OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AA-SGAN: Adversarially Augmented Social GAN with Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Accurately predicting pedestrian trajectories is crucial in applications such as autonomous driving or service robotics, to name a few. Deep generative models achieve top performance in this task, assuming enough labelled trajectories are available for training. To this end, large amounts of synthetically generated, labelled trajectories exist (e.g., generated by video games). However, such trajectories are not meant to represent pedestrian motion realistically and are ineffective at training a predictive model. We propose a method and an architecture to augment synthetic trajectories at training time and with an adversarial approach. We show that trajectory augmentation at training time unleashes significant gains when a state-of-the-art generative model is evaluated over real-world trajectories.
Diverse Concept Proposals for Concept Bottleneck Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Concept bottleneck models are interpretable predictive models that are often used in domains where model trust is a key priority, such as healthcare. They identify a small number of human-interpretable concepts in the data, which they then use to make predictions. Learning relevant concepts from data proves to be a challenging task. The most predictive concepts may not align with expert intuition, thus, failing interpretability with no recourse. Our proposed approach identifies a number of predictive concepts that explain the data. By offering multiple alternative explanations, we allow the human expert to choose the one that best aligns with their expectation. To demonstrate our method, we show that it is able discover all possible concept representations on a synthetic dataset. On EHR data, our model was able to identify 4 out of the 5 pre-defined concepts without supervision.
An Ensemble Approach to Short-form Video Quality Assessment Using Multimodal LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The rise of short-form videos, characterized by diverse content, editing styles, and artifacts, poses substantial challenges for learning-based blind video quality assessment (BVQA) models. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs), renowned for their superior generalization capabilities, present a promising solution. This paper focuses on effectively leveraging a pretrained MLLM for short-form video quality assessment, regarding the impacts of pre-processing and response variability, and insights on combining the MLLM with BVQA models. We first investigated how frame pre-processing and sampling techniques influence the MLLM's performance. Then, we introduced a lightweight learning-based ensemble method that adaptively integrates predictions from the MLLM and state-of-the-art BVQA models. Our results demonstrated superior generalization performance with the proposed ensemble approach. Furthermore, the analysis of content-aware ensemble weights highlighted that some video characteristics are not fully represented by existing BVQA models, revealing potential directions to improve BVQA models further.
Lla-VAP: LSTM Ensemble of Llama and VAP for Turn-Taking Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Turn-taking prediction is the task of anticipating when the speaker in a conversation will yield their turn to another speaker to begin speaking. This project expands on existing strategies for turn-taking prediction by employing a multi-modal ensemble approach that integrates large language models (LLMs) and voice activity projection (VAP) models. By combining the linguistic capabilities of LLMs with the temporal precision of VAP models, we aim to improve the accuracy and efficiency of identifying TRPs in both scripted and unscripted conversational scenarios. Our methods are evaluated on the In-Conversation Corpus (ICC) and Coached Conversational Preference Elicitation (CCPE) datasets, highlighting the strengths and limitations of current models while proposing a potentially more robust framework for enhanced prediction.
MMFactory: A Universal Solution Search Engine for Vision-Language Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With advances in foundational and vision-language models, and effective fine-tuning techniques, a large number of both general and special-purpose models have been developed for a variety of visual tasks. Despite the flexibility and accessibility of these models, no single model is able to handle all tasks and/or applications that may be envisioned by potential users. Recent approaches, such as visual programming and multimodal LLMs with integrated tools aim to tackle complex visual tasks, by way of program synthesis. However, such approaches overlook user constraints (e.g., performance / computational needs), produce test-time sample-specific solutions that are difficult to deploy, and, sometimes, require low-level instructions that maybe beyond the abilities of a naive user. To address these limitations, we introduce MMFactory, a universal framework that includes model and metrics routing components, acting like a solution search engine across various available models. Based on a task description and few sample input-output pairs and (optionally) resource and/or performance constraints, MMFactory can suggest a diverse pool of programmatic solutions by instantiating and combining visio-lingual tools from its model repository. In addition to synthesizing these solutions, MMFactory also proposes metrics and benchmarks performance / resource characteristics, allowing users to pick a solution that meets their unique design constraints. From the technical perspective, we also introduced a committee-based solution proposer that leverages multi-agent LLM conversation to generate executable, diverse, universal, and robust solutions for the user. Experimental results show that MMFactory outperforms existing methods by delivering state-of-the-art solutions tailored to user problem specifications. Project page is available at https://davidhalladay.github.io/mmfactory_demo.
