OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Generalized Individual Q-learning for Polymatrix Games with Partial Observations
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses the challenge of limited observations in non-cooperative multi-agent systems where agents can have partial access to other agents' actions. We present the generalized individual Q-learning dynamics that combine belief-based and payoff-based learning for the networked interconnections of more than two self-interested agents. This approach leverages access to opponents' actions whenever possible, demonstrably achieving a faster (guaranteed) convergence to quantal response equilibrium in multi-agent zero-sum and potential polymatrix games. Notably, the dynamics reduce to the well-studied smoothed fictitious play and individual Q-learning under full and no access to opponent actions, respectively. We further quantify the improvement in convergence rate due to observing opponents' actions through numerical simulations.
Creating Domain-Specific Translation Memories for Machine Translation Fine-tuning: The TRENCARD Bilingual Cardiology Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This article investigates how translation memories (TM) can be created by translators or other language professionals in order to compile domain-specific parallel corpora , which can then be used in different scenarios, such as machine translation training and fine-tuning, TM leveraging, and/or large language model fine-tuning. The article introduces a semi-automatic TM preparation methodology leveraging primarily translation tools used by translators in favor of data quality and control by the translators. This semi-automatic methodology is then used to build a cardiology-based Turkish -> English corpus from bilingual abstracts of Turkish cardiology journals. The resulting corpus called TRENCARD Corpus has approximately 800,000 source words and 50,000 sentences. Using this methodology, translators can build their custom TMs in a reasonable time and use them in their bilingual data requiring tasks.
A Low-Cost Real-Time Spiking System for Obstacle Detection based on Ultrasonic Sensors and Rate Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Since the advent of mobile robots, obstacle detection has been a topic of great interest. It has also been a subject of study in neuroscience, where flying insects and bats could be considered two of the most interesting cases in terms of vision-based and sound-based mechanisms for obstacle detection, respectively. Currently, many studies focus on vision-based obstacle detection, but not many can be found regarding sound-based obstacle detection. This work focuses on the latter approach, which also makes use of a Spiking Neural Network to exploit the advantages of these architectures and achieve an approach closer to biology. The complete system was tested through a series of experiments that confirm the validity of the spiking architecture for obstacle detection. It is empirically demonstrated that, when the distance between the robot and the obstacle decreases, the output firing rate of the system increases in response as expected, and vice versa. Therefore, there is a direct relation between the two. Furthermore, there is a distance threshold between detectable and undetectable objects which is also empirically measured in this work. An in-depth study on how this system works at low level based on the Inter-Spike Interval concept was performed, which may be useful in the future development of applications based on spiking filters.
Few-shot Multi-Task Learning of Linear Invariant Features with Meta Subspace Pursuit
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Data scarcity poses a serious threat to modern machine learning and artificial intelligence, as their practical success typically relies on the availability of big datasets. One effective strategy to mitigate the issue of insufficient data is to first harness information from other data sources possessing certain similarities in the study design stage, and then employ the multi-task or meta learning framework in the analysis stage. In this paper, we focus on multi-task (or multi-source) linear models whose coefficients across tasks share an invariant low-rank component, a popular structural assumption considered in the recent multi-task or meta learning literature. Under this assumption, we propose a new algorithm, called Meta Subspace Pursuit (abbreviated as Meta-SP), that provably learns this invariant subspace shared by different tasks. Under this stylized setup for multi-task or meta learning, we establish both the algorithmic and statistical guarantees of the proposed method. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted, comparing Meta-SP against several competing methods, including popular, off-the-shelf model-agnostic meta learning algorithms such as ANIL. These experiments demonstrate that Meta-SP achieves superior performance over the competing methods in various aspects.
A Data Selection Approach for Enhancing Low Resource Machine Translation Using Cross-Lingual Sentence Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Machine translation in low-resource language pairs faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of parallel corpora and linguistic resources. This study focuses on the case of English-Marathi language pairs, where existing datasets are notably noisy, impeding the performance of machine translation models. To mitigate the impact of data quality issues, we propose a data filtering approach based on cross-lingual sentence representations. Our methodology leverages a multilingual SBERT model to filter out problematic translations in the training data. Specifically, we employ an IndicSBERT similarity model to assess the semantic equivalence between original and translated sentences, allowing us to retain linguistically correct translations while discarding instances with substantial deviations. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in translation quality over the baseline post-filtering with IndicSBERT. This illustrates how cross-lingual sentence representations can reduce errors in machine translation scenarios with limited resources. By integrating multilingual sentence BERT models into the translation pipeline, this research contributes to advancing machine translation techniques in low-resource environments. The proposed method not only addresses the challenges in English-Marathi language pairs but also provides a valuable framework for enhancing translation quality in other low-resource language translation tasks.
