OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adaptable and Interpretable Framework for Novelty Detection in Real-Time IoT Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents the Real-time Adaptive and Interpretable Detection (RAID) algorithm. The novel approach addresses the limitations of state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods for multivariate dynamic processes, which are restricted to detecting anomalies within the scope of the model training conditions. The RAID algorithm adapts to non-stationary effects such as data drift and change points that may not be accounted for during model development, resulting in prolonged service life. A dynamic model based on joint probability distribution handles anomalous behavior detection in a system and the root cause isolation based on adaptive process limits. RAID algorithm does not require changes to existing process automation infrastructures, making it highly deployable across different domains. Two case studies involving real dynamic system data demonstrate the benefits of the RAID algorithm, including change point adaptation, root cause isolation, and improved detection accuracy.
Benchmarking Robustness to Text-Guided Corruptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This study investigates the robustness of image classifiers to text-guided corruptions. We utilize diffusion models to edit images to different domains. Unlike other works that use synthetic or hand-picked data for benchmarking, we use diffusion models as they are generative models capable of learning to edit images while preserving their semantic content. Thus, the corruptions will be more realistic and the comparison will be more informative. Also, there is no need for manual labeling and we can create large-scale benchmarks with less effort. We define a prompt hierarchy based on the original ImageNet hierarchy to apply edits in different domains. As well as introducing a new benchmark we try to investigate the robustness of different vision models. The results of this study demonstrate that the performance of image classifiers decreases significantly in different language-based corruptions and edit domains. We also observe that convolutional models are more robust than transformer architectures. Additionally, we see that common data augmentation techniques can improve the performance on both the original data and the edited images. The findings of this research can help improve the design of image classifiers and contribute to the development of more robust machine learning systems. The code for generating the benchmark is available at https://github.com/ckoorosh/RobuText.
Spritz-PS: Validation of Synthetic Face Images Using a Large Dataset of Printed Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The capability of doing effective forensic analysis on printed and scanned (PS) images is essential in many applications. PS documents may be used to conceal the artifacts of images which is due to the synthetic nature of images since these artifacts are typically present in manipulated images and the main artifacts in the synthetic images can be removed after the PS. Due to the appeal of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), synthetic face images generated with GANs models are difficult to differentiate from genuine human faces and may be used to create counterfeit identities. Additionally, since GANs models do not account for physiological constraints for generating human faces and their impact on human IRISes, distinguishing genuine from synthetic IRISes in the PS scenario becomes extremely difficult. As a result of the lack of large-scale reference IRIS datasets in the PS scenario, we aim at developing a novel dataset to become a standard for Multimedia Forensics (MFs) investigation which is available at [45]. In this paper, we provide a novel dataset made up of a large number of synthetic and natural printed IRISes taken from VIPPrint Printed and Scanned face images. We extracted irises from face images and it is possible that the model due to eyelid occlusion captured the incomplete irises. To fill the missing pixels of extracted iris, we applied techniques to discover the complex link between the iris images. To highlight the problems involved with the evaluation of the dataset's IRIS images, we conducted a large number of analyses employing Siamese Neural Networks to assess the similarities between genuine and synthetic human IRISes, such as ResNet50, Xception, VGG16, and MobileNet-v2. For instance, using the Xception network, we achieved 56.76\% similarity of IRISes for synthetic images and 92.77% similarity of IRISes for real images.
Natural Language Robot Programming: NLP integrated with autonomous robotic grasping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present a grammar-based natural language framework for robot programming, specifically for pick-and-place tasks. Our approach uses a custom dictionary of action words, designed to store together words that share meaning, allowing for easy expansion of the vocabulary by adding more action words from a lexical database. We validate our Natural Language Robot Programming (NLRP) framework through simulation and real-world experimentation, using a Franka Panda robotic arm equipped with a calibrated camera-in-hand and a microphone. Participants were asked to complete a pick-and-place task using verbal commands, which were converted into text using Google's Speech-to-Text API and processed through the NLRP framework to obtain joint space trajectories for the robot. Our results indicate that our approach has a high system usability score. The framework's dictionary can be easily extended without relying on transfer learning or large data sets. In the future, we plan to compare the presented framework with different approaches of human-assisted pick-and-place tasks via a comprehensive user study.
