OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Scrolly2Reel: Retargeting Graphics for Social Media Using Narrative Beats
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Content retargeting is crucial for social media creators. Once great content is created, it is important to reach as broad an audience as possible. This is particularly important in journalism where younger audiences are shifting away from print and towards short-video platforms. Many newspapers already create rich graphics for the web that they want to be able to reuse for social media. One example is scrollytelling sequences or "scrollies" -- immersive articles with graphics like animation, charts, and 3D visualizations that appear as a user scrolls. We present a system that helps transform scrollies into social media videos. By using the scriptwriting concept of narrative beats to extract fundamental storytelling units, we can create videos that are more aligned with narration, and allow for better pacing and stylistic changes. Narrative beats are thus an important primitive to retargeting content that matches the style of a new medium while maintaining the cohesiveness of the original content.
Adaptive TTD Configurations for Near-Field Communications: An Unsupervised Transformer Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

True-time delayers (TTDs) are popular analog devices for facilitating near-field wideband beamforming subject to the spatial-wideband effect. In this paper, an adaptive TTD configuration is proposed for short-range TTDs. Compared to the existing TTD configurations, the proposed one can effectively combat the spatial-widebandd effect for arbitrary user locations and array shapes with the aid of a switch network. A novel end-to-end deep neural network is proposed to optimize the hybrid beamforming with adaptive TTDs for maximizing spectral efficiency. 1) First, based on the U-Net architecture, a near-field channel learning module (NFC-LM) is proposed for adaptive beamformer design through extracting the latent channel response features of various users across different frequencies. In the NFC-LM, an improved cross attention (CA) is introduced to further optimize beamformer design by enhancing the latent feature connection between near-field channel and different beamformers. 2) Second, a switch multi-user transformer (S-MT) is proposed to adaptively control the connection between TTDs and phase shifters (PSs). In the S-MT, an improved multi-head attention, namely multi-user attention (MSA), is introduced to optimize the switch network through exploring the latent channel relations among various users. 3) Third, a multi feature cross attention (MCA) is introduced to simultaneously optimize the NFC-LM and S-MT by enhancing the latent feature correlation between beamformers and switch network. Numerical simulation results show that 1) the proposed adaptive TTD configuration effectively eliminates the spatial-wideband effect under uniform linear array (ULA) and uniform circular array (UCA) architectures, and 2) the proposed deep neural network can provide near optimal spectral efficiency, and solve the multi-user bemformer design and dynamical connection problem in real-time.
Divide, Conquer, Combine Bayesian Decision Tree Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Decision trees are commonly used predictive models due to their flexibility and interpretability. This paper is directed at quantifying the uncertainty of decision tree predictions by employing a Bayesian inference approach. This is challenging because these approaches need to explore both the tree structure space and the space of decision parameters associated with each tree structure. This has been handled by using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, where a Markov Chain is constructed to provide samples from the desired Bayesian estimate. Importantly, the structure and the decision parameters are tightly coupled; small changes in the tree structure can demand vastly different decision parameters to provide accurate predictions. A challenge for existing MCMC approaches is proposing joint changes in both the tree structure and the decision parameters that result in efficient sampling. This paper takes a different approach, where each distinct tree structure is associated with a unique set of decision parameters. The proposed approach, entitled DCC-Tree, is inspired by the work in Zhou et al. [23] for probabilistic programs and Cochrane et al. [4] for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) based sampling for decision trees. Results show that DCC-Tree performs comparably to other HMC-based methods and better than existing Bayesian tree methods while improving on consistency and reducing the per-proposal complexity.
Multi-AGV Path Planning Method via Reinforcement Learning and Particle Filters
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Thanks to its robust learning and search stabilities,the reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm has garnered increasingly significant attention and been exten-sively applied in Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) path planning. However, RL-based planning algorithms have been discovered to suffer from the substantial variance of neural networks caused by environmental instability and significant fluctua-tions in system structure. These challenges manifest in slow convergence speed and low learning efficiency. To tackle this issue, this paper presents a novel multi-AGV path planning method named Particle Filters - Double Deep Q-Network (PF-DDQN)via leveraging Particle Filters (PF) and RL algorithm. Firstly, the proposed method leverages the imprecise weight values of the network as state values to formulate thestate space equation.Subsequently, the DDQN model is optimized to acquire the optimal true weight values through the iterative fusion process of neural networksand PF in order to enhance the optimization efficiency of the proposedmethod. Lastly, the performance of the proposed method is validated by different numerical simulations. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methoddominates the traditional DDQN algorithm in terms of path planning superiority andtraining time indicator by 92.62% and 76.88%, respectively. Therefore, the proposedmethod could be considered as a vital alternative in the field of multi-AGV path planning.
