OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Space Filling Curves for Coverage Path Planning with Online Obstacle Avoidance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The paper presents a strategy for robotic exploration problem using Space-Filling curves (SFC). The strategy plans a path that avoids unknown obstacles while ensuring complete coverage of the free space in region of interest. The region of interest is first tessellated, and the tiles/cells are connected using a SFC pattern. A robot follows the SFC to explore the entire area. However, obstacles can block the systematic movement of the robot. We overcome this problem by determining an alternate path online that avoids the blocked cells while ensuring all the accessible cells are visited at least once. The proposed strategy chooses next waypoint based on the graph connectivity of the cells and the obstacle encountered so far. It is online, exhaustive and works in situations demanding non-uniform coverage. The completeness of the strategy is proved and its desirable properties are discussed with examples.
A Novel Nearest Neighbors Algorithm Based on Power Muirhead Mean
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the innovative Power Muirhead Mean K-Nearest Neighbors (PMM-KNN) algorithm, a novel data classification approach that combines the K-Nearest Neighbors method with the adaptive Power Muirhead Mean operator. The proposed methodology aims to address the limitations of traditional KNN by leveraging the Power Muirhead Mean for calculating the local means of K-nearest neighbors in each class to the query sample. Extensive experimentation on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrates the superiority of PMM-KNN over other classification methods. Results indicate statistically significant improvements in accuracy on various datasets, particularly those with complex and high-dimensional distributions. The adaptability of the Power Muirhead Mean empowers PMM-KNN to effectively capture underlying data structures, leading to enhanced accuracy and robustness. The findings highlight the potential of PMM-KNN as a powerful and versatile tool for data classification tasks, encouraging further research to explore its application in real-world scenarios and the automation of Power Muirhead Mean parameters to unleash its full potential.
FairSNA: Algorithmic Fairness in Social Network Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, designing fairness-aware methods has received much attention in various domains, including machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval. However, understanding structural bias and inequalities in social networks and designing fairness-aware methods for various research problems in social network analysis (SNA) have not received much attention. In this work, we highlight how the structural bias of social networks impacts the fairness of different SNA methods. We further discuss fairness aspects that should be considered while proposing network structure-based solutions for different SNA problems, such as link prediction, influence maximization, centrality ranking, and community detection. This paper clearly highlights that very few works have considered fairness and bias while proposing solutions; even these works are mainly focused on some research topics, such as link prediction, influence maximization, and PageRank. However, fairness has not yet been addressed for other research topics, such as influence blocking and community detection. We review state-of-the-art for different research topics in SNA, including the considered fairness constraints, their limitations, and our vision. This paper also covers evaluation metrics, available datasets, and synthetic network generating models used in such studies. Finally, we highlight various open research directions that require researchers' attention to bridge the gap between fairness and SNA.
Task-wise Sampling Convolutions for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection in Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Arbitrary-oriented object detection (AOOD) has been widely applied to locate and classify objects with diverse orientations in remote sensing images. However, the inconsistent features for the localization and classification tasks in AOOD models may lead to ambiguity and low-quality object predictions, which constrains the detection performance. In this article, an AOOD method called task-wise sampling convolutions (TS-Conv) is proposed. TS-Conv adaptively samples task-wise features from respective sensitive regions and maps these features together in alignment to guide a dynamic label assignment for better predictions. Specifically, sampling positions of the localization convolution in TS-Conv are supervised by the oriented bounding box (OBB) prediction associated with spatial coordinates, while sampling positions and convolutional kernel of the classification convolution are designed to be adaptively adjusted according to different orientations for improving the orientation robustness of features. Furthermore, a dynamic task-consistent-aware label assignment (DTLA) strategy is developed to select optimal candidate positions and assign labels dynamically according to ranked task-aware scores obtained from TS-Conv. Extensive experiments on several public datasets covering multiple scenes, multimodal images, and multiple categories of objects demonstrate the effectiveness, scalability, and superior performance of the proposed TS-Conv.
