OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Two Sides of Redundancy in Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Message passing neural networks iteratively generate node embeddings by aggregating information from neighboring nodes. With increasing depth, information from more distant nodes is included. However, node embeddings may be unable to represent the growing node neighborhoods accurately and the influence of distant nodes may vanish, a problem referred to as oversquashing. Information redundancy in message passing, i.e., the repetitive exchange and encoding of identical information amplifies oversquashing. We develop a novel aggregation scheme based on neighborhood trees, which allows for controlling redundancy by pruning redundant branches of unfolding trees underlying standard message passing. While the regular structure of unfolding trees allows the reuse of intermediate results in a straightforward way, the use of neighborhood trees poses computational challenges. We propose compact representations of neighborhood trees and merge them, exploiting computational redundancy by identifying isomorphic subtrees. From this, node and graph embeddings are computed via a neural architecture inspired by tree canonization techniques. Our method is less susceptible to oversquashing than traditional message passing neural networks and can improve the accuracy on widely used benchmark datasets.
Indoor Positioning based on Active Radar Sensing and Passive Reflectors: Concepts & Initial Results
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

To navigate reliably in indoor environments, an industrial autonomous vehicle must know its position. However, current indoor vehicle positioning technologies either lack accuracy, usability or are too expensive. Thus, we propose a novel concept called local reference point assisted active radar positioning, which is able to overcome these drawbacks. It is based on distributing passive retroreflectors in the indoor environment such that each position of the vehicle can be identified by a unique reflection characteristic regarding the reflectors. To observe these characteristics, the autonomous vehicle is equipped with an active radar system. On one hand, this paper presents the basic idea and concept of our new approach towards indoor vehicle positioning and especially focuses on the crucial placement of the reflectors. On the other hand, it also provides a proof of concept by conducting a full system simulation including the placement of the local reference points, the radar-based distance estimation and the comparison of two different positioning methods. It successfully demonstrates the feasibility of our proposed approach.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Benchmark Biomedical Text Processing Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, Large Language Models (LLM) have demonstrated impressive capability to solve a wide range of tasks. However, despite their success across various tasks, no prior work has investigated their capability in the biomedical domain yet. To this end, this paper aims to evaluate the performance of LLMs on benchmark biomedical tasks. For this purpose, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 4 popular LLMs in 6 diverse biomedical tasks across 26 datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that conducts an extensive evaluation and comparison of various LLMs in the biomedical domain. Interestingly, we find based on our evaluation that in biomedical datasets that have smaller training sets, zero-shot LLMs even outperform the current state-of-the-art fine-tuned biomedical models. This suggests that pretraining on large text corpora makes LLMs quite specialized even in the biomedical domain. We also find that not a single LLM can outperform other LLMs in all tasks, with the performance of different LLMs may vary depending on the task. While their performance is still quite poor in comparison to the biomedical models that were fine-tuned on large training sets, our findings demonstrate that LLMs have the potential to be a valuable tool for various biomedical tasks that lack large annotated data.
Distributed Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding with Decoder-Only Side Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We consider low-latency image transmission over a noisy wireless channel when correlated side information is present only at the receiver side (the Wyner-Ziv scenario). In particular, we are interested in developing practical schemes using a data-driven joint source-channel coding (JSCC) approach, which has been previously shown to outperform conventional separation-based approaches in the practical finite blocklength regimes, and to provide graceful degradation with channel quality. We propose a novel neural network architecture that incorporates the decoder-only side information at multiple stages at the receiver side. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method succeeds in integrating the side information, yielding improved performance at all channel conditions in terms of the various quality measures considered here, especially at low channel signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and small bandwidth ratios (BRs). We have made the source code of the proposed method public to enable further research, and the reproducibility of the results.
Pika: Empowering Non-Programmers to Author Executable Governance Policies in Online Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Internet users have formed a wide array of online communities with nuanced and diverse community goals and norms. However, most online platforms only offer a limited set of governance models in their software infrastructure and leave little room for customization. Consequently, technical proficiency becomes a prerequisite for online communities to build governance policies in code, excluding non-programmers from participation in designing community governance. In this paper, we present Pika, a system that empowers non-programmers to author a wide range of executable governance policies. At its core, Pika incorporates a declarative language that decomposes governance policies into modular components, thereby facilitating expressive policy authoring through a user-friendly, form-based web interface. Our user studies with 17 participants show that Pika can empower non-programmers to author governance policies approximately 2.5 times faster than programmers who author in code. We also provide insights about Pika's expressivity in supporting diverse policies that online communities want.
