OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SimplyMime: A Control at Our Fingertips
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The utilization of consumer electronics, such as televisions, set-top boxes, home theaters, and air conditioners, has become increasingly prevalent in modern society as technology continues to evolve. As new devices enter our homes each year, the accumulation of multiple infrared remote controls to operate them not only results in a waste of energy and resources, but also creates a cumbersome and cluttered environment for the user. This paper presents a novel system, named SimplyMime, which aims to eliminate the need for multiple remote controls for consumer electronics and provide the user with intuitive control without the need for additional devices. SimplyMime leverages a dynamic hand gesture recognition architecture, incorporating Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction, to create a sophisticated system that enables users to interact with a vast majority of consumer electronics with ease. Additionally, SimplyMime has a security aspect where it can verify and authenticate the user utilising the palmprint, which ensures that only authorized users can control the devices. The performance of the proposed method for detecting and recognizing gestures in a stream of motion was thoroughly tested and validated using multiple benchmark datasets, resulting in commendable accuracy levels. One of the distinct advantages of the proposed method is its minimal computational power requirements, making it highly adaptable and reliable in a wide range of circumstances. The paper proposes incorporating this technology into all consumer electronic devices that currently require a secondary remote for operation, thus promoting a more efficient and sustainable living environment.
Knowledge Distillation from 3D to Bird's-Eye-View for LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

LiDAR point cloud segmentation is one of the most fundamental tasks for autonomous driving scene understanding. However, it is difficult for existing models to achieve both high inference speed and accuracy simultaneously. For example, voxel-based methods perform well in accuracy, while Bird's-Eye-View (BEV)-based methods can achieve real-time inference. To overcome this issue, we develop an effective 3D-to-BEV knowledge distillation method that transfers rich knowledge from 3D voxel-based models to BEV-based models. Our framework mainly consists of two modules: the voxel-to-pillar distillation module and the label-weight distillation module. Voxel-to-pillar distillation distills sparse 3D features to BEV features for middle layers to make the BEV-based model aware of more structural and geometric information. Label-weight distillation helps the model pay more attention to regions with more height information. Finally, we conduct experiments on the SemanticKITTI dataset and Paris-Lille-3D. The results on SemanticKITTI show more than 5% improvement on the test set, especially for classes such as motorcycle and person, with more than 15% improvement. The code can be accessed at https://github.com/fengjiang5/Knowledge-Distillation-from-Cylinder3D-to-PolarNet.
L3Cube-IndicSBERT: A simple approach for learning cross-lingual sentence representations using multilingual BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The multilingual Sentence-BERT (SBERT) models map different languages to common representation space and are useful for cross-language similarity and mining tasks. We propose a simple yet effective approach to convert vanilla multilingual BERT models into multilingual sentence BERT models using synthetic corpus. We simply aggregate translated NLI or STS datasets of the low-resource target languages together and perform SBERT-like fine-tuning of the vanilla multilingual BERT model. We show that multilingual BERT models are inherent cross-lingual learners and this simple baseline fine-tuning approach without explicit cross-lingual training yields exceptional cross-lingual properties. We show the efficacy of our approach on 10 major Indic languages and also show the applicability of our approach to non-Indic languages German and French. Using this approach, we further present L3Cube-IndicSBERT, the first multilingual sentence representation model specifically for Indian languages Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Odia, Bengali, and Punjabi. The IndicSBERT exhibits strong cross-lingual capabilities and performs significantly better than alternatives like LaBSE, LASER, and paraphrase-multilingual-mpnet-base-v2 on Indic cross-lingual and monolingual sentence similarity tasks. We also release monolingual SBERT models for each of the languages and show that IndicSBERT performs competitively with its monolingual counterparts. These models have been evaluated using embedding similarity scores and classification accuracy.