A Survey of Machine Unlearning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Today, computer systems hold large amounts of personal data. Yet while such an abundance of data allows breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and especially machine learning (ML), its existence can be a threat to user privacy, and it can weaken the bonds of trust between humans and AI. Recent regulations now require that, on request, private information about a user must be removed from both computer systems and from ML models, i.e. ``the right to be forgotten''). While removing data from back-end databases should be straightforward, it is not sufficient in the AI context as ML models often `remember' the old data. Contemporary adversarial attacks on trained models have proven that we can learn whether an instance or an attribute belonged to the training data. This phenomenon calls for a new paradigm, namely machine unlearning, to make ML models forget about particular data. It turns out that recent works on machine unlearning have not been able to completely solve the problem due to the lack of common frameworks and resources. Therefore, this paper aspires to present a comprehensive examination of machine unlearning's concepts, scenarios, methods, and applications. Specifically, as a category collection of cutting-edge studies, the intention behind this article is to serve as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners seeking an introduction to machine unlearning and its formulations, design criteria, removal requests, algorithms, and applications. In addition, we aim to highlight the key findings, current trends, and new research areas that have not yet featured the use of machine unlearning but could benefit greatly from it. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for ML researchers and those seeking to innovate privacy technologies. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/tamlhp/awesome-machine-unlearning.
Multi-Modal Experience Inspired AI Creation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

AI creation, such as poem or lyrics generation, has attracted increasing attention from both industry and academic communities, with many promising models proposed in the past few years. Existing methods usually estimate the outputs based on single and independent visual or textual information. However, in reality, humans usually make creations according to their experiences, which may involve different modalities and be sequentially correlated. To model such human capabilities, in this paper, we define and solve a novel AI creation problem based on human experiences. More specifically, we study how to generate texts based on sequential multi-modal information. Compared with the previous works, this task is much more difficult because the designed model has to well understand and adapt the semantics among different modalities and effectively convert them into the output in a sequential manner. To alleviate these difficulties, we firstly design a multi-channel sequence-to-sequence architecture equipped with a multi-modal attention network. For more effective optimization, we then propose a curriculum negative sampling strategy tailored for the sequential inputs. To benchmark this problem and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we manually labeled a new multi-modal experience dataset. With this dataset, we conduct extensive experiments by comparing our model with a series of representative baselines, where we can demonstrate significant improvements in our model based on both automatic and human-centered metrics. The code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/MMTG}.
Finite-Time Error Bounds for Greedy-GQ
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Greedy-GQ with linear function approximation, originally proposed in \cite{maei2010toward}, is a value-based off-policy algorithm for optimal control in reinforcement learning, and it has a non-linear two timescale structure with the non-convex objective function. This paper develops its tightest finite-time error bounds. We show that the Greedy-GQ algorithm converges as fast as $\mathcal{O}({1}/{\sqrt{T}})$ under the i.i.d.\ setting and $\mathcal{O}({\log T}/{\sqrt{T}})$ under the Markovian setting. We further design a variant of the vanilla Greedy-GQ algorithm using the nested-loop approach, and show that its sample complexity is $\mathcal{O}({\log(1/ε)ε^{-2}})$, which matches with the one of the vanilla Greedy-GQ. Our finite-time error bounds match with one of the stochastic gradient descent algorithms for general smooth non-convex optimization problems, despite its additonal challenge in the two time-scale updates. Our finite-sample analysis provides theoretical guidance on choosing step-sizes for faster convergence in practice, and suggests the trade-off between the convergence rate and the quality of the obtained policy. Our techniques provide a general approach for finite-sample analysis of non-convex two timescale value-based reinforcement learning algorithms.
Adaptive Complexity Model Predictive Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This work introduces a formulation of model predictive control (MPC) which adaptively reasons about the complexity of the model based on the task while maintaining feasibility and stability guarantees. Existing MPC implementations often handle computational complexity by shortening prediction horizons or simplifying models, both of which can result in instability. Inspired by related approaches in behavioral economics, motion planning, and biomechanics, our method solves MPC problems with a simple model for dynamics and constraints over regions of the horizon where such a model is feasible and a complex model where it is not. The approach leverages an interleaving of planning and execution to iteratively identify these regions, which can be safely simplified if they satisfy an exact template/anchor relationship. We show that this method does not compromise the stability and feasibility properties of the system, and measure performance in simulation experiments on a quadrupedal robot executing agile behaviors over terrains of interest. We find that this adaptive method enables more agile motion and expands the range of executable tasks compared to fixed-complexity implementations.
