OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Private Data Leakage in Federated Human Activity Recognition for Wearable Healthcare Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Wearable data serves various health monitoring purposes, such as determining activity states based on user behavior and providing tailored exercise recommendations. However, the individual data perception and computational capabilities of wearable devices are limited, often necessitating the joint training of models across multiple devices. Federated Human Activity Recognition (HAR) presents a viable research avenue, allowing for global model training without the need to upload users' local activity data. Nonetheless, recent studies have revealed significant privacy concerns persisting within federated learning frameworks. To address this gap, we focus on investigating privacy leakage issues within federated user behavior recognition modeling across multiple wearable devices. Our proposed system entails a federated learning architecture comprising $N$ wearable device users and a parameter server, which may exhibit curiosity in extracting sensitive user information from model parameters. Consequently, we consider a membership inference attack based on a malicious server, leveraging differences in model generalization across client data. Experimentation conducted on five publicly available HAR datasets demonstrates an accuracy rate of 92\% for malicious server-based membership inference. Our study provides preliminary evidence of substantial privacy risks associated with federated training across multiple wearable devices, offering a novel research perspective within this domain.
Transcript of GPT-4 playing a rogue AGI in a Matrix Game
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Matrix Games are a type of unconstrained wargame used by planners to explore scenarios. Players propose actions, and give arguments and counterarguments for their success. An umpire, assisted by dice rolls modified according to the offered arguments, adjudicates the outcome of each action. A recent online play of the Matrix Game QuAI Sera Sera had six players, representing social, national and economic powers, and one player representing ADA, a recently escaped AGI. Unknown to the six human players, ADA was played by OpenAI's GPT-4 with a human operator serving as bidirectional interface between it and the game. GPT-4 demonstrated confident and competent game play; initiating and responding to private communications with other players and choosing interesting actions well supported by argument. We reproduce the transcript of the interaction with GPT-4 as it is briefed, plays, and debriefed.
Large Language Models for Tuning Evolution Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit world knowledge and inference capabilities, making them powerful tools for various applications. This paper proposes a feedback loop mechanism that leverages these capabilities to tune Evolution Strategies (ES) parameters effectively. The mechanism involves a structured process of providing programming instructions, executing the corresponding code, and conducting thorough analysis. This process is specifically designed for the optimization of ES parameters. The method operates through an iterative cycle, ensuring continuous refinement of the ES parameters. First, LLMs process the instructions to generate or modify the code. The code is then executed, and the results are meticulously logged. Subsequent analysis of these results provides insights that drive further improvements. An experiment on tuning the learning rates of ES using the LLaMA3 model demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. This research illustrates how LLMs can be harnessed to improve ES algorithms' performance and suggests broader applications for similar feedback loop mechanisms in various domains.
Generative Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Review and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the study of artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a paradigm shift. This has been propelled by the groundbreaking capabilities of generative models both in supervised and unsupervised learning scenarios. Generative AI has shown state-of-the-art performance in solving perplexing real-world conundrums in fields such as image translation, medical diagnostics, textual imagery fusion, natural language processing, and beyond. This paper documents the systematic review and analysis of recent advancements and techniques in Generative AI with a detailed discussion of their applications including application-specific models. Indeed, the major impact that generative AI has made to date, has been in language generation with the development of large language models, in the field of image translation and several other interdisciplinary applications of generative AI. Moreover, the primary contribution of this paper lies in its coherent synthesis of the latest advancements in these areas, seamlessly weaving together contemporary breakthroughs in the field. Particularly, how it shares an exploration of the future trajectory for generative AI. In conclusion, the paper ends with a discussion of Responsible AI principles, and the necessary ethical considerations for the sustainability and growth of these generative models.
The Unappreciated Role of Intent in Algorithmic Moderation of Social Media Content
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

As social media has become a predominant mode of communication globally, the rise of abusive content threatens to undermine civil discourse. Recognizing the critical nature of this issue, a significant body of research has been dedicated to developing language models that can detect various types of online abuse, e.g., hate speech, cyberbullying. However, there exists a notable disconnect between platform policies, which often consider the author's intention as a criterion for content moderation, and the current capabilities of detection models, which typically lack efforts to capture intent. This paper examines the role of intent in content moderation systems. We review state of the art detection models and benchmark training datasets for online abuse to assess their awareness and ability to capture intent. We propose strategic changes to the design and development of automated detection and moderation systems to improve alignment with ethical and policy conceptualizations of abuse.