Toward a Plug-and-Play Vision-Based Grasping Module for Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Despite recent advancements in AI for robotics, grasping remains a partially solved challenge, hindered by the lack of benchmarks and reproducibility constraints. This paper introduces a vision-based grasping framework that can easily be transferred across multiple manipulators. Leveraging Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, the framework generates diverse repertoires of open-loop grasping trajectories, enhancing adaptability while maintaining a diversity of grasps. This framework addresses two main issues: the lack of an off-the-shelf vision module for detecting object pose and the generalization of QD trajectories to the whole robot operational space. The proposed solution combines multiple vision modules for 6DoF object detection and tracking while rigidly transforming QD-generated trajectories into the object frame. Experiments on a Franka Research 3 arm and a UR5 arm with a SIH Schunk hand demonstrate comparable performance when the real scene aligns with the simulation used for grasp generation. This work represents a significant stride toward building a reliable vision-based grasping module transferable to new platforms, while being adaptable to diverse scenarios without further training iterations.
Higher-Order DeepTrails: Unified Approach to *Trails
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Analyzing, understanding, and describing human behavior is advantageous in different settings, such as web browsing or traffic navigation. Understanding human behavior naturally helps to improve and optimize the underlying infrastructure or user interfaces. Typically, human navigation is represented by sequences of transitions between states. Previous work suggests to use hypotheses, representing different intuitions about the navigation to analyze these transitions. To mathematically grasp this setting, first-order Markov chains are used to capture the behavior, consequently allowing to apply different kinds of graph comparisons, but comes with the inherent drawback of losing information about higher-order dependencies within the sequences. To this end, we propose to analyze entire sequences using autoregressive language models, as they are traditionally used to model higher-order dependencies in sequences. We show that our approach can be easily adapted to model different settings introduced in previous work, namely HypTrails, MixedTrails and even SubTrails, while at the same time bringing unique advantages: 1. Modeling higher-order dependencies between state transitions, while 2. being able to identify short comings in proposed hypotheses, and 3. naturally introducing a unified approach to model all settings. To show the expressiveness of our approach, we evaluate our approach on different synthetic datasets and conclude with an exemplary analysis of a real-world dataset, examining the behavior of users who interact with voice assistants.
Ada-Instruct: Adapting Instruction Generators for Complex Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Instructions augmentation is a crucial step for unleashing the full potential of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. Existing Self-Instruct methods primarily simulate new instructions from a few initial instructions with in-context learning. However, our study identifies a critical flaw in this approach: even with GPT4o, Self-Instruct cannot generate complex instructions of length $\ge 100$, which is necessary in complex tasks such as code completion. To address this issue, our key insight is that fine-tuning open source LLMs with only ten examples can produce complex instructions that maintain distributional consistency for complex reasoning tasks. We introduce Ada-Instruct, an adaptive instruction generator developed through fine-tuning. We empirically validated Ada-Instruct's efficacy across different applications. The results highlight Ada-Instruct's capacity to generate long, intricate, and distributionally consistent instructions.
Detecting Abnormal Health Conditions in Smart Home Using a Drone
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Nowadays, detecting aberrant health issues is a difficult process. Falling, especially among the elderly, is a severe concern worldwide. Falls can result in deadly consequences, including unconsciousness, internal bleeding, and often times, death. A practical and optimal, smart approach of detecting falling is currently a concern. The use of vision-based fall monitoring is becoming more common among scientists as it enables senior citizens and those with other health conditions to live independently. For tracking, surveillance, and rescue, unmanned aerial vehicles use video or image segmentation and object detection methods. The Tello drone is equipped with a camera and with this device we determined normal and abnormal behaviors among our participants. The autonomous falling objects are classified using a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier. The results demonstrate that the systems can identify falling objects with a precision of 0.9948.