Data Processing with FPGAs on Modern Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Trends in hardware, the prevalence of the cloud, and the rise of highly demanding applications have ushered an era of specialization that quickly changes how data is processed at scale. These changes are likely to continue and accelerate in the next years as new technologies are adopted and deployed: smart NICs, smart storage, smart memory, disaggregated storage, disaggregated memory, specialized accelerators (GPUS, TPUs, FPGAs), and a wealth of ASICs specifically created to deal with computationally expensive tasks (e.g., cryptography or compression). In this tutorial, we focus on data processing on FPGAs, a technology that has received less attention than, e.g., TPUs or GPUs but that is, however, increasingly being deployed in the cloud for data processing tasks due to the architectural flexibility of FPGAs, along with their ability to process data at line rate, something not possible with other types of processors or accelerators. In the tutorial, we will cover what FPGAs are, their characteristics, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as examples from deployments in the industry and how they are used in various data processing tasks. We will introduce FPGA programming with high-level languages and describe hardware and software resources available to researchers. The tutorial includes case studies borrowed from research done in collaboration with companies that illustrate the potential of FPGAs in data processing and how software and hardware are evolving to take advantage of the possibilities offered by FPGAs. The use cases include: (1) approximated nearest neighbor search, which is relevant to databases and machine learning, (2) remote disaggregated memory, showing how the cloud architecture is evolving and demonstrating the potential for operator offloading and line rate data processing, and (3) recommendation system as an application with tight latency constraints.
Protected or Porous: A Comparative Analysis of Threat Detection Capability of IoT Safeguards
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly common, from smart speakers to security cameras, in homes. Along with their benefits come potential privacy and security threats. To limit these threats a number of commercial services have become available (IoT safeguards). The safeguards claim to provide protection against IoT privacy risks and security threats. However, the effectiveness and the associated privacy risks of these safeguards remains a key open question. In this paper, we investigate the threat detection capabilities of IoT safeguards for the first time. We develop and release an approach for automated safeguards experimentation to reveal their response to common security threats and privacy risks. We perform thousands of automated experiments using popular commercial IoT safeguards when deployed in a large IoT testbed. Our results indicate not only that these devices may be ineffective in preventing risks, but also their cloud interactions and data collection operations may introduce privacy risks for the households that adopt them.
DreamFace: Progressive Generation of Animatable 3D Faces under Text Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.
For-Each Operations in Collaborative Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) allow collaborative access to an app's data. We describe a novel CRDT operation, for-each on the list of CRDTs, and demonstrate its use in collaborative apps. Our for-each operation applies a given mutation to each element of a list, including elements inserted concurrently. This often preserves user intention in a way that would otherwise require custom CRDT algorithms. We give example applications of our for-each operation to collaborative rich-text, recipe, and slideshow editors.
Cerebras-GPT: Open Compute-Optimal Language Models Trained on the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Cluster
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study recent research advances that improve large language models through efficient pre-training and scaling, and open datasets and tools. We combine these advances to introduce Cerebras-GPT, a family of open compute-optimal language models scaled from 111M to 13B parameters. We train Cerebras-GPT models on the Eleuther Pile dataset following DeepMind Chinchilla scaling rules for efficient pre-training (highest accuracy for a given compute budget). We characterize the predictable power-law scaling and compare Cerebras-GPT with other publicly-available models to show all Cerebras-GPT models have state-of-the-art training efficiency on both pre-training and downstream objectives. We describe our learnings including how Maximal Update Parameterization ($μ$P) can further improve large model scaling, improving accuracy and hyperparameter predictability at scale. We release our pre-trained models and code, making this paper the first open and reproducible work comparing compute-optimal model scaling to models trained on fixed dataset sizes. Cerebras-GPT models are available on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/cerebras.