Understanding Artificial Neural Network's Behavior from Neuron Activation Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the intricate behavior of deep neural networks (DNNs) through the lens of neuron activation dynamics. We propose a probabilistic framework that can analyze models' neuron activation patterns as a stochastic process, uncovering theoretical insights into neural scaling laws, such as over-parameterization and the power-law decay of loss with respect to dataset size. By deriving key mathematical relationships, we present that the number of activated neurons increases in the form of $N(1-(\frac{bN}{D+bN})^b)$, and the neuron activation should follows power-law distribution. Based on these two mathematical results, we demonstrate how DNNs maintain generalization capabilities even under over-parameterization, and we elucidate the phase transition phenomenon observed in loss curves as dataset size plotted in log-axis (i.e. the data magnitude increases linearly). Moreover, by combining the above two phenomenons and the power-law distribution of neuron activation, we derived the power-law decay of neural network's loss function as the data size scale increases. Furthermore, our analysis bridges the gap between empirical observations and theoretical underpinnings, offering experimentally testable predictions regarding parameter efficiency and model compressibility. These findings provide a foundation for understanding neural network scaling and present new directions for optimizing DNN performance.
COMO: Cross-Mamba Interaction and Offset-Guided Fusion for Multimodal Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Single-modal object detection tasks often experience performance degradation when encountering diverse scenarios. In contrast, multimodal object detection tasks can offer more comprehensive information about object features by integrating data from various modalities. Current multimodal object detection methods generally use various fusion techniques, including conventional neural networks and transformer-based models, to implement feature fusion strategies and achieve complementary information. However, since multimodal images are captured by different sensors, there are often misalignments between them, making direct matching challenging. This misalignment hinders the ability to establish strong correlations for the same object across different modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called the CrOss-Mamba interaction and Offset-guided fusion (COMO) framework for multimodal object detection tasks. The COMO framework employs the cross-mamba technique to formulate feature interaction equations, enabling multimodal serialized state computation. This results in interactive fusion outputs while reducing computational overhead and improving efficiency. Additionally, COMO leverages high-level features, which are less affected by misalignment, to facilitate interaction and transfer complementary information between modalities, addressing the positional offset challenges caused by variations in camera angles and capture times. Furthermore, COMO incorporates a global and local scanning mechanism in the cross-mamba module to capture features with local correlation, particularly in remote sensing images. To preserve low-level features, the offset-guided fusion mechanism ensures effective multiscale feature utilization, allowing the construction of a multiscale fusion data cube that enhances detection performance.
Beyond the Known: Enhancing Open Set Domain Adaptation with Unknown Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can learn directly from raw data, resulting in exceptional performance across various research areas. However, factors present in non-controllable environments such as unlabeled datasets with varying levels of domain and category shift can reduce model accuracy. The Open Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) is a challenging problem that arises when both of these issues occur together. Existing OSDA approaches in literature only align known classes or use supervised training to learn unknown classes as a single new category. In this work, we introduce a new approach to improve OSDA techniques by extracting a set of high-confidence unknown instances and using it as a hard constraint to tighten the classification boundaries. Specifically, we use a new loss constraint that is evaluated in three different ways: (1) using pristine negative instances directly; (2) using data augmentation techniques to create randomly transformed negatives; and (3) with generated synthetic negatives containing adversarial features. We analyze different strategies to improve the discriminator and the training of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) used to generate synthetic negatives. We conducted extensive experiments and analysis on OVANet using three widely-used public benchmarks, the Office-31, Office-Home, and VisDA datasets. We were able to achieve similar H-score to other state-of-the-art methods, while increasing the accuracy on unknown categories.