Dilated-UNet: A Fast and Accurate Medical Image Segmentation Approach using a Dilated Transformer and U-Net Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Medical image segmentation is crucial for the development of computer-aided diagnostic and therapeutic systems, but still faces numerous difficulties. In recent years, the commonly used encoder-decoder architecture based on CNNs has been applied effectively in medical image segmentation, but has limitations in terms of learning global context and spatial relationships. Some researchers have attempted to incorporate transformers into both the decoder and encoder components, with promising results, but this approach still requires further improvement due to its high computational complexity. This paper introduces Dilated-UNet, which combines a Dilated Transformer block with the U-Net architecture for accurate and fast medical image segmentation. Image patches are transformed into tokens and fed into the U-shaped encoder-decoder architecture, with skip-connections for local-global semantic feature learning. The encoder uses a hierarchical Dilated Transformer with a combination of Neighborhood Attention and Dilated Neighborhood Attention Transformer to extract local and sparse global attention. The results of our experiments show that Dilated-UNet outperforms other models on several challenging medical image segmentation datasets, such as ISIC and Synapse.
An approach to extract information from academic transcripts of HUST
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In many Vietnamese schools, grades are still being inputted into the database manually, which is not only inefficient but also prone to human error. Thus, the automation of this process is highly necessary, which can only be achieved if we can extract information from academic transcripts. In this paper, we test our improved CRNN model in extracting information from 126 transcripts, with 1008 vertical lines, 3859 horizontal lines, and 2139 handwritten test scores. Then, this model is compared to the Baseline model. The results show that our model significantly outperforms the Baseline model with an accuracy of 99.6% in recognizing vertical lines, 100% in recognizing horizontal lines, and 96.11% in recognizing handwritten test scores.
Vision Transformers, a new approach for high-resolution and large-scale mapping of canopy heights
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate and timely monitoring of forest canopy heights is critical for assessing forest dynamics, biodiversity, carbon sequestration as well as forest degradation and deforestation. Recent advances in deep learning techniques, coupled with the vast amount of spaceborne remote sensing data offer an unprecedented opportunity to map canopy height at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Current techniques for wall-to-wall canopy height mapping correlate remotely sensed 2D information from optical and radar sensors to the vertical structure of trees using LiDAR measurements. While studies using deep learning algorithms have shown promising performances for the accurate mapping of canopy heights, they have limitations due to the type of architectures and loss functions employed. Moreover, mapping canopy heights over tropical forests remains poorly studied, and the accurate height estimation of tall canopies is a challenge due to signal saturation from optical and radar sensors, persistent cloud covers and sometimes the limited penetration capabilities of LiDARs. Here, we map heights at 10 m resolution across the diverse landscape of Ghana with a new vision transformer (ViT) model optimized concurrently with a classification (discrete) and a regression (continuous) loss function. This model achieves better accuracy than previously used convolutional based approaches (ConvNets) optimized with only a continuous loss function. The ViT model results show that our proposed discrete/continuous loss significantly increases the sensitivity for very tall trees (i.e., > 35m), for which other approaches show saturation effects. The height maps generated by the ViT also have better ground sampling distance and better sensitivity to sparse vegetation in comparison to a convolutional model. Our ViT model has a RMSE of 3.12m in comparison to a reference dataset while the ConvNet model has a RMSE of 4.3m.
Boosting Theory-of-Mind Performance in Large Language Models via Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in 2023, but they still face challenges in complex reasoning. Theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks, which require understanding agents' beliefs, goals, and mental states, are essential for common-sense reasoning involving humans, making it crucial to enhance LLM performance in this area. This study measures the ToM performance of GPT-4 and three GPT-3.5 variants (Davinci-2, Davinci-3, GPT-3.5-Turbo), and investigates the effectiveness of in-context learning in improving their ToM comprehension. We evaluated prompts featuring two-shot chain of thought reasoning and step-by-step thinking instructions. We found that LLMs trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (all models excluding Davinci-2) improved their ToM accuracy via in-context learning. GPT-4 performed best in zero-shot settings, reaching nearly 80% ToM accuracy, but still fell short of the 87% human accuracy on the test set. However, when supplied with prompts for in-context learning, all RLHF-trained LLMs exceeded 80% ToM accuracy, with GPT-4 reaching 100%. These results demonstrate that appropriate prompting enhances LLM ToM reasoning, and they underscore the context-dependent nature of LLM cognitive capacities.
