OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dronument: System for Reliable Deployment of Micro Aerial Vehicles in Dark Areas of Large Historical Monuments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This letter presents a self-contained system for robust deployment of autonomous aerial vehicles in environments without access to global navigation systems and with limited lighting conditions. The proposed system, application-tailored for documentation in dark areas of large historical monuments, uses a unique and reliable aerial platform with a multi-modal lightweight sensory setup to acquire data in human-restricted areas with adverse lighting conditions, especially in areas that are high above the ground. The introduced localization method relies on an easy-to-obtain 3-D point cloud of a historical building, while it copes with a lack of visible light by fusing active laser-based sensors. The approach does not rely on any external localization, or on a preset motion-capture system. This enables fast deployment in the interiors of investigated structures while being computationally undemanding enough to process data online, onboard an MAV equipped with ordinary processing resources. The reliability of the system is analyzed, is quantitatively evaluated on a set of aerial trajectories performed inside a real-world church, and is deployed onto the aerial platform in the position control feedback loop to demonstrate the reliability of the system in the safety-critical application of historical monuments documentation.
System for 3D Acquisition and 3D Reconstruction using Structured Light for Sewer Line Inspection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The assessment of sewer pipe systems is a highly important, but at the same time cumbersome and error-prone task. We introduce an innovative system based on single-shot structured light modules that facilitates the detection and classification of spatial defects like jutting intrusions, spallings, or misaligned joints. This system creates highly accurate 3D measurements with sub-millimeter resolution of pipe surfaces and fuses them into a holistic 3D model. The benefit of such a holistic 3D model is twofold: on the one hand, it facilitates the accurate manual sewer pipe assessment, on the other, it simplifies the detection of defects in downstream automatic systems as it endows the input with highly accurate depth information. In this work, we provide an extensive overview of the system and give valuable insights into our design choices.
Pseudo-label Correction and Learning For Semi-Supervised Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Pseudo-Labeling has emerged as a simple yet effective technique for semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). However, the inevitable noise problem in pseudo-labels significantly degrades the performance of SSOD methods. Recent advances effectively alleviate the classification noise in SSOD, while the localization noise which is a non-negligible part of SSOD is not well-addressed. In this paper, we analyse the localization noise from the generation and learning phases, and propose two strategies, namely pseudo-label correction and noise-unaware learning. For pseudo-label correction, we introduce a multi-round refining method and a multi-vote weighting method. The former iteratively refines the pseudo boxes to improve the stability of predictions, while the latter smoothly self-corrects pseudo boxes by weighing the scores of surrounding jittered boxes. For noise-unaware learning, we introduce a loss weight function that is negatively correlated with the Intersection over Union (IoU) in the regression task, which pulls the predicted boxes closer to the object and improves localization accuracy. Our proposed method, Pseudo-label Correction and Learning (PCL), is extensively evaluated on the MS COCO and PASCAL VOC benchmarks. On MS COCO, PCL outperforms the supervised baseline by 12.16, 12.11, and 9.57 mAP and the recent SOTA (SoftTeacher) by 3.90, 2.54, and 2.43 mAP under 1\%, 5\%, and 10\% labeling ratios, respectively. On PASCAL VOC, PCL improves the supervised baseline by 5.64 mAP and the recent SOTA (Unbiased Teacherv2) by 1.04 mAP on AP$^{50}$.
xCodeEval: A Large Scale Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Code Understanding, Generation, Translation and Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating codes from natural language descriptions, repairing buggy codes, translating codes between languages, and retrieving relevant code segments. However, the evaluation of these models has often been performed in a scattered way on only one or two specific tasks, in a few languages, at a partial granularity (e.g., function) level, and in many cases without proper training data. Even more concerning is that in most cases the evaluation of generated codes has been done in terms of mere lexical overlap with a reference code rather than actual execution. We introduce xCodeEval, the largest executable multilingual multitask benchmark to date consisting of $25$M document-level coding examples ($16.5$B tokens) from about $7.5$K unique problems covering up to $11$ programming languages with execution-level parallelism. It features a total of $7$ tasks involving code understanding, generation, translation and retrieval. xCodeEval adopts an execution-based evaluation and offers a multilingual code execution engine, ExecEval that supports unit test based execution in all the $11$ languages. To address the challenge of balancing the distributions of text-code samples over multiple attributes in validation/test sets, we propose a novel data splitting and a data selection schema based on the geometric mean and graph-theoretic principle. Our experiments with OpenAI's LLMs (zero-shot) and open-LLMs (zero-shot and fine-tuned) on the tasks and languages demonstrate **xCodeEval** to be quite challenging as per the current advancements in language models.