VisionLLM-based Multimodal Fusion Network for Glottic Carcinoma Early Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The early detection of glottic carcinoma is critical for improving patient outcomes, as it enables timely intervention, preserves vocal function, and significantly reduces the risk of tumor progression and metastasis. However, the similarity in morphology between glottic carcinoma and vocal cord dysplasia results in suboptimal detection accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a vision large language model-based (VisionLLM-based) multimodal fusion network for glottic carcinoma detection, known as MMGC-Net. By integrating image and text modalities, multimodal models can capture complementary information, leading to more accurate and robust predictions. In this paper, we collect a private real glottic carcinoma dataset named SYSU1H from the First Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University, with 5,799 image-text pairs. We leverage an image encoder and additional Q-Former to extract vision embeddings and the Large Language Model Meta AI (Llama3) to obtain text embeddings. These modalities are then integrated through a laryngeal feature fusion block, enabling a comprehensive integration of image and text features, thereby improving the glottic carcinoma identification performance. Extensive experiments on the SYSU1H dataset demonstrate that MMGC-Net can achieve state-of-the-art performance, which is superior to previous multimodal models.
Molar: Multimodal LLMs with Collaborative Filtering Alignment for Enhanced Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Sequential recommendation (SR) systems have evolved significantly over the past decade, transitioning from traditional collaborative filtering to deep learning approaches and, more recently, to large language models (LLMs). While the adoption of LLMs has driven substantial advancements, these models inherently lack collaborative filtering information, relying primarily on textual content data neglecting other modalities and thus failing to achieve optimal recommendation performance. To address this limitation, we propose Molar, a Multimodal large language sequential recommendation framework that integrates multiple content modalities with ID information to capture collaborative signals effectively. Molar employs an MLLM to generate unified item representations from both textual and non-textual data, facilitating comprehensive multimodal modeling and enriching item embeddings. Additionally, it incorporates collaborative filtering signals through a post-alignment mechanism, which aligns user representations from content-based and ID-based models, ensuring precise personalization and robust performance. By seamlessly combining multimodal content with collaborative filtering insights, Molar captures both user interests and contextual semantics, leading to superior recommendation accuracy. Extensive experiments validate that Molar significantly outperforms traditional and LLM-based baselines, highlighting its strength in utilizing multimodal data and collaborative signals for sequential recommendation tasks. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Molar-8B06/.
JANUS: A Stablecoin 3.0 Blueprint for Navigating the Stablecoin Trilemma Through Dual-Token Design, Multi-Collateralization, Soft Peg, and AI-Driven Stabilization
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces JANUS, a Stablecoin 3.0 protocol designed to address the stablecoin trilemma--simultaneously improving decentralization (D), capital efficiency (E), and safety-stability (S). Building upon insights from previous stablecoin generations, JANUS leverages a dual-token system (Alpha and Omega), integrates crypto-assets and real-world assets (RWAs), employs a soft-peg mechanism, and utilizes AI-driven stabilization. We provide a comprehensive theoretical framework, including formal definitions of D, E, and S, along with equilibrium existence proofs and analogies drawn from international trade and open-economy macroeconomics. By introducing a second token backed by external yield, JANUS breaks from ponzinomic dynamics and creates a more robust foundation. Multi-collateralization and a soft peg enable controlled price oscillations, while AI-driven parameter adjustments maintain equilibrium. Through these innovations, JANUS aims to approach the center of the stablecoin trilemma, offering a globally resilient, inflation-adjusted, and decentralized stablecoin ecosystem bridging DeFi and TradFi. The main body presents a high-level overview of the trilemma and JANUS's key features, while the Appendix provides more formal mathematical treatments, including rigorous metrics for decentralization, capital efficiency, and stability, as well as the optimization challenges inherent in the trilemma.
Sharper Error Bounds in Late Fusion Multi-view Clustering Using Eigenvalue Proportion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims to integrate complementary information from multiple views to enhance clustering performance. Late Fusion Multi-View Clustering (LFMVC) has shown promise by synthesizing diverse clustering results into a unified consensus. However, current LFMVC methods struggle with noisy and redundant partitions and often fail to capture high-order correlations across views. To address these limitations, we present a novel theoretical framework for analyzing the generalization error bounds of multiple kernel $k$-means, leveraging local Rademacher complexity and principal eigenvalue proportions. Our analysis establishes a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/n)$, significantly improving upon the existing rate in the order of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{k/n})$. Building on this insight, we propose a low-pass graph filtering strategy within a multiple linear $k$-means framework to mitigate noise and redundancy, further refining the principal eigenvalue proportion and enhancing clustering accuracy. Experimental results on benchmark datasets confirm that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance and robustness. The related codes is available at https://github.com/csliangdu/GMLKM .