LIPIDS: Learning-based Illumination Planning In Discretized (Light) Space for Photometric Stereo
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Photometric stereo is a powerful method for obtaining per-pixel surface normals from differently illuminated images of an object. While several methods address photometric stereo with different image (or light) counts ranging from one to two to a hundred, very few focus on learning optimal lighting configuration. Finding an optimal configuration is challenging due to the vast number of possible lighting directions. Moreover, exhaustively sampling all possibilities is impractical due to time and resource constraints. Photometric stereo methods have demonstrated promising performance on existing datasets, which feature limited light directions sparsely sampled from the light space. Therefore, can we optimally utilize these datasets for illumination planning? In this work, we introduce LIPIDS - Learning-based Illumination Planning In Discretized light Space to achieve minimal and optimal lighting configurations for photometric stereo under arbitrary light distribution. We propose a Light Sampling Network (LSNet) that optimizes lighting direction for a fixed number of lights by minimizing the normal loss through a normal regression network. The learned light configurations can directly estimate surface normals during inference, even using an off-the-shelf photometric stereo method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses on synthetic and real-world datasets show that photometric stereo under learned lighting configurations through LIPIDS either surpasses or is nearly comparable to existing illumination planning methods across different photometric stereo backbones.
Pooling And Attention: What Are Effective Designs For LLM-Based Embedding Models?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The significant advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generative tasks have led to a growing body of work exploring LLM-based embedding models. While these models, employing different pooling and attention strategies, have achieved state-of-the-art performance on public embedding benchmarks, questions still arise about what constitutes an effective design for LLM-based embedding models. However, these models are often trained on different datasets, using different LLM base models or training settings. Moreover, evaluations on public embedding benchmarks often fail to report statistical significance, making it difficult to determine which designs truly contribute to final performance. This complicates the process for practitioners seeking optimal training recipes for LLM-based embedding models. In this study, we conduct a large-scale experiment by training a series of LLM-based embedding models using the same training data and base model but differing in their pooling and attention strategies. The results show that there is no one-size-fits-all solution: while bidirectional attention and an additional trainable pooling layer outperform in text similarity and information retrieval tasks, they do not significantly surpass simpler designs like EOS-last token pooling and default causal attention in clustering and classification tasks. Furthermore, we propose a new pooling strategy, Multi-Layers Trainable Pooling, which transforms the outputs of all hidden layers, rather than just the last layer, using a cross-attention network. This method proves to be statistically superior in text similarity and retrieval tasks compared to existing pooling methods. Overall, this paper sheds light on effective training strategies for LLM-based embedding models.
Does the Vulnerability Threaten Our Projects? Automated Vulnerable API Detection for Third-Party Libraries
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Developers usually use TPLs to facilitate the development of the projects to avoid reinventing the wheels, however, the vulnerable TPLs indeed cause severe security threats. The majority of existing research only considered whether projects used vulnerable TPLs but neglected whether the vulnerable code of the TPLs was indeed used by the projects, which inevitably results in false positives and further requires additional patching efforts and maintenance costs. To address this, we propose VAScanner, which can effectively identify vulnerable root methods causing vulnerabilities in TPLs and further identify all vulnerable APIs of TPLs used by Java projects. Specifically, we first collect the initial patch methods from the patch commits and extract accurate patch methods by employing a patch-unrelated sifting mechanism, then we further identify the vulnerable root methods for each vulnerability by employing an augmentation mechanism. Based on them, we leverage backward call graph analysis to identify all vulnerable APIs for each vulnerable TPL version and construct a database consisting of 90,749 (2,410,779 with library versions) vulnerable APIs with 1.45% false positive proportion with a 95% CI of [1.31%, 1.59%] from 362 TPLs with 14,775 versions. Our experiments show VAScanner eliminates 5.78% false positives and 2.16% false negatives owing to the proposed sifting and augmentation mechanisms. Besides, it outperforms the state-of-the-art method-level tool in analyzing direct dependencies, Eclipse Steady, achieving more effective detection of vulnerable APIs. Furthermore, in a large-scale analysis of 3,147 projects using vulnerable TPLs, we find only 21.51% of projects (with 1.83% false positive proportion and a 95% CI of [0.71%, 4.61%]) were threatened through vulnerable APIs by vulnerable TPLs, demonstrating that VAScanner can potentially reduce false positives significantly.