Regulating eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) May Harm Consumers
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recent AI algorithms are black box models whose decisions are difficult to interpret. eXplainable AI (XAI) is a class of methods that seek to address lack of AI interpretability and trust by explaining to customers their AI decisions. The common wisdom is that regulating AI by mandating fully transparent XAI leads to greater social welfare. Our paper challenges this notion through a game theoretic model of a policy-maker who maximizes social welfare, firms in a duopoly competition that maximize profits, and heterogenous consumers. The results show that XAI regulation may be redundant. In fact, mandating fully transparent XAI may make firms and consumers worse off. This reveals a tradeoff between maximizing welfare and receiving explainable AI outputs. We extend the existing literature on method and substantive fronts, and we introduce and study the notion of XAI fairness, which may be impossible to guarantee even under mandatory XAI. Finally, the regulatory and managerial implications of our results for policy-makers and businesses are discussed, respectively.
SSL-WM: A Black-Box Watermarking Approach for Encoders Pre-trained by Self-supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent years have witnessed tremendous success in Self-Supervised Learning (SSL), which has been widely utilized to facilitate various downstream tasks in Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) domains. However, attackers may steal such SSL models and commercialize them for profit, making it crucial to verify the ownership of the SSL models. Most existing ownership protection solutions (e.g., backdoor-based watermarks) are designed for supervised learning models and cannot be used directly since they require that the models' downstream tasks and target labels be known and available during watermark embedding, which is not always possible in the domain of SSL. To address such a problem, especially when downstream tasks are diverse and unknown during watermark embedding, we propose a novel black-box watermarking solution, named SSL-WM, for verifying the ownership of SSL models. SSL-WM maps watermarked inputs of the protected encoders into an invariant representation space, which causes any downstream classifier to produce expected behavior, thus allowing the detection of embedded watermarks. We evaluate SSL-WM on numerous tasks, such as CV and NLP, using different SSL models both contrastive-based and generative-based. Experimental results demonstrate that SSL-WM can effectively verify the ownership of stolen SSL models in various downstream tasks. Furthermore, SSL-WM is robust against model fine-tuning, pruning, and input preprocessing attacks. Lastly, SSL-WM can also evade detection from evaluated watermark detection approaches, demonstrating its promising application in protecting the ownership of SSL models.
Deep Learning Models for Detecting Malware Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Malware is one of the most common and severe cyber-attack today. Malware infects millions of devices and can perform several malicious activities including mining sensitive data, encrypting data, crippling system performance, and many more. Hence, malware detection is crucial to protect our computers and mobile devices from malware attacks. Deep learning (DL) is one of the emerging and promising technologies for detecting malware. The recent high production of malware variants against desktop and mobile platforms makes DL algorithms powerful approaches for building scalable and advanced malware detection models as they can handle big datasets. This work explores current deep learning technologies for detecting malware attacks on the Windows, Linux, and Android platforms. Specifically, we present different categories of DL algorithms, network optimizers, and regularization methods. Different loss functions, activation functions, and frameworks for implementing DL models are presented. We also present feature extraction approaches and a review of recent DL-based models for detecting malware attacks on the above platforms. Furthermore, this work presents major research issues on malware detection including future directions to further advance knowledge and research in this field.
PixTrack: Precise 6DoF Object Pose Tracking using NeRF Templates and Feature-metric Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present PixTrack, a vision based object pose tracking framework using novel view synthesis and deep feature-metric alignment. We follow an SfM-based relocalization paradigm where we use a Neural Radiance Field to canonically represent the tracked object. Our evaluations demonstrate that our method produces highly accurate, robust, and jitter-free 6DoF pose estimates of objects in both monocular RGB images and RGB-D images without the need of any data annotation or trajectory smoothing. Our method is also computationally efficient making it easy to have multi-object tracking with no alteration to our algorithm through simple CPU multiprocessing. Our code is available at: https://github.com/GiantAI/pixtrack
Assessing Lower Limb Strength using Internet-of-Things Enabled Chair
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This project describes the application of the technologies of Machine Learning and Internet-of-Things to assess the lower limb strength of individuals undergoing rehabilitation or therapy. Specifically, it seeks to measure and assess the progress of individuals by sensors attached to chairs and processing the data through Google GPU Tensorflow CoLab. Pressure sensors are attached to various locations on a chair, including but not limited to the seating area, backrest, hand rests, and legs. Sensor data from the individual performing both sit-to-stand transition and stand-to-sit transition provides a time series dataset regarding the pressure distribution and vibratory motion on the chair. The dataset and timing information can then be fed into a machine learning model to estimate the relative strength and weakness during various phases of the movement.