TAFormer: A Unified Target-Aware Transformer for Video and Motion Joint Prediction in Aerial Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

As drone technology advances, using unmanned aerial vehicles for aerial surveys has become the dominant trend in modern low-altitude remote sensing. The surge in aerial video data necessitates accurate prediction for future scenarios and motion states of the interested target, particularly in applications like traffic management and disaster response. Existing video prediction methods focus solely on predicting future scenes (video frames), suffering from the neglect of explicitly modeling target's motion states, which is crucial for aerial video interpretation. To address this issue, we introduce a novel task called Target-Aware Aerial Video Prediction, aiming to simultaneously predict future scenes and motion states of the target. Further, we design a model specifically for this task, named TAFormer, which provides a unified modeling approach for both video and target motion states. Specifically, we introduce Spatiotemporal Attention (STA), which decouples the learning of video dynamics into spatial static attention and temporal dynamic attention, effectively modeling the scene appearance and motion. Additionally, we design an Information Sharing Mechanism (ISM), which elegantly unifies the modeling of video and target motion by facilitating information interaction through two sets of messenger tokens. Moreover, to alleviate the difficulty of distinguishing targets in blurry predictions, we introduce Target-Sensitive Gaussian Loss (TSGL), enhancing the model's sensitivity to both target's position and content. Extensive experiments on UAV123VP and VisDroneVP (derived from single-object tracking datasets) demonstrate the exceptional performance of TAFormer in target-aware video prediction, showcasing its adaptability to the additional requirements of aerial video interpretation for target awareness.
Exploring the Deceptive Power of LLM-Generated Fake News: A Study of Real-World Detection Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the creation of fake news, particularly in complex fields like healthcare. Studies highlight the gap in the deceptive power of LLM-generated fake news with and without human assistance, yet the potential of prompting techniques has not been fully explored. Thus, this work aims to determine whether prompting strategies can effectively narrow this gap. Current LLM-based fake news attacks require human intervention for information gathering and often miss details and fail to maintain context consistency. Therefore, to better understand threat tactics, we propose a strong fake news attack method called conditional Variational-autoencoder-Like Prompt (VLPrompt). Unlike current methods, VLPrompt eliminates the need for additional data collection while maintaining contextual coherence and preserving the intricacies of the original text. To propel future research on detecting VLPrompt attacks, we created a new dataset named VLPrompt fake news (VLPFN) containing real and fake texts. Our experiments, including various detection methods and novel human study metrics, were conducted to assess their performance on our dataset, yielding numerous findings.
Towards Non-Exemplar Semi-Supervised Class-Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks perform remarkably well in close-world scenarios. However, novel classes emerged continually in real applications, making it necessary to learn incrementally. Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to gradually recognize new classes while maintaining the discriminability of old ones. Existing CIL methods have two limitations: a heavy reliance on preserving old data for forgetting mitigation and the need for vast labeled data for knowledge adaptation. To overcome these issues, we propose a non-exemplar semi-supervised CIL framework with contrastive learning and semi-supervised incremental prototype classifier (Semi-IPC). On the one hand, contrastive learning helps the model learn rich representations, easing the trade-off between learning representations of new classes and forgetting that of old classes. On the other hand, Semi-IPC learns a prototype for each class with unsupervised regularization, enabling the model to incrementally learn from partially labeled new data while maintaining the knowledge of old classes. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the strong performance of our method: without storing any old samples and only using less than 1% of labels, Semi-IPC outperforms advanced exemplar-based methods. We hope our work offers new insights for future CIL research. The code will be made publicly available.
Mutual Information Optimization for SIM-Based Holographic MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In the context of emerging stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM)-based holographic MIMO (HMIMO) systems, a fundamental problem is to study the mutual information (MI) between transmitted and received signals to establish their capacity. However, direct optimization or analytical evaluation of the MI, particularly for discrete signaling, is often intractable. To address this challenge, we adopt the channel cutoff rate (CR) as an alternative optimization metric for the MI maximization. In this regard, we propose an alternating projected gradient method (APGM), which optimizes the CR of a SIM-based HMIMO system by adjusting signal precoding and the phase shifts across the transmit and receive SIMs on a layer-by-layer basis. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm significantly enhances the CR, achieving substantial gains, compared to the case with random SIM phase shifts, that are proportional to those observed for the corresponding MI. This justifies the effectiveness of using the channel CR for the MI optimization. Moreover, we demonstrate that the integration of digital precoding, even on a modest scale, has a significant impact on the ultimate performance of SIM-aided systems.