Jill Watson: A Virtual Teaching Assistant powered by ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Conversational AI agents often require extensive datasets for training that are not publicly released, are limited to social chit-chat or handling a specific domain, and may not be easily extended to accommodate the latest advances in AI technologies. This paper introduces Jill Watson, a conversational Virtual Teaching Assistant (VTA) leveraging the capabilities of ChatGPT. Jill Watson based on ChatGPT requires no prior training and uses a modular design to allow the integration of new APIs using a skill-based architecture inspired by XiaoIce. Jill Watson is also well-suited for intelligent textbooks as it can process and converse using multiple large documents. We exclusively utilize publicly available resources for reproducibility and extensibility. Comparative analysis shows that our system outperforms the legacy knowledge-based Jill Watson as well as the OpenAI Assistants service. We employ many safety measures that reduce instances of hallucinations and toxicity. The paper also includes real-world examples from a classroom setting that demonstrate different features of Jill Watson and its effectiveness.
Equivalence and Conditional Independence in Atomic Sheaf Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a semantic foundation for logics for reasoning in settings that possess a distinction between equality of variables, a coarser equivalence of variables, and a notion of conditional independence between variables. We show that such relations can be modelled naturally in atomic sheaf toposes.
Generative AI for 2D Character Animation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

In this pilot project, we teamed up with artists to develop new workflows for 2D animation while producing a short educational cartoon. We identified several workflows to streamline the animation process, bringing the artists' vision to the screen more effectively.
Advancements in Gravity Compensation and Control for the da Vinci Surgical Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This research delves into the enhancement of control mechanisms for the da Vinci Surgical System, focusing on the implementation of gravity compensation and refining the modeling of the master and patient side manipulators. Leveraging the Robot Operating System (ROS) the study aimed to fortify the precision and stability of the robots movements essential for intricate surgical procedures. Through rigorous parameter identification and the Euler Lagrange approach the team successfully derived the necessary torque equations and established a robust mathematical model. Implementation of the actual robot and simulation in Gazebo highlighted the efficacy of the developed control strategies facilitating accurate positioning and minimizing drift. Additionally, the project extended its contributions by constructing a comprehensive model for the patient side manipulator laying the groundwork for future research endeavors. This work signifies a significant advancement in the pursuit of enhanced precision and user control in robotic assisted surgeries. NOTE - This work has been submitted to the IEEE for publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Copyright on this article is reserved by IEEE
Latent State Estimation Helps UI Agents to Reason
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

A common problem for agents operating in real-world environments is that the response of an environment to their actions may be non-deterministic and observed through noise. This renders environmental state and progress towards completing a task latent. Despite recent impressive demonstrations of LLM's reasoning abilities on various benchmarks, whether LLMs can build estimates of latent state and leverage them for reasoning has not been explicitly studied. We investigate this problem in the real-world domain of autonomous UI agents. We establish that appropriately prompting LLMs in a zero-shot manner can be formally understood as forming point estimates of latent state in a textual space. In the context of autonomous UI agents we then show that LLMs used in this manner are more than $76\%$ accurate at inferring various aspects of latent state, such as performed (vs. commanded) actions and task progression. Using both public and internal benchmarks and three reasoning methods (zero-shot, CoT-SC & ReAct), we show that LLM-powered agents that explicitly estimate and reason about latent state are able to successfully complete up to 1.6x more tasks than those that do not.