Single Stage Warped Cloth Learning and Semantic-Contextual Attention Feature Fusion for Virtual TryOn
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image-based virtual try-on aims to fit an in-shop garment onto a clothed person image. Garment warping, which aligns the target garment with the corresponding body parts in the person image, is a crucial step in achieving this goal. Existing methods often use multi-stage frameworks to handle clothes warping, person body synthesis and tryon generation separately or rely on noisy intermediate parser-based labels. We propose a novel single-stage framework that implicitly learns the same without explicit multi-stage learning. Our approach utilizes a novel semantic-contextual fusion attention module for garment-person feature fusion, enabling efficient and realistic cloth warping and body synthesis from target pose keypoints. By introducing a lightweight linear attention framework that attends to garment regions and fuses multiple sampled flow fields, we also address misalignment and artifacts present in previous methods. To achieve simultaneous learning of warped garment and try-on results, we introduce a Warped Cloth Learning Module. Our proposed approach significantly improves the quality and efficiency of virtual try-on methods, providing users with a more reliable and realistic virtual try-on experience.
Robust-GBDT: GBDT with Nonconvex Loss for Tabular Classification in the Presence of Label Noise and Class Imbalance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Dealing with label noise in tabular classification tasks poses a persistent challenge in machine learning. While robust boosting methods have shown promise in binary classification, their effectiveness in complex, multi-class scenarios is often limited. Additionally, issues like imbalanced datasets, missing values, and computational inefficiencies further complicate their practical utility. This study introduces Robust-GBDT, a groundbreaking approach that combines the power of Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) with the resilience of nonconvex loss functions against label noise. By leveraging local convexity within specific regions, Robust-GBDT demonstrates unprecedented robustness, challenging conventional wisdom. Through seamless integration of advanced GBDT with a novel Robust Focal Loss tailored for class imbalance, Robust-GBDT significantly enhances generalization capabilities, particularly in noisy and imbalanced datasets. Notably, its user-friendly design facilitates integration with existing open-source code, enhancing computational efficiency and scalability. Extensive experiments validate Robust-GBDT's superiority over other noise-robust methods, establishing a new standard for accurate classification amidst label noise. This research heralds a paradigm shift in machine learning, paving the way for a new era of robust and precise classification across diverse real-world applications.
Linear Loop Synthesis for Quadratic Invariants
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Invariants are key to formal loop verification as they capture loop properties that are valid before and after each loop iteration. Yet, generating invariants is a notorious task already for syntactically restricted classes of loops. Rather than generating invariants for given loops, in this paper we synthesise loops that exhibit a predefined behaviour given by an invariant. From the perspective of formal loop verification, the synthesised loops are thus correct by design and no longer need to be verified. To overcome the hardness of reasoning with arbitrarily strong invariants, in this paper we construct simple (non-nested) while loops with linear updates that exhibit polynomial equality invariants. Rather than solving arbitrary polynomial equations, we consider loop properties defined by a single quadratic invariant in any number of variables. We present a procedure that, given a quadratic equation, decides whether a loop with affine updates satisfying this equation exists. Furthermore, if the answer is positive, the procedure synthesises a loop and ensures its variables achieve infinitely many different values.
Investigating the Ability of PINNs To Solve Burgers' PDE Near Finite-Time BlowUp
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have been achieving ever newer feats of solving complicated PDEs numerically while offering an attractive trade-off between accuracy and speed of inference. A particularly challenging aspect of PDEs is that there exist simple PDEs which can evolve into singular solutions in finite time starting from smooth initial conditions. In recent times some striking experiments have suggested that PINNs might be good at even detecting such finite-time blow-ups. In this work, we embark on a program to investigate this stability of PINNs from a rigorous theoretical viewpoint. Firstly, we derive generalization bounds for PINNs for Burgers' PDE, in arbitrary dimensions, under conditions that allow for a finite-time blow-up. Then we demonstrate via experiments that our bounds are significantly correlated to the $\ell_2$-distance of the neurally found surrogate from the true blow-up solution, when computed on sequences of PDEs that are getting increasingly close to a blow-up.