Improved Churn Causal Analysis Through Restrained High-Dimensional Feature Space Effects in Financial Institutions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Customer churn describes terminating a relationship with a business or reducing customer engagement over a specific period. Customer acquisition cost can be five to six times that of customer retention, hence investing in customers with churn risk is wise. Causal analysis of the churn model can predict whether a customer will churn in the foreseeable future and identify effects and possible causes for churn. In general, this study presents a conceptual framework to discover the confounding features that correlate with independent variables and are causally related to those dependent variables that impact churn. We combine different algorithms including the SMOTE, ensemble ANN, and Bayesian networks to address churn prediction problems on a massive and high-dimensional finance data that is usually generated in financial institutions due to employing interval-based features used in Customer Relationship Management systems. The effects of the curse and blessing of dimensionality assessed by utilising the Recursive Feature Elimination method to overcome the high dimension feature space problem. Moreover, a causal discovery performed to find possible interpretation methods to describe cause probabilities that lead to customer churn. Evaluation metrics on validation data confirm the random forest and our ensemble ANN model, with %86 accuracy, outperformed other approaches. Causal analysis results confirm that some independent causal variables representing the level of super guarantee contribution, account growth, and account balance amount were identified as confounding variables that cause customer churn with a high degree of belief. This article provides a real-world customer churn analysis from current status inference to future directions in local superannuation funds.
Detecting Socially Abnormal Highway Driving Behaviors via Recurrent Graph Attention Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

With the rapid development of Internet of Things technologies, the next generation traffic monitoring infrastructures are connected via the web, to aid traffic data collection and intelligent traffic management. One of the most important tasks in traffic is anomaly detection, since abnormal drivers can reduce traffic efficiency and cause safety issues. This work focuses on detecting abnormal driving behaviors from trajectories produced by highway video surveillance systems. Most of the current abnormal driving behavior detection methods focus on a limited category of abnormal behaviors that deal with a single vehicle without considering vehicular interactions. In this work, we consider the problem of detecting a variety of socially abnormal driving behaviors, i.e., behaviors that do not conform to the behavior of other nearby drivers. This task is complicated by the variety of vehicular interactions and the spatial-temporal varying nature of highway traffic. To solve this problem, we propose an autoencoder with a Recurrent Graph Attention Network that can capture the highway driving behaviors contextualized on the surrounding cars, and detect anomalies that deviate from learned patterns. Our model is scalable to large freeways with thousands of cars. Experiments on data generated from traffic simulation software show that our model is the only one that can spot the exact vehicle conducting socially abnormal behaviors, among the state-of-the-art anomaly detection models. We further show the performance on real world HighD traffic dataset, where our model detects vehicles that violate the local driving norms.
Identifying Stochasticity in Time-Series with Autoencoder-Based Content-aware 2D Representation: Application to Black Hole Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we report an autoencoder-based 2D representation to classify a time-series as stochastic or non-stochastic, to understand the underlying physical process. Content-aware conversion of 1D time-series to 2D representation, that simultaneously utilizes time- and frequency-domain characteristics, is proposed. An autoencoder is trained with a loss function to learn latent space (using both time- and frequency domains) representation, that is designed to be, time-invariant. Every element of the time-series is represented as a tuple with two components, one each, from latent space representation in time- and frequency-domains, forming a binary image. In this binary image, those tuples that represent the points in the time-series, together form the ``Latent Space Signature" (LSS) of the input time-series. The obtained binary LSS images are fed to a classification network. The EfficientNetv2-S classifier is trained using 421 synthetic time-series, with fair representation from both categories. The proposed methodology is evaluated on publicly available astronomical data which are 12 distinct temporal classes of time-series pertaining to the black hole GRS 1915 + 105, obtained from RXTE satellite. Results obtained using the proposed methodology are compared with existing techniques. Concurrence in labels obtained across the classes, illustrates the efficacy of the proposed 2D representation using the latent space co-ordinates. The proposed methodology also outputs the confidence in the classification label.
Hold the Suspect! : An Analysis on Media Framing of Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Based on the 10.9K articles from top 40 news providers of South Korea, this paper analyzed the media framing of Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush during the first 72 hours after the incident. By adopting word-vector embedding and clustering, we figured out that conservative media focused on political parties' responses and the suspect's identity while the liberal media covered the responsibility of the government and possible unequal spillover effect on the low-income industry workers. Although the social tragedy was not directly connected to institutional politics, the media clearly exhibited political bias in the coverage process.