Bayesian Learned Models Can Detect Adversarial Malware For Free
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The vulnerability of machine learning-based malware detectors to adversarial attacks has prompted the need for robust solutions. Adversarial training is an effective method but is computationally expensive to scale up to large datasets and comes at the cost of sacrificing model performance for robustness. We hypothesize that adversarial malware exploits the low-confidence regions of models and can be identified using epistemic uncertainty of ML approaches -- epistemic uncertainty in a machine learning-based malware detector is a result of a lack of similar training samples in regions of the problem space. In particular, a Bayesian formulation can capture the model parameters' distribution and quantify epistemic uncertainty without sacrificing model performance. To verify our hypothesis, we consider Bayesian learning approaches with a mutual information-based formulation to quantify uncertainty and detect adversarial malware in Android, Windows domains and PDF malware. We found, quantifying uncertainty through Bayesian learning methods can defend against adversarial malware. In particular, Bayesian models: (1) are generally capable of identifying adversarial malware in both feature and problem space, (2) can detect concept drift by measuring uncertainty, and (3) with a diversity-promoting approach (or better posterior approximations) lead to parameter instances from the posterior to significantly enhance a detectors' ability.
Chinese Offensive Language Detection:Current Status and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the considerable efforts being made to monitor and regulate user-generated content on social media platforms, the pervasiveness of offensive language, such as hate speech or cyberbullying, in the digital space remains a significant challenge. Given the importance of maintaining a civilized and respectful online environment, there is an urgent and growing need for automatic systems capable of detecting offensive speech in real time. However, developing effective systems for processing languages such as Chinese presents a significant challenge, owing to the language's complex and nuanced nature, which makes it difficult to process automatically. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of offensive language detection in Chinese, examining current benchmarks and approaches and highlighting specific models and tools for addressing the unique challenges of detecting offensive language in this complex language. The primary objective of this survey is to explore the existing techniques and identify potential avenues for further research that can address the cultural and linguistic complexities of Chinese.
A Situation-aware Enhancer for Personalized Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

When users interact with Recommender Systems (RecSys), current situations, such as time, location, and environment, significantly influence their preferences. Situations serve as the background for interactions, where relationships between users and items evolve with situation changes. However, existing RecSys treat situations, users, and items on the same level. They can only model the relations between situations and users/items respectively, rather than the dynamic impact of situations on user-item associations (i.e., user preferences). In this paper, we provide a new perspective that takes situations as the preconditions for users' interactions. This perspective allows us to separate situations from user/item representations, and capture situations' influences over the user-item relationship, offering a more comprehensive understanding of situations. Based on it, we propose a novel Situation-Aware Recommender Enhancer (SARE), a pluggable module to integrate situations into various existing RecSys. Since users' perception of situations and situations' impact on preferences are both personalized, SARE includes a Personalized Situation Fusion (PSF) and a User-Conditioned Preference Encoder (UCPE) to model the perception and impact of situations, respectively. We conduct experiments of applying SARE on seven backbones in various settings on two real-world datasets. Experimental results indicate that SARE improves the recommendation performances significantly compared with backbones and SOTA situation-aware baselines.
Common Sense Enhanced Knowledge-based Recommendation with Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge-based recommendation models effectively alleviate the data sparsity issue leveraging the side information in the knowledge graph, and have achieved considerable performance. Nevertheless, the knowledge graphs used in previous work, namely metadata-based knowledge graphs, are usually constructed based on the attributes of items and co-occurring relations (e.g., also buy), in which the former provides limited information and the latter relies on sufficient interaction data and still suffers from cold start issue. Common sense, as a form of knowledge with generality and universality, can be used as a supplement to the metadata-based knowledge graph and provides a new perspective for modeling users' preferences. Recently, benefiting from the emergent world knowledge of the large language model, efficient acquisition of common sense has become possible. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-based recommendation framework incorporating common sense, CSRec, which can be flexibly coupled to existing knowledge-based methods. Considering the challenge of the knowledge gap between the common sense-based knowledge graph and metadata-based knowledge graph, we propose a knowledge fusion approach based on mutual information maximization theory. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of existing knowledge-based recommendation models.