Cybersecurity of AI medical devices: risks, legislation, and challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Medical devices and artificial intelligence systems rapidly transform healthcare provisions. At the same time, due to their nature, AI in or as medical devices might get exposed to cyberattacks, leading to patient safety and security risks. This book chapter is divided into three parts. The first part starts by setting the scene where we explain the role of cybersecurity in healthcare. Then, we briefly define what we refer to when we talk about AI that is considered a medical device by itself or supports one. To illustrate the risks such medical devices pose, we provide three examples: the poisoning of datasets, social engineering, and data or source code extraction. In the second part, the paper provides an overview of the European Union's regulatory framework relevant for ensuring the cybersecurity of AI as or in medical devices (MDR, NIS Directive, Cybersecurity Act, GDPR, the AI Act proposal and the NIS 2 Directive proposal). Finally, the third part of the paper examines possible challenges stemming from the EU regulatory framework. In particular, we look toward the challenges deriving from the two legislative proposals and their interaction with the existing legislation concerning AI medical devices' cybersecurity. They are structured as answers to the following questions: (1) how will the AI Act interact with the MDR regarding the cybersecurity and safety requirements?; (2) how should we interpret incident notification requirements from the NIS 2 Directive proposal and MDR?; and (3) what are the consequences of the evolving term of critical infrastructures? [This is a draft chapter. The final version will be available in Research Handbook on Health, AI and the Law edited by Barry Solaiman & I. Glenn Cohen, forthcoming 2023, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd]
Planning Distributed Security Operations Centers in Multi-Cloud Landscapes: A Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

We present a case study on the strategic planning of a security operations center in a typical, modern, mid-size organization. Against the backdrop of the company's multi-cloud strategy a distributed approach envisioning the involvement of external providers is taken. From a security-centric abstraction of the organizational IT-landscape, a novel strategic planning method for security operation centers is developed with an adaptable relationship matrix as core tool. The method is put to a practical test in modeling different levels of engagement of external providers in the center's operation. It is shown that concrete output, such as a core statement of work for an external provider, can easily be derived.
IPA-CLIP: Integrating Phonetic Priors into Vision and Language Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, large-scale Vision and Language (V\&L) pretraining has become the standard backbone of many multimedia systems. While it has shown remarkable performance even in unseen situations, it often performs in ways not intuitive to humans. Particularly, they usually do not consider the pronunciation of the input, which humans would utilize to understand language, especially when it comes to unknown words. Thus, this paper inserts phonetic prior into Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP), one of the V\&L pretrained models, to make it consider the pronunciation similarity among its pronunciation inputs. To achieve this, we first propose a phoneme embedding that utilizes the phoneme relationships provided by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart as a phonetic prior. Next, by distilling the frozen CLIP text encoder, we train a pronunciation encoder employing the IPA-based embedding. The proposed model named IPA-CLIP comprises this pronunciation encoder and the original CLIP encoders (image and text). Quantitative evaluation reveals that the phoneme distribution on the embedding space represents phonetic relationships more accurately when using the proposed phoneme embedding. Furthermore, in some multimodal retrieval tasks, we confirm that the proposed pronunciation encoder enhances the performance of the text encoder and that the pronunciation encoder handles nonsense words in a more phonetic manner than the text encoder. Finally, qualitative evaluation verifies the correlation between the pronunciation encoder and human perception regarding pronunciation similarity.
Evaluation of Confidence-based Ensembling in Deep Learning Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Ensembling is a successful technique to improve the performance of machine learning (ML) models. Conf-Ensemble is an adaptation to Boosting to create ensembles based on model confidence instead of model errors to better classify difficult edge-cases. The key idea is to create successive model experts for samples that were difficult (not necessarily incorrectly classified) by the preceding model. This technique has been shown to provide better results than boosting in binary-classification with a small feature space (~80 features). In this paper, we evaluate the Conf-Ensemble approach in the much more complex task of image classification with the ImageNet dataset (224x224x3 features with 1000 classes). Image classification is an important benchmark for AI-based perception and thus it helps to assess if this method can be used in safety-critical applications using ML ensembles. Our experiments indicate that in a complex multi-label classification task, the expected benefit of specialization on complex input samples cannot be achieved with a small sample set, i.e., a good classifier seems to rely on very complex feature analysis that cannot be well trained on just a limited subset of "difficult samples". We propose an improvement to Conf-Ensemble to increase the number of samples fed to successive ensemble members, and a three-member Conf-Ensemble using this improvement was able to surpass a single model in accuracy, although the amount is not significant. Our findings shed light on the limits of the approach and the non-triviality of harnessing big data.
