OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Analyzing Chain-of-Thought Prompting in Large Language Models via Gradient-based Feature Attributions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to empirically improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on various question answering tasks. While understanding why CoT prompting is effective is crucial to ensuring that this phenomenon is a consequence of desired model behavior, little work has addressed this; nonetheless, such an understanding is a critical prerequisite for responsible model deployment. We address this question by leveraging gradient-based feature attribution methods which produce saliency scores that capture the influence of input tokens on model output. Specifically, we probe several open-source LLMs to investigate whether CoT prompting affects the relative importances they assign to particular input tokens. Our results indicate that while CoT prompting does not increase the magnitude of saliency scores attributed to semantically relevant tokens in the prompt compared to standard few-shot prompting, it increases the robustness of saliency scores to question perturbations and variations in model output.
Of Mice and Pose: 2D Mouse Pose Estimation from Unlabelled Data and Synthetic Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Numerous fields, such as ecology, biology, and neuroscience, use animal recordings to track and measure animal behaviour. Over time, a significant volume of such data has been produced, but some computer vision techniques cannot explore it due to the lack of annotations. To address this, we propose an approach for estimating 2D mouse body pose from unlabelled images using a synthetically generated empirical pose prior. Our proposal is based on a recent self-supervised method for estimating 2D human pose that uses single images and a set of unpaired typical 2D poses within a GAN framework. We adapt this method to the limb structure of the mouse and generate the empirical prior of 2D poses from a synthetic 3D mouse model, thereby avoiding manual annotation. In experiments on a new mouse video dataset, we evaluate the performance of the approach by comparing pose predictions to a manually obtained ground truth. We also compare predictions with those from a supervised state-of-the-art method for animal pose estimation. The latter evaluation indicates promising results despite the lack of paired training data. Finally, qualitative results using a dataset of horse images show the potential of the setting to adapt to other animal species.
BotHawk: An Approach for Bots Detection in Open Source Software Projects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Social coding platforms have revolutionized collaboration in software development, leading to using software bots for streamlining operations. However, The presence of open-source software (OSS) bots gives rise to problems including impersonation, spamming, bias, and security risks. Identifying bot accounts and behavior is a challenging task in the OSS project. This research aims to investigate bots' behavior in open-source software projects and identify bot accounts with maximum possible accuracy. Our team gathered a dataset of 19,779 accounts that meet standardized criteria to enable future research on bots in open-source projects. We follow a rigorous workflow to ensure that the data we collect is accurate, generalizable, scalable, and up-to-date. We've identified four types of bot accounts in open-source software projects by analyzing their behavior across 17 features in 5 dimensions. Our team created BotHawk, a highly effective model for detecting bots in open-source software projects. It outperforms other models, achieving an AUC of 0.947 and an F1-score of 0.89. BotHawk can detect a wider variety of bots, including CI/CD and scanning bots. Furthermore, we find that the number of followers, number of repositories, and tags contain the most relevant features to identify the account type.
Complexity Analysis for Call-by-Value Higher-Order Rewriting
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

In this short paper, we consider a form of higher-order rewriting with a call-by-value evaluation strategy so as to model call-by-value programs. We briefly present a cost-size semantics to call-by-value rewriting: a class of algebraic interpretations that map terms to tuples that bound both the reductions' cost and the size of normal forms.
Multi-Objective Optimisation of URLLC-Based Metaverse Services
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Metaverse aims for building a fully immersive virtual shared space, where the users are able to engage in various activities. To successfully deploy the service for each user, the Metaverse service provider and network service provider generally localise the user first and then support the communication between the base station (BS) and the user. A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is capable of creating a reflected link between the BS and the user to enhance line-of-sight. Furthermore, the new key performance indicators (KPIs) in Metaverse, such as its energy-consumption-dependent total service cost and transmission latency, are often overlooked in ultra-reliable low latency communication (URLLC) designs, which have to be carefully considered in next-generation URLLC (xURLLC) regimes. In this paper, our design objective is to jointly optimise the transmit power, the RIS phase shifts, and the decoding error probability to simultaneously minimise the total service cost and transmission latency and approach the Pareto Front (PF). We conceive a twin-stage central controller, which aims for localising the users first and then supports the communication between the BS and users. In the first stage, we localise the Metaverse users, where the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is invoked for accurate user localisation. In the second stage, a meta-learning-based position-dependent multi-objective soft actor and critic (MO-SAC) algorithm is proposed to approach the PF between the total service cost and transmission latency and to further optimise the latency-dependent reliability. Our numerical results demonstrate that ...
Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Multi-Agent Pathfinding: Preliminary Results
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In this work we study a well-known and challenging problem of Multi-agent Pathfinding, when a set of agents is confined to a graph, each agent is assigned a unique start and goal vertices and the task is to find a set of collision-free paths (one for each agent) such that each agent reaches its respective goal. We investigate how to utilize Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to solve the problem. Although MCTS was shown to demonstrate superior performance in a wide range of problems like playing antagonistic games (e.g. Go, Chess etc.), discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms etc., its application to the problem at hand was not well studied before. To this end we introduce an original variant of MCTS, tailored to multi-agent pathfinding. The crux of our approach is how the reward, that guides MCTS, is computed. Specifically, we use individual paths to assist the agents with the the goal-reaching behavior, while leaving them freedom to get off the track if it is needed to avoid collisions. We also use a dedicated decomposition technique to reduce the branching factor of the tree search procedure. Empirically we show that the suggested method outperforms the baseline planning algorithm that invokes heuristic search, e.g. A*, at each re-planning step.
FacTool: Factuality Detection in Generative AI -- A Tool Augmented Framework for Multi-Task and Multi-Domain Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The emergence of generative pre-trained models has facilitated the synthesis of high-quality text, but it has also posed challenges in identifying factual errors in the generated text. In particular: (1) A wider range of tasks now face an increasing risk of containing factual errors when handled by generative models. (2) Generated texts tend to be lengthy and lack a clearly defined granularity for individual facts. (3) There is a scarcity of explicit evidence available during the process of fact checking. With the above challenges in mind, in this paper, we propose FacTool, a task and domain agnostic framework for detecting factual errors of texts generated by large language models (e.g., ChatGPT). Experiments on four different tasks (knowledge-based QA, code generation, mathematical reasoning, and scientific literature review) show the efficacy of the proposed method. We release the code of FacTool associated with ChatGPT plugin interface at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/factool .
Decisive Data using Multi-Modality Optical Sensors for Advanced Vehicular Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Optical sensors have played a pivotal role in acquiring real world data for critical applications. This data, when integrated with advanced machine learning algorithms provides meaningful information thus enhancing human vision. This paper focuses on various optical technologies for design and development of state-of-the-art out-cabin forward vision systems and in-cabin driver monitoring systems. The focused optical sensors include Longwave Thermal Imaging (LWIR) cameras, Near Infrared (NIR), Neuromorphic/ event cameras, Visible CMOS cameras and Depth cameras. Further the paper discusses different potential applications which can be employed using the unique strengths of each these optical modalities in real time environment.
Dendritic Integration Based Quadratic Neural Networks Outperform Traditional Aritificial Ones
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Incorporating biological neuronal properties into Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to enhance computational capabilities poses a formidable challenge in the field of machine learning. Inspired by recent findings indicating that dendrites adhere to quadratic integration rules for synaptic inputs, we propose a novel ANN model, Dendritic Integration-Based Quadratic Neural Network (DIQNN). This model shows superior performance over traditional ANNs in a variety of classification tasks. To reduce the computational cost of DIQNN, we introduce the Low-Rank DIQNN, while we find it can retain the performance of the original DIQNN. We further propose a margin to characterize the generalization error and theoretically prove this margin will increase monotonically during training. And we show the consistency between generalization and our margin using numerical experiments. Finally, by integrating this margin into the loss function, the change of test accuracy is indeed accelerated. Our work contributes a novel, brain-inspired ANN model that surpasses traditional ANNs and provides a theoretical framework to analyze the generalization error in classification tasks.
Multi-Scenario Empirical Assessment of Agile Governance Theory: A Technical Report
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Context: Agile Governance Theory (AGT) has emerged as a potential model for organizational chains of responsibility across business units and teams. Objective: This study aims to assess how AGT is reflected in practice. Method: AGT was operationalized down into 16 testable hypotheses. All hypotheses were tested by arranging eight theoretical scenarios with 118 practitioners from 86 organizations and 19 countries who completed an in-depth explanatory scenario-based survey. The feedback results were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Results: The analyses supported key theory components and hypotheses, such as mediation between agile capabilities and business operations through governance capabilities. Conclusion: This study supports the theory and suggests that AGT can assist teams in gaining a better understanding of their organization governance in an agile context. A better understanding can help remove delays and misunderstandings that can come about with unclear decision-making channels, which can jeopardize the fulfillment of the overall strategy.