Diagnosis-guided Attack Recovery for Securing Robotic Vehicles from Sensor Deception Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Sensors are crucial for perception and autonomous operation in robotic vehicles (RV). Unfortunately, RV sensors can be compromised by physical attacks such as sensor tampering or spoofing. In this paper, we present DeLorean, a unified framework for attack detection, attack diagnosis, and recovering RVs from sensor deception attacks (SDA). DeLorean can recover RVs even from strong SDAs in which the adversary targets multiple heterogeneous sensors simultaneously. We propose a novel attack diagnosis technique that inspects the attack-induced errors under SDAs, and identifies the targeted sensors using causal analysis. DeLorean then uses historic state information to selectively reconstruct physical states for compromised sensors, enabling targeted attack recovery under single or multi-sensor SDAs. We evaluate DeLorean on four real and two simulated RVs under SDAs targeting various sensors, and we find that it successfully recovers RVs from SDAs in 93% of the cases.
Causal Intervention for Fairness in Multi-behavior Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recommender systems usually learn user interests from various user behaviors, including clicks and post-click behaviors (e.g., like and favorite). However, these behaviors inevitably exhibit popularity bias, leading to some unfairness issues: 1) for items with similar quality, more popular ones get more exposure; and 2) even worse the popular items with lower popularity might receive more exposure. Existing work on mitigating popularity bias blindly eliminates the bias and usually ignores the effect of item quality. We argue that the relationships between different user behaviors (e.g., conversion rate) actually reflect the item quality. Therefore, to handle the unfairness issues, we propose to mitigate the popularity bias by considering multiple user behaviors. In this work, we examine causal relationships behind the interaction generation procedure in multi-behavior recommendation. Specifically, we find that: 1) item popularity is a confounder between the exposed items and users' post-click interactions, leading to the first unfairness; and 2) some hidden confounders (e.g., the reputation of item producers) affect both item popularity and quality, resulting in the second unfairness. To alleviate these confounding issues, we propose a causal framework to estimate the causal effect, which leverages backdoor adjustment to block the backdoor paths caused by the confounders. In the inference stage, we remove the negative effect of popularity and utilize the good effect of quality for recommendation. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which enhances fairness without sacrificing recommendation accuracy.
Graph Neural Modeling of Network Flows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Network flow problems, which involve distributing traffic such that the underlying infrastructure is used effectively, are ubiquitous in transportation and logistics. Among them, the general Multi-Commodity Network Flow (MCNF) problem concerns the distribution of multiple flows of different sizes between several sources and sinks, while achieving effective utilization of the links. Due to the appeal of data-driven optimization, these problems have increasingly been approached using graph learning methods. In this paper, we propose a novel graph learning architecture for network flow problems called Per-Edge Weights (PEW). This method builds on a Graph Attention Network and uses distinctly parametrized message functions along each link. We extensively evaluate the proposed solution through an Internet flow routing case study using $17$ Service Provider topologies and $2$ routing schemes. We show that PEW yields substantial gains over architectures whose global message function constrains the routing unnecessarily. We also find that an MLP is competitive with other standard architectures. Furthermore, we analyze the relationship between graph structure and predictive performance for data-driven routing of flows, an aspect that has not been considered by existing work in the area.
Composing Copyless Streaming String Transducers
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

Streaming string transducers (SSTs) implement string-to-string transformations by reading each input word in a single left-to-right pass while maintaining fragments of potential outputs in a finite set of string variables. These variables get updated on transitions of the transducer, where they can be assigned new values described by concatenations of variables and output symbols. An SST is called copyless if every update is such that no variable occurs more than once amongst all of the assigned expressions. The transformations realized by copyless SSTs coincide with Courcelle's monadic second-order logic graph transducers (MSOTs) when restricted to string graphs. Copyless SSTs with nondeterminism are known to be equivalent to nondeterministic MSOTs as well. MSOTs, both deterministic and nondeterministic, are closed under composition. Given the equivalence of MSOTs and copyless SSTs, it is easy to see that copyless SSTs are also closed under composition. The original proof of this fact, however, was based on a direct construction to produce a composite copyless SST from two given copyless SSTs. A counterexample discovered by Joost Englefriet showed that this construction may produce copyful transducers. We revisit the original composition constructions for both deterministic and nondeterministic SSTs and show that, although they can introduce copyful updates, the resulting copyful behavior they exhibit is superficial. To characterize this mild copyful behavior, we define a subclass of copyful SSTs, called diamond-free SSTs, in which two copies of a common variable are never combined in any subsequent assignment. In order to recover a modified version of the original construction, we provide a method for producing an equivalent copyless SST from any diamond-free copyful SST.