Money Over Morals: A Business Analysis of Conti Ransomware
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Ransomware operations have evolved from relatively unsophisticated threat actors into highly coordinated cybercrime syndicates that regularly extort millions of dollars in a single attack. Despite dominating headlines and crippling businesses across the globe, there is relatively little in-depth research into the modern structure and economics of ransomware operations. In this paper, we leverage leaked chat messages to provide an in-depth empirical analysis of Conti, one of the largest ransomware groups. By analyzing these chat messages, we construct a picture of Conti's operations as a highly-profitable business, from profit structures to employee recruitment and roles. We present novel methodologies to trace ransom payments, identifying over $80 million in likely ransom payments to Conti and its predecessor -- over five times as much as in previous public datasets. As part of our work, we publish a dataset of 666 labeled Bitcoin addresses related to Conti and an additional 75 Bitcoin addresses of likely ransom payments. Future work can leverage this case study to more effectively trace -- and ultimately counteract -- ransomware activity.
Sound-based drone fault classification using multitask learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

The drone has been used for various purposes, including military applications, aerial photography, and pesticide spraying. However, the drone is vulnerable to external disturbances, and malfunction in propellers and motors can easily occur. To improve the safety of drone operations, one should detect the mechanical faults of drones in real-time. This paper proposes a sound-based deep neural network (DNN) fault classifier and drone sound dataset. The dataset was constructed by collecting the operating sounds of drones from microphones mounted on three different drones in an anechoic chamber. The dataset includes various operating conditions of drones, such as flight directions (front, back, right, left, clockwise, counterclockwise) and faults on propellers and motors. The drone sounds were then mixed with noises recorded in five different spots on the university campus, with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) varying from 10 dB to 15 dB. Using the acquired dataset, we train a DNN classifier, 1DCNN-ResNet, that classifies the types of mechanical faults and their locations from short-time input waveforms. We employ multitask learning (MTL) and incorporate the direction classification task as an auxiliary task to make the classifier learn more general audio features. The test over unseen data reveals that the proposed multitask model can successfully classify faults in drones and outperforms single-task models even with less training data.
No Free Lunch in Self Supervised Representation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised representation learning in computer vision relies heavily on hand-crafted image transformations to learn meaningful and invariant features. However few extensive explorations of the impact of transformation design have been conducted in the literature. In particular, the dependence of downstream performances to transformation design has been established, but not studied in depth. In this work, we explore this relationship, its impact on a domain other than natural images, and show that designing the transformations can be viewed as a form of supervision. First, we demonstrate that not only do transformations have an effect on downstream performance and relevance of clustering, but also that each category in a supervised dataset can be impacted in a different way. Following this, we explore the impact of transformation design on microscopy images, a domain where the difference between classes is more subtle and fuzzy than in natural images. In this case, we observe a greater impact on downstream tasks performances. Finally, we demonstrate that transformation design can be leveraged as a form of supervision, as careful selection of these by a domain expert can lead to a drastic increase in performance on a given downstream task.
A Review On Game Theory With Smart Grid Security
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Smart grid is the modern two way mechanism combining the power grid, control center, smart metering facility, energy routing and customer demand response services. The system being complicated, security vulnerabilities are paramount for the sound operation and process continuation. Since smart grid connects with the end user to the energy providers, these two parties can interact with each other within the whole energy management work flow. In this regard, game theory provides effective insights in the analysis of security measures for smart grid. The mentioned parties will be the players in the game model to provide a solution for the various threats to the grid aspects. In this work, a brief review has presented with the existing approaches to the threat models for divergent sectors of the smart grid. The solution approaches to these threats are based on the game theoretical approaches that connect the attackers and defenders in the scenarios.
A Neuro-Symbolic Approach for Enhanced Human Motion Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Reasoning on the context of human beings is crucial for many real-world applications especially for those deploying autonomous systems (e.g. robots). In this paper, we present a new approach for context reasoning to further advance the field of human motion prediction. We therefore propose a neuro-symbolic approach for human motion prediction (NeuroSyM), which weights differently the interactions in the neighbourhood by leveraging an intuitive technique for spatial representation called Qualitative Trajectory Calculus (QTC). The proposed approach is experimentally tested on medium and long term time horizons using two architectures from the state of art, one of which is a baseline for human motion prediction and the other is a baseline for generic multivariate time-series prediction. Six datasets of challenging crowded scenarios, collected from both fixed and mobile cameras, were used for testing. Experimental results show that the NeuroSyM approach outperforms in most cases the baseline architectures in terms of prediction accuracy.