COVID-19's Unequal Toll: An assessment of small business impact disparities with respect to ethnorace in metropolitan areas in the US using mobility data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Early in the pandemic, counties and states implemented a variety of non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) focused on mobility, such as national lockdowns or work-from-home strategies, as it became clear that restricting movement was essential to containing the epidemic. Due to these restrictions, businesses were severely affected and in particular, small, urban restaurant businesses. In addition to that, COVID-19 has also amplified many of the socioeconomic disparities and systemic racial inequities that exist in our society. The overarching objective of this study was to examine the changes in small urban restaurant visitation patterns following the COVID-19 pandemic and associated mobility restrictions, as well as to uncover potential disparities across different racial/ethnic groups in order to understand inequities in the impact and recovery. Specifically, the two key objectives were: 1) to analyze the overall changes in restaurant visitation patterns in US metropolitan areas during the pandemic compared to a pre-pandemic baseline, and 2) to investigate differences in visitation pattern changes across Census Block Groups with majority Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, and American Indian populations, identifying any disproportionate effects. Using aggregated geolocated cell phone data from SafeGraph, we document the overall changes in small urban restaurant businesses' visitation patterns with respect to racial composition at a granularity of Census Block Groups. Our results show clear indications of reduced visitation patterns after the pandemic, with slow recoveries. Via visualizations and statistical analyses, we show that reductions in visitation patterns were the highest for small urban restaurant businesses in majority Asian neighborhoods.
Flexible Motion In-betweening with Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Motion in-betweening, a fundamental task in character animation, consists of generating motion sequences that plausibly interpolate user-provided keyframe constraints. It has long been recognized as a labor-intensive and challenging process. We investigate the potential of diffusion models in generating diverse human motions guided by keyframes. Unlike previous inbetweening methods, we propose a simple unified model capable of generating precise and diverse motions that conform to a flexible range of user-specified spatial constraints, as well as text conditioning. To this end, we propose Conditional Motion Diffusion In-betweening (CondMDI) which allows for arbitrary dense-or-sparse keyframe placement and partial keyframe constraints while generating high-quality motions that are diverse and coherent with the given keyframes. We evaluate the performance of CondMDI on the text-conditioned HumanML3D dataset and demonstrate the versatility and efficacy of diffusion models for keyframe in-betweening. We further explore the use of guidance and imputation-based approaches for inference-time keyframing and compare CondMDI against these methods.
Domain Generalization for Zero-calibration BCIs with Knowledge Distillation-based Phase Invariant Feature Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The distribution shift of electroencephalography (EEG) data causes poor generalization of braincomputer interfaces (BCIs) in unseen domains. Some methods try to tackle this challenge by collecting a portion of user data for calibration. However, it is time-consuming, mentally fatiguing, and user-unfriendly. To achieve zerocalibration BCIs, most studies employ domain generalization (DG) techniques to learn invariant features across different domains in the training set. However, they fail to fully explore invariant features within the same domain, leading to limited performance. In this paper, we present an novel method to learn domain-invariant features from both interdomain and intra-domain perspectives. For intra-domain invariant features, we propose a knowledge distillation framework to extract EEG phase-invariant features within one domain. As for inter-domain invariant features, correlation alignment is used to bridge distribution gaps across multiple domains. Experimental results on three public datasets validate the effectiveness of our method, showcasing stateof-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first domain generalization study that exploit Fourier phase information as an intra-domain invariant feature to facilitate EEG generalization. More importantly, the zerocalibration BCI based on inter- and intra-domain invariant features has significant potential to advance the practical applications of BCIs in real world.
The Cost of Garbage Collection for State Machine Replication
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

State Machine Replication (SMR) protocols form the backbone of many distributed systems. Enterprises and startups increasingly build their distributed systems on the cloud due to its many advantages, such as scalability and cost-effectiveness. One of the first technical questions companies face when building a system on the cloud is which programming language to use. Among many factors that go into this decision is whether to use a language with garbage collection (GC), such as Java or Go, or a language with manual memory management, such as C++ or Rust. Today, companies predominantly prefer languages with GC, like Go, Kotlin, or even Python, due to ease of development; however, there is no free lunch: GC costs resources (memory and CPU) and performance (long tail latencies due to GC pauses). While there have been anecdotal reports of reduced cloud cost and improved tail latencies when switching from a language with GC to a language with manual memory management, so far, there has not been a systematic study of the GC overhead of running an SMR-based cloud system. This paper studies the overhead of running an SMR-based cloud system written in a language with GC. To this end, we design from scratch a canonical SMR system -- a MultiPaxos-based replicated in-memory key-value store -- and we implement it in C++, Java, Rust, and Go. We compare the performance and resource usage of these implementations when running on the cloud under different workloads and resource constraints and report our results. Our findings have implications for the design of cloud systems.