Exploring Sentiment Dynamics and Predictive Behaviors in Cryptocurrency Discussions by Few-Shot Learning with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study performs analysis of Predictive statements, Hope speech, and Regret Detection behaviors within cryptocurrency-related discussions, leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques. We introduce a novel classification scheme named "Prediction statements," categorizing comments into Predictive Incremental, Predictive Decremental, Predictive Neutral, or Non-Predictive categories. Employing GPT-4o, a cutting-edge large language model, we explore sentiment dynamics across five prominent cryptocurrencies: Cardano, Binance, Matic, Fantom, and Ripple. Our analysis reveals distinct patterns in predictive sentiments, with Matic demonstrating a notably higher propensity for optimistic predictions. Additionally, we investigate hope and regret sentiments, uncovering nuanced interplay between these emotions and predictive behaviors. Despite encountering limitations related to data volume and resource availability, our study reports valuable discoveries concerning investor behavior and sentiment trends within the cryptocurrency market, informing strategic decision-making and future research endeavors.
Key Compression Limits for $k$-Minimum Value Sketches
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The $k$-Minimum Values (\kmv) data sketch algorithm stores the $k$ least hash keys generated by hashing the items in a dataset. We show that compression based on ordering the keys and encoding successive differences can offer $O(\log n)$ bits per key in expected storage savings, where $n$ is the number of unique values in the data set. We also show that $O(\log n)$ expected bits saved per key is optimal for any form of compression for the $k$ least of $n$ random values -- that the encoding method is near-optimal among all methods to encode a \kmv sketch. We present a practical method to perform that compression, show that it is computationally efficient, and demonstrate that its average savings in practice is within about five percent of the theoretical minimum based on entropy. We verify that our method outperforms off-the-shelf compression methods, and we demonstrate that it is practical, using real and synthetic data.
Visually Grounded Speech Models for Low-resource Languages and Cognitive Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This dissertation examines visually grounded speech (VGS) models that learn from unlabelled speech paired with images. It focuses on applications for low-resource languages and understanding human language acquisition. We introduce a task called visually prompted keyword localisation to detect and localise keywords in speech using images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VGS models in few-shot learning scenarios for low-resource languages like Yoruba. Additionally, we examine the mutual exclusivity bias in VGS models. Our monolingual VGS model exhibits this bias, but we found that multilingualism does not affect the bias in this VGS model similarly to what is observed in children.
SITAR: Semi-supervised Image Transformer for Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recognizing actions from a limited set of labeled videos remains a challenge as annotating visual data is not only tedious but also can be expensive due to classified nature. Moreover, handling spatio-temporal data using deep $3$D transformers for this can introduce significant computational complexity. In this paper, our objective is to address video action recognition in a semi-supervised setting by leveraging only a handful of labeled videos along with a collection of unlabeled videos in a compute efficient manner. Specifically, we rearrange multiple frames from the input videos in row-column form to construct super images. Subsequently, we capitalize on the vast pool of unlabeled samples and employ contrastive learning on the encoded super images. Our proposed approach employs two pathways to generate representations for temporally augmented super images originating from the same video. Specifically, we utilize a 2D image-transformer to generate representations and apply a contrastive loss function to minimize the similarity between representations from different videos while maximizing the representations of identical videos. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches for semi-supervised action recognition across various benchmark datasets, all while significantly reducing computational costs.
CortexCompile: Harnessing Cortical-Inspired Architectures for Enhanced Multi-Agent NLP Code Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Current approaches to automated code generation often rely on monolithic models that lack real-time adaptability and scalability. This limitation is particularly evident in complex programming tasks that require dynamic adjustment and efficiency. The integration of neuroscience principles into Natural Language Processing (NLP) has the potential to revolutionize automated code generation. This paper presents CortexCompile, a novel modular system inspired by the specialized functions of the human brain's cortical regions. By emulating the distinct roles of the Prefrontal Cortex, Parietal Cortex, Temporal Lobe, and Motor Cortex, CortexCompile achieves significant advancements in scalability, efficiency, and adaptability compared to traditional monolithic models like GPT-4o. The system's architecture features a Task Orchestration Agent that manages dynamic task delegation and parallel processing, facilitating the generation of highly accurate and optimized code across increasingly complex programming tasks. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that CortexCompile consistently outperforms GPT-4o in development time, accuracy, and user satisfaction, particularly in tasks involving real-time strategy games and first-person shooters. These findings underscore the viability of neuroscience-inspired architectures in addressing the limitations of current NLP models, paving the way for more efficient and human-like AI systems.