Personal Protective Equipment Detection in Extreme Construction Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Object detection has been widely applied for construction safety management, especially personal protective equipment (PPE) detection. Though the existing PPE detection models trained on conventional datasets have achieved excellent results, their performance dramatically declines in extreme construction conditions. A robust detection model NST-YOLOv5 is developed by combining the neural style transfer (NST) and YOLOv5 technologies. Five extreme conditions are considered and simulated via the NST module to endow the detection model with excellent robustness, including low light, intense light, sand dust, fog, and rain. Experiments show that the NST has great potential as a tool for extreme data synthesis since it is better at simulating extreme conditions than other traditional image processing algorithms and helps the NST-YOLOv5 achieve 0.141 and 0.083 mAP_(05:95) improvements in synthesized and real-world extreme data. This study provides a new feasible way to obtain a more robust detection model for extreme construction conditions.
Noisy k-means++ Revisited
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

The $k$-means++ algorithm by Arthur and Vassilvitskii [SODA 2007] is a classical and time-tested algorithm for the $k$-means problem. While being very practical, the algorithm also has good theoretical guarantees: its solution is $O(\log k)$-approximate, in expectation. In a recent work, Bhattacharya, Eube, Roglin, and Schmidt [ESA 2020] considered the following question: does the algorithm retain its guarantees if we allow for a slight adversarial noise in the sampling probability distributions used by the algorithm? This is motivated e.g. by the fact that computations with real numbers in $k$-means++ implementations are inexact. Surprisingly, the analysis under this scenario gets substantially more difficult and the authors were able to prove only a weaker approximation guarantee of $O(\log^2 k)$. In this paper, we close the gap by providing a tight, $O(\log k)$-approximate guarantee for the $k$-means++ algorithm with noise.
A Compact DAG for Storing and Searching Maximal Common Subsequences
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Maximal Common Subsequences (MCSs) between two strings X and Y are subsequences of both X and Y that are maximal under inclusion. MCSs relax and generalize the well known and widely used concept of Longest Common Subsequences (LCSs), which can be seen as MCSs of maximum length. While the number both LCSs and MCSs can be exponential in the length of the strings, LCSs have been long exploited for string and text analysis, as simple compact representations of all LCSs between two strings, built via dynamic programming or automata, have been known since the '70s. MCSs appear to have a more challenging structure: even listing them efficiently was an open problem open until recently, thus narrowing the complexity difference between the two problems, but the gap remained significant. In this paper we close the complexity gap: we show how to build DAG of polynomial size-in polynomial time-which allows for efficient operations on the set of all MCSs such as enumeration in Constant Amortized Time per solution (CAT), counting, and random access to the i-th element (i.e., rank and select operations). Other than improving known algorithmic results, this work paves the way for new sequence analysis methods based on MCSs.
eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in aging clock models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a rapidly progressing field of machine learning, aiming to unravel the predictions of complex models. XAI is especially required in sensitive applications, e.g. in health care, when diagnosis, recommendations and treatment choices might rely on the decisions made by artificial intelligence systems. AI approaches have become widely used in aging research as well, in particular, in developing biological clock models and identifying biomarkers of aging and age-related diseases. However, the potential of XAI here awaits to be fully appreciated. We discuss the application of XAI for developing the "aging clocks" and present a comprehensive analysis of the literature categorized by the focus on particular physiological systems.
Training-based Model Refinement and Representation Disagreement for Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) aims to improve the performance and generalization of existing object detectors by utilizing limited labeled data and extensive unlabeled data. Despite many advances, recent SSOD methods are still challenged by inadequate model refinement using the classical exponential moving average (EMA) strategy, the consensus of Teacher-Student models in the latter stages of training (i.e., losing their distinctiveness), and noisy/misleading pseudo-labels. This paper proposes a novel training-based model refinement (TMR) stage and a simple yet effective representation disagreement (RD) strategy to address the limitations of classical EMA and the consensus problem. The TMR stage of Teacher-Student models optimizes the lightweight scaling operation to refine the model's weights and prevent overfitting or forgetting learned patterns from unlabeled data. Meanwhile, the RD strategy helps keep these models diverged to encourage the student model to explore additional patterns in unlabeled data. Our approach can be integrated into established SSOD methods and is empirically validated using two baseline methods, with and without cascade regression, to generate more reliable pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over state-of-the-art SSOD methods. Specifically, the proposed approach outperforms the baseline Unbiased-Teacher-v2 (& Unbiased-Teacher-v1) method by an average mAP margin of 2.23, 2.1, and 3.36 (& 2.07, 1.9, and 3.27) on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and Pascal VOC datasets, respectively.