Schödinger Bridge Type Diffusion Models as an Extension of Variational Autoencoders
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Generative diffusion models use time-forward and backward stochastic differential equations to connect the data and prior distributions. While conventional diffusion models (e.g., score-based models) only learn the backward process, more flexible frameworks have been proposed to also learn the forward process by employing the Schrödinger bridge (SB). However, due to the complexity of the mathematical structure behind SB-type models, we can not easily give an intuitive understanding of their objective function. In this work, we propose a unified framework to construct diffusion models by reinterpreting the SB-type models as an extension of variational autoencoders. In this context, the data processing inequality plays a crucial role. As a result, we find that the objective function consists of the prior loss and drift matching parts.
Robust Semi-Supervised Learning in Open Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to improve performance by exploiting unlabeled data when labels are scarce. Conventional SSL studies typically assume close environments where important factors (e.g., label, feature, distribution) between labeled and unlabeled data are consistent. However, more practical tasks involve open environments where important factors between labeled and unlabeled data are inconsistent. It has been reported that exploiting inconsistent unlabeled data causes severe performance degradation, even worse than the simple supervised learning baseline. Manually verifying the quality of unlabeled data is not desirable, therefore, it is important to study robust SSL with inconsistent unlabeled data in open environments. This paper briefly introduces some advances in this line of research, focusing on techniques concerning label, feature, and data distribution inconsistency in SSL, and presents the evaluation benchmarks. Open research problems are also discussed for reference purposes.
Efficient Contrastive Explanations on Demand
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent work revealed a tight connection between adversarial robustness and restricted forms of symbolic explanations, namely distance-based (formal) explanations. This connection is significant because it represents a first step towards making the computation of symbolic explanations as efficient as deciding the existence of adversarial examples, especially for highly complex machine learning (ML) models. However, a major performance bottleneck remains, because of the very large number of features that ML models may possess, in particular for deep neural networks. This paper proposes novel algorithms to compute the so-called contrastive explanations for ML models with a large number of features, by leveraging on adversarial robustness. Furthermore, the paper also proposes novel algorithms for listing explanations and finding smallest contrastive explanations. The experimental results demonstrate the performance gains achieved by the novel algorithms proposed in this paper.
Improving Multi-Step Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models with Direct Advantage Policy Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning of LLMs. One challenge is the sparse reward, which makes optimization difficult for RL and necessitates a large amount of data samples. Another challenge stems from the inherent instability of RL, particularly when using Actor-Critic (AC) methods to derive optimal policies, which often leads to unstable training processes. To address these issues, we introduce Direct Advantage Policy Optimization (DAPO), an novel step-level offline RL algorithm. Unlike standard alignment that rely solely outcome rewards to optimize policies (such as DPO), DAPO employs a critic function to predict the reasoning accuracy at each step, thereby generating dense signals to refine the generation strategy. Additionally, the Actor and Critic components in DAPO are trained independently, avoiding the co-training instability observed in standard AC algorithms like PPO. We train DAPO on mathematical and code query datasets and then evaluate its performance on multiple benchmarks. Our results show that DAPO can effectively enhance the mathematical and code capabilities on both SFT models and RL models, demonstrating the effectiveness of DAPO.
GenPod: Constructive News Framing in AI-Generated Podcasts More Effectively Reduces Negative Emotions Than Non-Constructive Framing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

AI-generated media products are increasingly prevalent in the news industry, yet their impacts on audience perception remain underexplored. Traditional media often employs negative framing to capture attention and capitalize on news consumption, and without oversight, AI-generated news could reinforce this trend. This study examines how different framing styles-constructive versus non-constructive-affect audience responses in AI-generated podcasts. We developed a pipeline using generative AI and text-to-speech (TTS) technology to create both constructive and non-constructive news podcasts from the same set of news resources. Through empirical research (N=65), we found that constructive podcasts significantly reduced audience's negative emotions compared to non-constructive podcasts. Additionally, in certain news contexts, constructive framing might further enhance audience self-efficacy. Our findings show that simply altering the framing of AI generated content can significantly impact audience responses, and we offer insights on leveraging these effects for positive outcomes while minimizing ethical risks.