OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Image-Guided Robotic System for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: System Development and Experimental Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive medical procedure that can modulate brain activity, and it is widely used in neuroscience and neurology research. Compared to manual operators, robots may improve the outcome of TMS due to their superior accuracy and repeatability. However, there has not been a widely accepted standard protocol for performing robotic TMS using fine-segmented brain images, resulting in arbitrary planned angles with respect to the true boundaries of the modulated cortex. Given that the recent study in TMS simulation suggests a noticeable difference in outcomes when using different anatomical details, cortical shape should play a more significant role in deciding the optimal TMS coil pose. In this work, we introduce an image-guided robotic system for TMS that focuses on (1) establishing standardized planning methods and heuristics to define a reference (true zero) for the coil poses and (2) solving the issue that the manual coil placement requires expert hand-eye coordination which often leading to low repeatability of the experiments. To validate the design of our robotic system, a phantom study and a preliminary human subject study were performed. Our results show that the robotic method can half the positional error and improve the rotational accuracy by up to two orders of magnitude. The accuracy is proven to be repeatable because the standard deviation of multiple trials is lowered by an order of magnitude. The improved actuation accuracy successfully translates to the TMS application, with a higher and more stable induced voltage in magnetic field sensors.
HyQE: Ranking Contexts with Hypothetical Query Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In retrieval-augmented systems, context ranking techniques are commonly employed to reorder the retrieved contexts based on their relevance to a user query. A standard approach is to measure this relevance through the similarity between contexts and queries in the embedding space. However, such similarity often fails to capture the relevance. Alternatively, large language models (LLMs) have been used for ranking contexts. However, they can encounter scalability issues when the number of candidate contexts grows and the context window sizes of the LLMs remain constrained. Additionally, these approaches require fine-tuning LLMs with domain-specific data. In this work, we introduce a scalable ranking framework that combines embedding similarity and LLM capabilities without requiring LLM fine-tuning. Our framework uses a pre-trained LLM to hypothesize the user query based on the retrieved contexts and ranks the context based on the similarity between the hypothesized queries and the user query. Our framework is efficient at inference time and is compatible with many other retrieval and ranking techniques. Experimental results show that our method improves the ranking performance across multiple benchmarks. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/zwc662/hyqe
TRIZ Method for Urban Building Energy Optimization: GWO-SARIMA-LSTM Forecasting model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

With the advancement of global climate change and sustainable development goals, urban building energy consumption optimization and carbon emission reduction have become the focus of research. Traditional energy consumption prediction methods often lack accuracy and adaptability due to their inability to fully consider complex energy consumption patterns, especially in dealing with seasonal fluctuations and dynamic changes. This study proposes a hybrid deep learning model that combines TRIZ innovation theory with GWO, SARIMA and LSTM to improve the accuracy of building energy consumption prediction. TRIZ plays a key role in model design, providing innovative solutions to achieve an effective balance between energy efficiency, cost and comfort by systematically analyzing the contradictions in energy consumption optimization. GWO is used to optimize the parameters of the model to ensure that the model maintains high accuracy under different conditions. The SARIMA model focuses on capturing seasonal trends in the data, while the LSTM model handles short-term and long-term dependencies in the data, further improving the accuracy of the prediction. The main contribution of this research is the development of a robust model that leverages the strengths of TRIZ and advanced deep learning techniques, improving the accuracy of energy consumption predictions. Our experiments demonstrate a significant 15% reduction in prediction error compared to existing models. This innovative approach not only enhances urban energy management but also provides a new framework for optimizing energy use and reducing carbon emissions, contributing to sustainable development.
Unsupervised feature selection algorithm framework based on neighborhood interval disturbance fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Feature selection technology is a key technology of data dimensionality reduction. Becauseof the lack of label information of collected data samples, unsupervised feature selection has attracted more attention. The universality and stability of many unsupervised feature selection algorithms are very low and greatly affected by the dataset structure. For this reason, many researchers have been keen to improve the stability of the algorithm. This paper attempts to preprocess the data set and use an interval method to approximate the data set, experimentally verifying the advantages and disadvantages of the new interval data set. This paper deals with these data sets from the global perspective and proposes a new algorithm-unsupervised feature selection algorithm based on neighborhood interval disturbance fusion(NIDF). This method can realize the joint learning of the final score of the feature and the approximate data interval. By comparing with the original unsupervised feature selection methods and several existing feature selection frameworks, the superiority of the proposed model is verified.
Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Generating poetry has become a popular application of LLMs, perhaps especially of OpenAI's widely-used chatbot ChatGPT. What kind of poet is ChatGPT? Does ChatGPT have its own poetic style? Can it successfully produce poems in different styles? To answer these questions, we prompt the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models to generate English-language poems in 24 different poetic forms and styles, about 40 different subjects, and in response to 3 different writing prompt templates. We then analyze the resulting 5.7k poems, comparing them to a sample of 3.7k poems from the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. We find that the GPT models, especially GPT-4, can successfully produce poems in a range of both common and uncommon English-language forms in superficial yet noteworthy ways, such as by producing poems of appropriate lengths for sonnets (14 lines), villanelles (19 lines), and sestinas (39 lines). But the GPT models also exhibit their own distinct stylistic tendencies, both within and outside of these specific forms. Our results show that GPT poetry is much more constrained and uniform than human poetry, showing a strong penchant for rhyme, quatrains (4-line stanzas), iambic meter, first-person plural perspectives (we, us, our), and specific vocabulary like "heart," "embrace," "echo," and "whisper."
POSE: Pose estimation Of virtual Sync Exhibit system
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This work is a portable MetaVerse implementation, and we use 3D pose estimation with AI to make virtual avatars do synchronized actions and interact with the environment. The motivation is that we find it inconvenient to use joysticks and sensors when playing with fitness rings. In order to replace joysticks and reduce costs, we developed a platform that can control virtual avatars through pose estimation to identify the movements of real people, and we also implemented a multi-process to achieve modularization and reduce the overall latency.
LAC: Graph Contrastive Learning with Learnable Augmentation in Continuous Space
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph Contrastive Learning frameworks have demonstrated success in generating high-quality node representations. The existing research on efficient data augmentation methods and ideal pretext tasks for graph contrastive learning remains limited, resulting in suboptimal node representation in the unsupervised setting. In this paper, we introduce LAC, a graph contrastive learning framework with learnable data augmentation in an orthogonal continuous space. To capture the representative information in the graph data during augmentation, we introduce a continuous view augmenter, that applies both a masked topology augmentation module and a cross-channel feature augmentation module to adaptively augment the topological information and the feature information within an orthogonal continuous space, respectively. The orthogonal nature of continuous space ensures that the augmentation process avoids dimension collapse. To enhance the effectiveness of pretext tasks, we propose an information-theoretic principle named InfoBal and introduce corresponding pretext tasks. These tasks enable the continuous view augmenter to maintain consistency in the representative information across views while maximizing diversity between views, and allow the encoder to fully utilize the representative information in the unsupervised setting. Our experimental results show that LAC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art frameworks.
Hybrid Memory Replay: Blending Real and Distilled Data for Class Incremental Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Incremental learning (IL) aims to acquire new knowledge from current tasks while retaining knowledge learned from previous tasks. Replay-based IL methods store a set of exemplars from previous tasks in a buffer and replay them when learning new tasks. However, there is usually a size-limited buffer that cannot store adequate real exemplars to retain the knowledge of previous tasks. In contrast, data distillation (DD) can reduce the exemplar buffer's size, by condensing a large real dataset into a much smaller set of more information-compact synthetic exemplars. Nevertheless, DD's performance gain on IL quickly vanishes as the number of synthetic exemplars grows. To overcome the weaknesses of real-data and synthetic-data buffers, we instead optimize a hybrid memory including both types of data. Specifically, we propose an innovative modification to DD that distills synthetic data from a sliding window of checkpoints in history (rather than checkpoints on multiple training trajectories). Conditioned on the synthetic data, we then optimize the selection of real exemplars to provide complementary improvement to the DD objective. The optimized hybrid memory combines the strengths of synthetic and real exemplars, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting in Class IL (CIL) when the buffer size for exemplars is limited. Notably, our method can be seamlessly integrated into most existing replay-based CIL models. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing replay-based baselines.
Evaluation of Human-Robot Interfaces based on 2D/3D Visual and Haptic Feedback for Aerial Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Most telemanipulation systems for aerial robots provide the operator with only 2D screen visual information. The lack of richer information about the robot's status and environment can limit human awareness and, in turn, task performance. While the pilot's experience can often compensate for this reduced flow of information, providing richer feedback is expected to reduce the cognitive workload and offer a more intuitive experience overall. This work aims to understand the significance of providing additional pieces of information during aerial telemanipulation, namely (i) 3D immersive visual feedback about the robot's surroundings through mixed reality (MR) and (ii) 3D haptic feedback about the robot interaction with the environment. To do so, we developed a human-robot interface able to provide this information. First, we demonstrate its potential in a real-world manipulation task requiring sub-centimeter-level accuracy. Then, we evaluate the individual effect of MR vision and haptic feedback on both dexterity and workload through a human subjects study involving a virtual block transportation task. Results show that both 3D MR vision and haptic feedback improve the operator's dexterity in the considered teleoperated aerial interaction tasks. Nevertheless, pilot experience remains the most significant factor.