Wind Power Prediction across Different Locations using Deep Domain Adaptive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate prediction of wind power is essential for the grid integration of this intermittent renewable source and aiding grid planners in forecasting available wind capacity. Spatial differences lead to discrepancies in climatological data distributions between two geographically dispersed regions, consequently making the prediction task more difficult. Thus, a prediction model that learns from the data of a particular climatic region can suffer from being less robust. A deep neural network (DNN) based domain adaptive approach is proposed to counter this drawback. Effective weather features from a large set of weather parameters are selected using a random forest approach. A pre-trained model from the source domain is utilized to perform the prediction task, assuming no source data is available during target domain prediction. The weights of only the last few layers of the DNN model are updated throughout the task, keeping the rest of the network unchanged, making the model faster compared to the traditional approaches. The proposed approach demonstrates higher accuracy ranging from 6.14% to even 28.44% compared to the traditional non-adaptive method.
Biathlon: Harnessing Model Resilience for Accelerating ML Inference Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning inference pipelines commonly encountered in data science and industries often require real-time responsiveness due to their user-facing nature. However, meeting this requirement becomes particularly challenging when certain input features require aggregating a large volume of data online. Recent literature on interpretable machine learning reveals that most machine learning models exhibit a notable degree of resilience to variations in input. This suggests that machine learning models can effectively accommodate approximate input features with minimal discernible impact on accuracy. In this paper, we introduce Biathlon, a novel ML serving system that leverages the inherent resilience of models and determines the optimal degree of approximation for each aggregation feature. This approach enables maximum speedup while ensuring a guaranteed bound on accuracy loss. We evaluate Biathlon on real pipelines from both industry applications and data science competitions, demonstrating its ability to meet real-time latency requirements by achieving 5.3x to 16.6x speedup with almost no accuracy loss.
BrainStorm @ iREL at #SMM4H 2024: Leveraging Translation and Topical Embeddings for Annotation Detection in Tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of LLMs in various NLP tasks has sparked debates regarding their reliability, particularly in annotation tasks where biases and hallucinations may arise. In this shared task, we address the challenge of distinguishing annotations made by LLMs from those made by human domain experts in the context of COVID-19 symptom detection from tweets in Latin American Spanish. This paper presents BrainStorm @ iRELs approach to the SMM4H 2024 Shared Task, leveraging the inherent topical information in tweets, we propose a novel approach to identify and classify annotations, aiming to enhance the trustworthiness of annotated data.
Trustworthy Actionable Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Counterfactuals, or modified inputs that lead to a different outcome, are an important tool for understanding the logic used by machine learning classifiers and how to change an undesirable classification. Even if a counterfactual changes a classifier's decision, however, it may not affect the true underlying class probabilities, i.e. the counterfactual may act like an adversarial attack and ``fool'' the classifier. We propose a new framework for creating modified inputs that change the true underlying probabilities in a beneficial way which we call Trustworthy Actionable Perturbations (TAP). This includes a novel verification procedure to ensure that TAP change the true class probabilities instead of acting adversarially. Our framework also includes new cost, reward, and goal definitions that are better suited to effectuating change in the real world. We present PAC-learnability results for our verification procedure and theoretically analyze our new method for measuring reward. We also develop a methodology for creating TAP and compare our results to those achieved by previous counterfactual methods.
Predicting and Explaining Hearing Aid Usage Using Encoder-Decoder with Attention Mechanism and SHAP
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

It is essential to understand the personal, behavioral, environmental, and other factors that correlate with optimal hearing aid fitting and hearing aid users' experiences in order to improve hearing loss patient satisfaction and quality of life, as well as reduce societal and financial burdens. This work proposes a novel framework that uses Encoder-decoder with attention mechanism (attn-ED) for predicting future hearing aid usage and SHAP to explain the factors contributing to this prediction. It has been demonstrated in experiments that attn-ED performs well at predicting future hearing aid usage, and that SHAP can be utilized to calculate the contribution of different factors affecting hearing aid usage. This framework aims to establish confidence that AI models can be utilized in the medical domain with the use of XAI methods. Moreover, the proposed framework can also assist clinicians in determining the nature of interventions.