A Novel Computationally Efficient Group Signature for Anonymous and Secure V2X Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The use of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is expected to significantly improve road safety and traffic management. We present an efficient protocol, called the AEE protocol, for protecting data authenticity and user privacy in V2X applications. Our protocol provides event-based likability, which enables messages from a subject vehicle to be linked to a specific event in order to prevent Sybil attacks. Messages on different events are unlinkable to preserve the long-term privacy of vehicles. Moreover, our protocol introduces a new method for generating temporary public keys to reduce computing and transmission overheads. Such a temporary public key is bound with a certain event and is automatically revoked when the event is over. We describe how to apply our protocol in vehicular communications using two exemplar use cases. To further reduce the real-time computational complexity, our protocol enables us to decompose the cryptographic operations into offline processes for complex operations and real-time processes for fast computations.
Combating the Curse of Multilinguality in Cross-Lingual WSD by Aligning Sparse Contextualized Word Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we advocate for using large pre-trained monolingual language models in cross lingual zero-shot word sense disambiguation (WSD) coupled with a contextualized mapping mechanism. We also report rigorous experiments that illustrate the effectiveness of employing sparse contextualized word representations obtained via a dictionary learning procedure. Our experimental results demonstrate that the above modifications yield a significant improvement of nearly 6.5 points of increase in the average F-score (from 62.0 to 68.5) over a collection of 17 typologically diverse set of target languages. We release our source code for replicating our experiments at https://github.com/begab/sparsity_makes_sense.
The GANfather: Controllable generation of malicious activity to improve defence systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning methods to aid defence systems in detecting malicious activity typically rely on labelled data. In some domains, such labelled data is unavailable or incomplete. In practice this can lead to low detection rates and high false positive rates, which characterise for example anti-money laundering systems. In fact, it is estimated that 1.7--4 trillion euros are laundered annually and go undetected. We propose The GANfather, a method to generate samples with properties of malicious activity, without label requirements. We propose to reward the generation of malicious samples by introducing an extra objective to the typical Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) loss. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance the detection of illicit activity using the discriminator network as a novel and robust defence system. Optionally, we may encourage the generator to bypass pre-existing detection systems. This setup then reveals defensive weaknesses for the discriminator to correct. We evaluate our method in two real-world use cases, money laundering and recommendation systems. In the former, our method moves cumulative amounts close to 350 thousand dollars through a network of accounts without being detected by an existing system. In the latter, we recommend the target item to a broad user base with as few as 30 synthetic attackers. In both cases, we train a new defence system to capture the synthetic attacks.
Offline Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Q-Function Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The core challenge of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is dealing with the (potentially catastrophic) extrapolation error induced by the distribution shift between the history dataset and the desired policy. A large portion of prior work tackles this challenge by implicitly/explicitly regularizing the learning policy towards the behavior policy, which is hard to estimate reliably in practice. In this work, we propose to regularize towards the Q-function of the behavior policy instead of the behavior policy itself, under the premise that the Q-function can be estimated more reliably and easily by a SARSA-style estimate and handles the extrapolation error more straightforwardly. We propose two algorithms taking advantage of the estimated Q-function through regularizations, and demonstrate they exhibit strong performance on the D4RL benchmarks.
ARC-NLP at Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2023: Multimodal Methods Boosted by Ensemble Learning, Syntactical and Entity Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Text-embedded images can serve as a means of spreading hate speech, propaganda, and extremist beliefs. Throughout the Russia-Ukraine war, both opposing factions heavily relied on text-embedded images as a vehicle for spreading propaganda and hate speech. Ensuring the effective detection of hate speech and propaganda is of utmost importance to mitigate the negative effect of hate speech dissemination. In this paper, we outline our methodologies for two subtasks of Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2023. For the first subtask, hate speech detection, we utilize multimodal deep learning models boosted by ensemble learning and syntactical text attributes. For the second subtask, target detection, we employ multimodal deep learning models boosted by named entity features. Through experimentation, we demonstrate the superior performance of our models compared to all textual, visual, and text-visual baselines employed in multimodal hate speech detection. Furthermore, our models achieve the first place in both subtasks on the final leaderboard of the shared task.