PEAS: A Strategy for Crafting Transferable Adversarial Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Black box attacks, where adversaries have limited knowledge of the target model, pose a significant threat to machine learning systems. Adversarial examples generated with a substitute model often suffer from limited transferability to the target model. While recent work explores ranking perturbations for improved success rates, these methods see only modest gains. We propose a novel strategy called PEAS that can boost the transferability of existing black box attacks. PEAS leverages the insight that samples which are perceptually equivalent exhibit significant variability in their adversarial transferability. Our approach first generates a set of images from an initial sample via subtle augmentations. We then evaluate the transferability of adversarial perturbations on these images using a set of substitute models. Finally, the most transferable adversarial example is selected and used for the attack. Our experiments show that PEAS can double the performance of existing attacks, achieving a 2.5x improvement in attack success rates on average over current ranking methods. We thoroughly evaluate PEAS on ImageNet and CIFAR-10, analyze hyperparameter impacts, and provide an ablation study to isolate each component's importance.
A Simplified Parameterized Algorithm for Directed Feedback Vertex Set
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The Directed Feedback Vertex Set problem (DFVS) asks whether it is possible to remove at most $k$ vertices from a directed graph to make it acyclic. Whether DFVS is fixed-parameter tractable was a long-standing open problem in parameterized complexity until it was solved by Chen et al. in 2008 (STOC 2008). Now the running-time bound of this problem is improved to $\mathcal O(k!4^kk^5(n+m))$ (Lokshtanov et al, SODA 2018), where $n$ and $m$ are the numbers of vertices and arcs in the graph. In this paper, we simplify one crucial step in all previous parameterized algorithms for DFVS, which is to solve the compression version of the problem, and refine the running-time bound for DFVS to $\mathcal O(k!2^{o(k)}(n+m))$.
Human-Data Interaction: Thinking beyond individual datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Having greater access to data leads to many benefits, from advancing science to promoting accountability in government to boosting innovation. However, merely providing data access does not make data easy to use; even when data is openly available online, people may struggle to work with it. In this article, we draw on prior work, including our own, and a case study of Kaggle (a large online data science community) to discuss the importance of moving away from viewing datasets as static resources. Instead, we describe the view of data as a process with its own interactional affordances that offer many different possibilities for data, as well as for social interaction. We advocate for the notion of Human Data Interactions and their potential implications for various audiences.
Evaluating Consistencies in LLM responses through a Semantic Clustering of Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the realm of Large Language Model (LLM) functionalities, providing reliable information is paramount, yet reports suggest that LLM outputs lack consistency. This inconsistency, often at-tributed to randomness in token sampling, under-mines user trust as it leads to varying responses even for identical queries. In this paper, we present a new approach for evaluating semantic consistencies of LLM including comparison of alternative tech-niques. Our approach evaluates whether LLM re-sponses are semantically congruent for a given question, recognizing that as syntactically different sentences may convey the same meaning. Here-tofore, To enhance LLM consistency, two main approaches have been explored: Leverage external knowledge as context like the RAG pattern or use Zero-shot-CoT to improve performance of LLM itself. We apply our evaluation approach to these techniques, and demonstrate to compare the im-pact of these methods on LLM response con-sistency across different domains of question an-swering tasks. Using the TruthfulQA dataset to assess LLM responses, the study induces N re-sponses per question from the LLM and clusters semantically equivalent sentences to measure semantic consistency across 37 categories. Through this, it quantitatively analyzes the effectiveness of the aforementioned methods in improving LLM performance before and after their adoption.
Lie Theory Based Optimization for Unified State Planning of Mobile Manipulators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Mobile manipulators are finding use in numerous practical applications. The current issues with mobile manipulation are the large state space owing to the mobile base and the challenge of modeling high degree of freedom systems. It is critical to devise fast and accurate algorithms that generate smooth motion plans for such mobile manipulators. Existing techniques attempt to solve this problem but focus on separating the motion of the base and manipulator. We propose an approach using Lie theory to find the inverse kinematic constraints by converting the kinematic model, created using screw coordinates, between its Lie group and vector representation. An optimization function is devised to solve for the desired joint states of the entire mobile manipulator. This allows the motion of the mobile base and manipulator to be planned and applied in unison resulting in a smooth and accurate motion plan. The performance of the proposed state planner is validated on simulated mobile manipulators in an analytical experiment. Our solver is available with further derivations and results at https://github.com/peleito/slithers.