Boosting Differentiable Causal Discovery via Adaptive Sample Reweighting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Under stringent model type and variable distribution assumptions, differentiable score-based causal discovery methods learn a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data by evaluating candidate graphs over an average score function. Despite great success in low-dimensional linear systems, it has been observed that these approaches overly exploit easier-to-fit samples, thus inevitably learning spurious edges. Worse still, inherent mostly in these methods the common homogeneity assumption can be easily violated, due to the widespread existence of heterogeneous data in the real world, resulting in performance vulnerability when noise distributions vary. We propose a simple yet effective model-agnostic framework to boost causal discovery performance by dynamically learning the adaptive weights for the Reweighted Score function, ReScore for short, where the weights tailor quantitatively to the importance degree of each sample. Intuitively, we leverage the bilevel optimization scheme to \wx{alternately train a standard DAG learner and reweight samples -- that is, upweight the samples the learner fails to fit and downweight the samples that the learner easily extracts the spurious information from. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets are carried out to validate the effectiveness of ReScore. We observe consistent and significant boosts in structure learning performance. Furthermore, we visualize that ReScore concurrently mitigates the influence of spurious edges and generalizes to heterogeneous data. Finally, we perform the theoretical analysis to guarantee the structure identifiability and the weight adaptive properties of ReScore in linear systems. Our codes are available at https://github.com/anzhang314/ReScore.
Choice Over Control: How Users Write with Large Language Models using Diegetic and Non-Diegetic Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a conceptual perspective on prompts for Large Language Models (LLMs) that distinguishes between (1) diegetic prompts (part of the narrative, e.g. "Once upon a time, I saw a fox..."), and (2) non-diegetic prompts (external, e.g. "Write about the adventures of the fox."). With this lens, we study how 129 crowd workers on Prolific write short texts with different user interfaces (1 vs 3 suggestions, with/out non-diegetic prompts; implemented with GPT-3): When the interface offered multiple suggestions and provided an option for non-diegetic prompting, participants preferred choosing from multiple suggestions over controlling them via non-diegetic prompts. When participants provided non-diegetic prompts it was to ask for inspiration, topics or facts. Single suggestions in particular were guided both with diegetic and non-diegetic information. This work informs human-AI interaction with generative models by revealing that (1) writing non-diegetic prompts requires effort, (2) people combine diegetic and non-diegetic prompting, and (3) they use their draft (i.e. diegetic information) and suggestion timing to strategically guide LLMs.
Emerging AI Technologies Inspiring the Next Generation of E-textiles
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The smart textile and wearables sector is looking towards advancing technologies to meet both industry, consumer and new emerging innovative textile application demands, within a fast paced textile industry. In parallel inspiration based on the biological neural workings of the human brain is driving the next generation of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence inspired hardware (neuromorphic computing) and software modules mimicking the processing capabilities and properties of neural networks and the human nervous system are taking shape. The textile sector needs to actively look at such emerging and new technologies taking inspiration from their workings and processing methods in order to stimulate new and innovative embedded intelligence advancements in the etextile world. This emerging next generation of Artificial intelligence(AI) is rapidly gaining interest across varying industries (textile, medical, automotive, aerospace, military). How such properties can inspire and drive advancements within the etextiles sector needs to be considered. This paper will provide an insight into current nanotechnology and artificial intelligence advancements in the etextiles domain before focusing specifically on the future vision and direction around the potential application of neuromorphic computing and spiking neural network inspired AI technologies within the textile sector. We investigate the core architectural elements of artificial neural networks, neuromorphic computing and how such neuroscience inspired technologies could impact and inspire change and new research developments within the e-textile sector.