A Note On Deterministic Submodular Maximization With Bounded Curvature
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We show that the recent breakthrough result of [Buchbinder and Feldman, FOCS'24] could further lead to a deterministic $(1-κ_{f}/e-\varepsilon)$-approximate algorithm for maximizing a submodular function with curvature $κ_{f}$ under matroid constraint.
Multi-Modal Adapter for Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of image classification tasks, without requiring retraining. Few-shot CLIP is competitive with existing specialized architectures that were trained on the downstream tasks. Recent research demonstrates that the performance of CLIP can be further improved using lightweight adaptation approaches. However, previous methods adapt different modalities of the CLIP model individually, ignoring the interactions and relationships between visual and textual representations. In this work, we propose Multi-Modal Adapter, an approach for Multi-Modal adaptation of CLIP. Specifically, we add a trainable Multi-Head Attention layer that combines text and image features to produce an additive adaptation of both. Multi-Modal Adapter demonstrates improved generalizability, based on its performance on unseen classes compared to existing adaptation methods. We perform additional ablations and investigations to validate and interpret the proposed approach.
A Comprehensive Survey of Blockchain Scalability: Shaping Inner-Chain and Inter-Chain Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Blockchain is widely applied in logistics, finance, and agriculture. As single blockchain users grow, scalability becomes crucial. However, existing works lack a comprehensive summary of blockchain scalability. They focus on single chains or cross-chain technologies. This survey summarizes scalability across the physical and logical layers, as well as inner-chain, inter-chain, and technology dimensions. The physical layer covers data and protocols, while the logical layer represents blockchain architecture. Each component is analyzed from inner-chain and inter-chain perspectives, considering technological factors. The aim is to enhance researchers' understanding of blockchain's architecture, data, and protocols to advance scalability research.
Meal-taking activity monitoring in the elderly based on sensor data: Comparison of unsupervised classification methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In an era marked by a demographic change towards an older population, there is an urgent need to improve nutritional monitoring in view of the increase in frailty. This research aims to enhance the identification of meal-taking activities by combining K-Means, GMM, and DBSCAN techniques. Using the Davies-Bouldin Index (DBI) for the optimal meal taking activity clustering, the results show that K-Means seems to be the best solution, thanks to its unrivalled efficiency in data demarcation, compared with the capabilities of GMM and DBSCAN. Although capable of identifying complex patterns and outliers, the latter methods are limited by their operational complexities and dependence on precise parameter configurations. In this paper, we have processed data from 4 houses equipped with sensors. The findings indicate that applying the K-Means method results in high performance, evidenced by a particularly low Davies-Bouldin Index (DBI), illustrating optimal cluster separation and cohesion. Calculating the average duration of each activity using the GMM algorithm allows distinguishing various categories of meal-taking activities. Alternatively, this can correspond to different times of the day fitting to each meal-taking activity. Using K-Means, GMM, and DBSCAN clustering algorithms, the study demonstrates an effective strategy for thoroughly understanding the data. This approach facilitates the comparison and selection of the most suitable method for optimal meal-taking activity clustering.
SDOoop: Capturing Periodical Patterns and Out-of-phase Anomalies in Streaming Data Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Streaming data analysis is increasingly required in applications, e.g., IoT, cybersecurity, robotics, mechatronics or cyber-physical systems. Despite its relevance, it is still an emerging field with open challenges. SDO is a recent anomaly detection method designed to meet requirements of speed, interpretability and intuitive parameterization. In this work, we present SDOoop, which extends the capabilities of SDO's streaming version to retain temporal information of data structures. SDOoop spots contextual anomalies undetectable by traditional algorithms, while enabling the inspection of data geometries, clusters and temporal patterns. We used SDOoop to model real network communications in critical infrastructures and extract patterns that disclose their dynamics. Moreover, we evaluated SDOoop with data from intrusion detection and natural science domains and obtained performances equivalent or superior to state-of-the-art approaches. Our results show the high potential of new model-based methods to analyze and explain streaming data. Since SDOoop operates with constant per-sample space and time complexity, it is ideal for big data, being able to instantly process large volumes of information. SDOoop conforms to next-generation machine learning, which, in addition to accuracy and speed, is expected to provide highly interpretable and informative models.