Implicit Anatomical Rendering for Medical Image Segmentation with Stochastic Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Integrating high-level semantically correlated contents and low-level anatomical features is of central importance in medical image segmentation. Towards this end, recent deep learning-based medical segmentation methods have shown great promise in better modeling such information. However, convolution operators for medical segmentation typically operate on regular grids, which inherently blur the high-frequency regions, i.e., boundary regions. In this work, we propose MORSE, a generic implicit neural rendering framework designed at an anatomical level to assist learning in medical image segmentation. Our method is motivated by the fact that implicit neural representation has been shown to be more effective in fitting complex signals and solving computer graphics problems than discrete grid-based representation. The core of our approach is to formulate medical image segmentation as a rendering problem in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we continuously align the coarse segmentation prediction with the ambiguous coordinate-based point representations and aggregate these features to adaptively refine the boundary region. To parallelly optimize multi-scale pixel-level features, we leverage the idea from Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) to design and train our MORSE with a stochastic gating mechanism. Our experiments demonstrate that MORSE can work well with different medical segmentation backbones, consistently achieving competitive performance improvements in both 2D and 3D supervised medical segmentation methods. We also theoretically analyze the superiority of MORSE.
Hierarchical Graph Neural Network with Cross-Attention for Cross-Device User Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Cross-device user matching is a critical problem in numerous domains, including advertising, recommender systems, and cybersecurity. It involves identifying and linking different devices belonging to the same person, utilizing sequence logs. Previous data mining techniques have struggled to address the long-range dependencies and higher-order connections between the logs. Recently, researchers have modeled this problem as a graph problem and proposed a two-tier graph contextual embedding (TGCE) neural network architecture, which outperforms previous methods. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical graph neural network architecture (HGNN), which has a more computationally efficient second level design than TGCE. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-attention (Cross-Att) mechanism in our model, which improves performance by 5% compared to the state-of-the-art TGCE method.
FedBot: Enhancing Privacy in Chatbots with Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Chatbots are mainly data-driven and usually based on utterances that might be sensitive. However, training deep learning models on shared data can violate user privacy. Such issues have commonly existed in chatbots since their inception. In the literature, there have been many approaches to deal with privacy, such as differential privacy and secure multi-party computation, but most of them need to have access to users' data. In this context, Federated Learning (FL) aims to protect data privacy through distributed learning methods that keep the data in its location. This paper presents Fedbot, a proof-of-concept (POC) privacy-preserving chatbot that leverages large-scale customer support data. The POC combines Deep Bidirectional Transformer models and federated learning algorithms to protect customer data privacy during collaborative model training. The results of the proof-of-concept showcase the potential for privacy-preserving chatbots to transform the customer support industry by delivering personalized and efficient customer service that meets data privacy regulations and legal requirements. Furthermore, the system is specifically designed to improve its performance and accuracy over time by leveraging its ability to learn from previous interactions.
Parameterized algorithms for Eccentricity Shortest Path Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Given an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ and an integer $\ell$, the Eccentricity Shortest Path (ESP) asks to find a shortest path $P$ such that for every vertex $v\in V(G)$, there is a vertex $w\in P$ such that $d_G(v,w)\leq \ell$, where $d_G(v,w)$ represents the distance between $v$ and $w$ in $G$. Dragan and Leitert [Theor. Comput. Sci. 2017] showed that the optimization version of this problem, which asks to find the minimum $\ell$ for the ESP problem, is NP-hard even on planar bipartite graphs with maximum degree 3. They also showed that ESP is W[2]-hard when parameterized by $\ell$. On the positive side, Ku\v cera and Suchý [IWOCA 2021] showed that the problem exhibits fixed parameter tractable (FPT) behavior when parameterized by modular width, cluster vertex deletion set, maximum leaf number, or the combined parameters disjoint paths deletion set and $\ell$. It was asked as an open question in the above paper, if ESP is FPT parameterized by disjoint paths deletion set or feedback vertex set. We answer these questions partially and obtain the following results: - ESP is FPT when parameterized by disjoint paths deletion set, split vertex deletion set or the combined parameters feedback vertex set and eccentricity of the graph. - We design a $(1+ε)$-factor FPT approximation algorithm when parameterized by the feedback vertex set number. - ESP is W[2]-hard when parameterized by the chordal vertex deletion set.
