coalition of agents has a joint strategy to enforce a given goal. This basic setup has been extended to let some of the agents (revocably) commit to using certain named strategies, as in ATL with explicit strategies (ATLES). In the present work, we extend ATLES with fixpoint operators and strategy disjunction, arriving at the alternating-time $μ$-calculus with disjunctive explicit strategies (AMCDES), which allows for a more flexible formulation of temporal properties (e.g. fairness) and, through strategy disjunction, a form of controlled nondeterminism in commitments. Our main result is an ExpTime upper bound for satisfiability checking (which is thus ExpTime-complete). We also prove upper bounds QP (quasipolynomial time) and NP $\cap$ coNP for model checking under fixed interpretations of explicit strategies, and NP under open interpretation. Our key technical tool is a treatment of the AMCDES within the generic framework of coalgebraic logic, which in particular reduces the analysis of most reasoning tasks to the treatment of a very simple one-step logic featuring only propositional operators and next-step operators without nesting; we give a new model construction principle for this one-step logic that relies on a set-valued variant of first-order resolution.
The Stratified Foundations as a theory modulo
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

The Stratified Foundations are a restriction of naive set theory where the comprehension scheme is restricted to stratifiable propositions. It is known that this theory is consistent and that proofs strongly normalize in this theory. Deduction modulo is a formulation of first-order logic with a general notion of cut. It is known that proofs normalize in a theory modulo if it has some kind of many-valued model called a pre-model. We show in this paper that the Stratified Foundations can be presented in deduction modulo and that the method used in the original normalization proof can be adapted to construct a pre-model for this theory.
How Generative Models Improve LOS Estimation in 6G Non-Terrestrial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

With the advent of 5G and the anticipated arrival of 6G, there has been a growing research interest in combining mobile networks with Non-Terrestrial Network platforms such as low earth orbit satellites and Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit satellites to provide broader coverage for a wide range of applications. However, integrating these platforms is challenging because Line-Of-Sight (LOS) estimation is required for both inter satellite and satellite-to-terrestrial segment links. Machine Learning (ML) techniques have shown promise in channel modeling and LOS estimation, but they require large datasets for model training, which can be difficult to obtain. In addition, network operators may be reluctant to disclose their network data due to privacy concerns. Therefore, alternative data collection techniques are needed. In this paper, a framework is proposed that uses generative models to generate synthetic data for LOS estimation in non-terrestrial 6G networks. Specifically, the authors show that generative models can be trained with a small available dataset to generate large datasets that can be used to train ML models for LOS estimation. Furthermore, since the generated synthetic data does not contain identifying information of the original dataset, it can be made publicly available without violating privacy