Blockchain-Envisioned UAV-Aided Disaster Relief Networks: Challenges and Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Natural or man-made disasters pose significant challenges for delivering critical relief to affected populations due to disruptions in critical infrastructures and logistics networks. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-aided disaster relief networks (UDRNs) leverage UAVs to assist existing ground relief networks by swiftly assessing affected areas and timely delivering lifesaving supplies. To meet the growing demands for collaborative, trust-free, and transparent UDRN services, blockchain-based UDRNs emerge as a promising approach through immutable ledgers and distributed smart contracts. However, several efficiency and security challenges hinder the deployment of blockchain-based UDRNs, including the lack of cooperation between smart contracts, lack of dynamic audit for smart contract vulnerabilities, and low forensics robustness against transaction malleability attacks. Towards efficient and secure blockchain-based UDRNs, this paper presents potential solutions: (i) a series of collaborative smart contracts for coordinated relief management, (ii) a dynamic contract audit mechanism to prevent known/unknown contract vulnerabilities; and (iii) a robust transaction forensics strategy with on/off-chain cooperation to resist transaction malleability attacks. Our prototype implementation and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach. Lastly, we outline key open research issues crucial to advancing this emerging field.
Physics-aware Machine Learning Revolutionizes Scientific Paradigm for Machine Learning and Process-based Hydrology
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate hydrological understanding and water cycle prediction are crucial for addressing scientific and societal challenges associated with the management of water resources, particularly under the dynamic influence of anthropogenic climate change. Existing reviews predominantly concentrate on the development of machine learning (ML) in this field, yet there is a clear distinction between hydrology and ML as separate paradigms. Here, we introduce physics-aware ML as a transformative approach to overcome the perceived barrier and revolutionize both fields. Specifically, we present a comprehensive review of the physics-aware ML methods, building a structured community (PaML) of existing methodologies that integrate prior physical knowledge or physics-based modeling into ML. We systematically analyze these PaML methodologies with respect to four aspects: physical data-guided ML, physics-informed ML, physics-embedded ML, and physics-aware hybrid learning. PaML facilitates ML-aided hypotheses, accelerating insights from big data and fostering scientific discoveries. We first conduct a systematic review of hydrology in PaML, including rainfall-runoff hydrological processes and hydrodynamic processes, and highlight the most promising and challenging directions for different objectives and PaML methods. Finally, a new PaML-based hydrology platform, termed HydroPML, is released as a foundation for hydrological applications. HydroPML enhances the explainability and causality of ML and lays the groundwork for the digital water cycle's realization. The HydroPML platform is publicly available at https://hydropml.github.io/.
Molecular De Novo Design through Transformer-based Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we introduce a method to fine-tune a Transformer-based generative model for molecular de novo design. Leveraging the superior sequence learning capacity of Transformers over Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), our model can generate molecular structures with desired properties effectively. In contrast to the traditional RNN-based models, our proposed method exhibits superior performance in generating compounds predicted to be active against various biological targets, capturing long-term dependencies in the molecular structure sequence. The model's efficacy is demonstrated across numerous tasks, including generating analogues to a query structure and producing compounds with particular attributes, outperforming the baseline RNN-based methods. Our approach can be used for scaffold hopping, library expansion starting from a single molecule, and generating compounds with high predicted activity against biological targets.
Distributed Evolution Strategies with Multi-Level Learning for Large-Scale Black-Box Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

In the post-Moore era, main performance gains of black-box optimizers are increasingly depending on parallelism, especially for large-scale optimization (LSO). Here we propose to parallelize the well-established covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) and in particular its one latest LSO variant called limited-memory CMA-ES (LM-CMA). To achieve efficiency while approximating its powerful invariance property, we present a multilevel learning-based meta-framework for distributed LM-CMA. Owing to its hierarchically organized structure, Meta-ES is well-suited to implement our distributed meta-framework, wherein the outer-ES controls strategy parameters while all parallel inner-ESs run the serial LM-CMA with different settings. For the distribution mean update of the outer-ES, both the elitist and multi-recombination strategy are used in parallel to avoid stagnation and regression, respectively. To exploit spatiotemporal information, the global step-size adaptation combines Meta-ES with the parallel cumulative step-size adaptation. After each isolation time, our meta-framework employs both the structure and parameter learning strategy to combine aligned evolution paths for CMA reconstruction. Experiments on a set of large-scale benchmarking functions with memory-intensive evaluations, arguably reflecting many data-driven optimization problems, validate the benefits (e.g., effectiveness w.r.t. solution quality, and adaptability w.r.t. second-order learning) and costs of our meta-framework.