Faithfulness-Aware Decoding Strategies for Abstractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Despite significant progress in understanding and improving faithfulness in abstractive summarization, the question of how decoding strategies affect faithfulness is less studied. We present a systematic study of the effect of generation techniques such as beam search and nucleus sampling on faithfulness in abstractive summarization. We find a consistent trend where beam search with large beam sizes produces the most faithful summaries while nucleus sampling generates the least faithful ones. We propose two faithfulness-aware generation methods to further improve faithfulness over current generation techniques: (1) ranking candidates generated by beam search using automatic faithfulness metrics and (2) incorporating lookahead heuristics that produce a faithfulness score on the future summary. We show that both generation methods significantly improve faithfulness across two datasets as evaluated by four automatic faithfulness metrics and human evaluation. To reduce computational cost, we demonstrate a simple distillation approach that allows the model to generate faithful summaries with just greedy decoding. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/amazon-science/faithful-summarization-generation
Learning Object Manipulation With Under-Actuated Impulse Generator Arrays
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

For more than half a century, vibratory bowl feeders have been the standard in automated assembly for singulation, orientation, and manipulation of small parts. Unfortunately, these feeders are expensive, noisy, and highly specialized on a single part design bases. We consider an alternative device and learning control method for singulation, orientation, and manipulation by means of seven fixed-position variable-energy solenoid impulse actuators located beneath a semi-rigid part supporting surface. Using computer vision to provide part pose information, we tested various machine learning (ML) algorithms to generate a control policy that selects the optimal actuator and actuation energy. Our manipulation test object is a 6-sided craps-style die. Using the most suitable ML algorithm, we were able to flip the die to any desired face 30.4\% of the time with a single impulse, and 51.3\% with two chosen impulses, versus a random policy succeeding 5.1\% of the time (that is, a randomly chosen impulse delivered by a randomly chosen solenoid).
AmQA: Amharic Question Answering Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Question Answering (QA) returns concise answers or answer lists from natural language text given a context document. Many resources go into curating QA datasets to advance robust models' development. There is a surge of QA datasets for languages like English, however, this is not true for Amharic. Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world. There is no published or publicly available Amharic QA dataset. Hence, to foster the research in Amharic QA, we present the first Amharic QA (AmQA) dataset. We crowdsourced 2628 question-answer pairs over 378 Wikipedia articles. Additionally, we run an XLMR Large-based baseline model to spark open-domain QA research interest. The best-performing baseline achieves an F-score of 69.58 and 71.74 in reader-retriever QA and reading comprehension settings respectively.
Learning to Backdoor Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In a federated learning (FL) system, malicious participants can easily embed backdoors into the aggregated model while maintaining the model's performance on the main task. To this end, various defenses, including training stage aggregation-based defenses and post-training mitigation defenses, have been proposed recently. While these defenses obtain reasonable performance against existing backdoor attacks, which are mainly heuristics based, we show that they are insufficient in the face of more advanced attacks. In particular, we propose a general reinforcement learning-based backdoor attack framework where the attacker first trains a (non-myopic) attack policy using a simulator built upon its local data and common knowledge on the FL system, which is then applied during actual FL training. Our attack framework is both adaptive and flexible and achieves strong attack performance and durability even under state-of-the-art defenses.
Implementation of a noisy hyperlink removal system: A semantic and relatedness approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

As the volume of data on the web grows, the web structure graph, which is a graph representation of the web, continues to evolve. The structure of this graph has gradually shifted from content-based to non-content-based. Furthermore, spam data, such as noisy hyperlinks, in the web structure graph adversely affect the speed and efficiency of information retrieval and link mining algorithms. Previous works in this area have focused on removing noisy hyperlinks using structural and string approaches. However, these approaches may incorrectly remove useful links or be unable to detect noisy hyperlinks in certain circumstances. In this paper, a data collection of hyperlinks is initially constructed using an interactive crawler. The semantic and relatedness structure of the hyperlinks is then studied through semantic web approaches and tools such as the DBpedia ontology. Finally, the removal process of noisy hyperlinks is carried out using a reasoner on the DBpedia ontology. Our experiments demonstrate the accuracy and ability of semantic web technologies to remove noisy hyperlinks
Symbolic Synthesis of Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Neural networks adapt very well to distributed and continuous representations, but struggle to generalize from small amounts of data. Symbolic systems commonly achieve data efficient generalization by exploiting modularity to benefit from local and discrete features of a representation. These features allow symbolic programs to be improved one module at a time and to experience combinatorial growth in the values they can successfully process. However, it is difficult to design a component that can be used to form symbolic abstractions and which is adequately overparametrized to learn arbitrary high-dimensional transformations. I present Graph-based Symbolically Synthesized Neural Networks (G-SSNNs), a class of neural modules that operate on representations modified with synthesized symbolic programs to include a fixed set of local and discrete features. I demonstrate that the choice of injected features within a G-SSNN module modulates the data efficiency and generalization of baseline neural models, creating predictable patterns of both heightened and curtailed generalization. By training G-SSNNs, we also derive information about desirable semantics of symbolic programs without manual engineering. This information is compact and amenable to abstraction, but can also be flexibly recontextualized for other high-dimensional settings. In future work, I will investigate data efficient generalization and the transferability of learned symbolic representations in more complex G-SSNN designs based on more complex classes of symbolic programs. Experimental code and data are available at https://github.com/shlomenu/symbolically_synthesized_networks .