MDFI-Net: Multiscale Differential Feature Interaction Network for Accurate Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The accurate segmentation of retinal vessels in fundus images is a great challenge in medical image segmentation tasks due to their highly complex structure from other organs.Currently, deep-learning based methods for retinal cessel segmentation achieved suboptimal outcoms,since vessels with indistinct features are prone to being overlooked in deeper layers of the network. Additionally, the abundance of redundant information in the background poses significant interference to feature extraction, thus increasing the segmentation difficulty. To address this issue, this paper proposes a feature-enhanced interaction network based on DPCN, named MDFI-Net.Specifically, we design a feature enhancement structure, the Deformable-convolutional Pulse Coupling Network (DPCN), to provide an enhanced feature iteration sequence to the segmentation network in a simple and efficient manner. Subsequently, these features will interact within the segmentation network.Extensive experiments were conducted on publicly available retinal vessel segmentation datasets to validate the effectiveness of our network structure. Experimental results of our algorithm show that the detection accuracy of the retinal blood vessel achieves 97.91%, 97.97% and 98.16% across all datasets. Finally, plentiful experimental results also prove that the proposed MDFI-Net achieves segmentation performance superior to state-of-the-art methods on public datasets.
Heuristic-based Dynamic Leiden Algorithm for Efficient Tracking of Communities on Evolving Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Community detection, or clustering, identifies groups of nodes in a graph that are more densely connected to each other than to the rest of the network. Given the size and dynamic nature of real-world graphs, efficient community detection is crucial for tracking evolving communities, enhancing our understanding and management of complex systems. The Leiden algorithm, which improves upon the Louvain algorithm, efficiently detects communities in large networks, producing high-quality structures. However, existing multicore dynamic community detection algorithms based on Leiden are inefficient and lack support for tracking evolving communities. This technical report introduces the first implementations of parallel Naive-dynamic (ND), Delta-screening (DS), and Dynamic Frontier (DF) Leiden algorithms that efficiently track communities over time. Experiments on a 64-core AMD EPYC-7742 processor demonstrate that ND, DS, and DF Leiden achieve average speedups of 3.9x, 4.4x, and 6.1x, respectively, on large graphs with random batch updates compared to the Static Leiden algorithm, and these approaches scale at 1.4 - 1.5x for every thread doubling.
A Novel Interpretability Metric for Explaining Bias in Language Models: Applications on Multilingual Models from Southeast Asia
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Work on bias in pretrained language models (PLMs) focuses on bias evaluation and mitigation and fails to tackle the question of bias attribution and explainability. We propose a novel metric, the $\textit{bias attribution score}$, which draws from information theory to measure token-level contributions to biased behavior in PLMs. We then demonstrate the utility of this metric by applying it on multilingual PLMs, including models from Southeast Asia which have not yet been thoroughly examined in bias evaluation literature. Our results confirm the presence of sexist and homophobic bias in Southeast Asian PLMs. Interpretability and semantic analyses also reveal that PLM bias is strongly induced by words relating to crime, intimate relationships, and helping among other discursive categories, suggesting that these are topics where PLMs strongly reproduce bias from pretraining data and where PLMs should be used with more caution.
AssemblyComplete: 3D Combinatorial Construction with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

A critical goal in robotics and autonomy is to teach robots to adapt to real-world collaborative tasks, particularly in automatic assembly. The ability of a robot to understand the original intent of an incomplete assembly and complete missing features without human instruction is valuable but challenging. This paper introduces 3D combinatorial assembly completion, which is demonstrated using combinatorial unit primitives (i.e., Lego bricks). Combinatorial assembly is challenging due to the possible assembly combinations and complex physical constraints (e.g., no brick collisions, structure stability, inventory constraints, etc.). To address these challenges, we propose a two-part deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that tackles teaching the robot to understand the objective of an incomplete assembly and learning a construction policy to complete the assembly. The robot queries a stable object library to facilitate assembly inference and guide learning. In addition to the robot policy, an action mask is developed to rule out invalid actions that violate physical constraints for object-oriented construction. We demonstrate the proposed framework's feasibility and robustness in a variety of assembly scenarios in which the robot satisfies real-life assembly with respect to both solution and runtime quality. Furthermore, results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively infers and assembles incomplete structures for unseen and unique object types.