Synthetic Data in Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Synthetic data are becoming a critical tool for building artificially intelligent systems. Simulators provide a way of generating data systematically and at scale. These data can then be used either exclusively, or in conjunction with real data, for training and testing systems. Synthetic data are particularly attractive in cases where the availability of ``real'' training examples might be a bottleneck. While the volume of data in healthcare is growing exponentially, creating datasets for novel tasks and/or that reflect a diverse set of conditions and causal relationships is not trivial. Furthermore, these data are highly sensitive and often patient specific. Recent research has begun to illustrate the potential for synthetic data in many areas of medicine, but no systematic review of the literature exists. In this paper, we present the cases for physical and statistical simulations for creating data and the proposed applications in healthcare and medicine. We discuss that while synthetics can promote privacy, equity, safety and continual and causal learning, they also run the risk of introducing flaws, blind spots and propagating or exaggerating biases.
Inst-Inpaint: Instructing to Remove Objects with Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image inpainting task refers to erasing unwanted pixels from images and filling them in a semantically consistent and realistic way. Traditionally, the pixels that are wished to be erased are defined with binary masks. From the application point of view, a user needs to generate the masks for the objects they would like to remove which can be time-consuming and prone to errors. In this work, we are interested in an image inpainting algorithm that estimates which object to be removed based on natural language input and removes it, simultaneously. For this purpose, first, we construct a dataset named GQA-Inpaint for this task. Second, we present a novel inpainting framework, Inst-Inpaint, that can remove objects from images based on the instructions given as text prompts. We set various GAN and diffusion-based baselines and run experiments on synthetic and real image datasets. We compare methods with different evaluation metrics that measure the quality and accuracy of the models and show significant quantitative and qualitative improvements.
Neural Fields meet Explicit Geometric Representation for Inverse Rendering of Urban Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Reconstruction and intrinsic decomposition of scenes from captured imagery would enable many applications such as relighting and virtual object insertion. Recent NeRF based methods achieve impressive fidelity of 3D reconstruction, but bake the lighting and shadows into the radiance field, while mesh-based methods that facilitate intrinsic decomposition through differentiable rendering have not yet scaled to the complexity and scale of outdoor scenes. We present a novel inverse rendering framework for large urban scenes capable of jointly reconstructing the scene geometry, spatially-varying materials, and HDR lighting from a set of posed RGB images with optional depth. Specifically, we use a neural field to account for the primary rays, and use an explicit mesh (reconstructed from the underlying neural field) for modeling secondary rays that produce higher-order lighting effects such as cast shadows. By faithfully disentangling complex geometry and materials from lighting effects, our method enables photorealistic relighting with specular and shadow effects on several outdoor datasets. Moreover, it supports physics-based scene manipulations such as virtual object insertion with ray-traced shadow casting.
LANe: Lighting-Aware Neural Fields for Compositional Scene Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural fields have recently enjoyed great success in representing and rendering 3D scenes. However, most state-of-the-art implicit representations model static or dynamic scenes as a whole, with minor variations. Existing work on learning disentangled world and object neural fields do not consider the problem of composing objects into different world neural fields in a lighting-aware manner. We present Lighting-Aware Neural Field (LANe) for the compositional synthesis of driving scenes in a physically consistent manner. Specifically, we learn a scene representation that disentangles the static background and transient elements into a world-NeRF and class-specific object-NeRFs to allow compositional synthesis of multiple objects in the scene. Furthermore, we explicitly designed both the world and object models to handle lighting variation, which allows us to compose objects into scenes with spatially varying lighting. This is achieved by constructing a light field of the scene and using it in conjunction with a learned shader to modulate the appearance of the object NeRFs. We demonstrate the performance of our model on a synthetic dataset of diverse lighting conditions rendered with the CARLA simulator, as well as a novel real-world dataset of cars collected at different times of the day. Our approach shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art compositional scene synthesis on the challenging dataset setup, via composing object-NeRFs learned from one scene into an entirely different scene whilst still respecting the lighting variations in the novel scene. For more results, please visit our project website https://lane-composition.github.io/.