The Artificial Neural Twin -- Process Optimization and Continual Learning in Distributed Process Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Industrial process optimization and control is crucial to increase economic and ecologic efficiency. However, data sovereignty, differing goals, or the required expert knowledge for implementation impede holistic implementation. Further, the increasing use of data-driven AI-methods in process models and industrial sensory often requires regular fine-tuning to accommodate distribution drifts. We propose the Artificial Neural Twin, which combines concepts from model predictive control, deep learning, and sensor networks to address these issues. Our approach introduces differentiable data fusion to estimate the state of distributed process steps and their dependence on input data. By treating the interconnected process steps as a quasi neural-network, we can backpropagate loss gradients for process optimization or model fine-tuning to process parameters or AI models respectively. The concept is demonstrated on a virtual machine park simulated in Unity, consisting of bulk material processes in plastic recycling.
Stragglers-Aware Low-Latency Synchronous Federated Learning via Layer-Wise Model Updates
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Synchronous federated learning (FL) is a popular paradigm for collaborative edge learning. It typically involves a set of heterogeneous devices locally training neural network (NN) models in parallel with periodic centralized aggregations. As some of the devices may have limited computational resources and varying availability, FL latency is highly sensitive to stragglers. Conventional approaches discard incomplete intra-model updates done by stragglers, alter the amount of local workload and architecture, or resort to asynchronous settings; which all affect the trained model performance under tight training latency constraints. In this work, we propose straggler-aware layer-wise federated learning (SALF) that leverages the optimization procedure of NNs via backpropagation to update the global model in a layer-wise fashion. SALF allows stragglers to synchronously convey partial gradients, having each layer of the global model be updated independently with a different contributing set of users. We provide a theoretical analysis, establishing convergence guarantees for the global model under mild assumptions on the distribution of the participating devices, revealing that SALF converges at the same asymptotic rate as FL with no timing limitations. This insight is matched with empirical observations, demonstrating the performance gains of SALF compared to alternative mechanisms mitigating the device heterogeneity gap in FL.
Improving Attributed Text Generation of Large Language Models via Preference Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they face the challenge of generating unreliable content. Recent works aim to reduce misinformation and hallucinations by resorting to attribution as a means to provide evidence (i.e., citations). However, current attribution methods usually focus on the retrieval stage and automatic evaluation that neglect mirroring the citation mechanisms in human scholarly writing to bolster credibility. In this paper, we address these challenges by modelling the attribution task as preference learning and introducing an Automatic Preference Optimization (APO) framework. First, we create a curated collection for post-training with 6,330 examples by collecting and filtering from existing datasets. Second, considering the high cost of labelling preference data, we further propose an automatic method to synthesize attribution preference data resulting in 95,263 pairs. Moreover, inspired by the human citation process, we further propose a progressive preference optimization method by leveraging fine-grained information. Extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., ASQA, StrategyQA, and ELI5) demonstrate that APO achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality.
Colour and Brush Stroke Pattern Recognition in Abstract Art using Modified Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Abstract Art is an immensely popular, discussed form of art that often has the ability to depict the emotions of an artist. Many researchers have made attempts to study abstract art in the form of edge detection, brush stroke and emotion recognition algorithms using machine and deep learning. This papers describes the study of a wide distribution of abstract paintings using Generative Adversarial Neural Networks(GAN). GANs have the ability to learn and reproduce a distribution enabling researchers and scientists to effectively explore and study the generated image space. However, the challenge lies in developing an efficient GAN architecture that overcomes common training pitfalls. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a modified-DCGAN (mDCGAN) specifically designed for high-quality artwork generation. The approach involves a thorough exploration of the modifications made, delving into the intricate workings of DCGANs, optimisation techniques, and regularisation methods aimed at improving stability and realism in art generation enabling effective study of generated patterns. The proposed mDCGAN incorporates meticulous adjustments in layer configurations and architectural choices, offering tailored solutions to the unique demands of art generation while effectively combating issues like mode collapse and gradient vanishing. Further this paper explores the generated latent space by performing random walks to understand vector relationships between brush strokes and colours in the abstract art space and a statistical analysis of unstable outputs after a certain period of GAN training and compare its significant difference. These findings validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, emphasising its potential to revolutionise the field of digital art generation and digital art ecosystem.