OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
High Epsilon Synthetic Data Vulnerabilities in MST and PrivBayes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Synthetic data generation (SDG) has become increasingly popular as a privacy-enhancing technology. It aims to maintain important statistical properties of its underlying training data, while excluding any personally identifiable information. There have been a whole host of SDG algorithms developed in recent years to improve and balance both of these aims. Many of these algorithms provide robust differential privacy guarantees. However, we show here that if the differential privacy parameter $\varepsilon$ is set too high, then unambiguous privacy leakage can result. We show this by conducting a novel membership inference attack (MIA) on two state-of-the-art differentially private SDG algorithms: MST and PrivBayes. Our work suggests that there are vulnerabilities in these generators not previously seen, and that future work to strengthen their privacy is advisable. We present the heuristic for our MIA here. It assumes knowledge of auxiliary "population" data, and also assumes knowledge of which SDG algorithm was used. We use this information to adapt the recent DOMIAS MIA uniquely to MST and PrivBayes. Our approach went on to win the SNAKE challenge in November 2023.
Evaluation Metrics for Text Data Augmentation in NLP
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent surveys on data augmentation for natural language processing have reported different techniques and advancements in the field. Several frameworks, tools, and repositories promote the implementation of text data augmentation pipelines. However, a lack of evaluation criteria and standards for method comparison due to different tasks, metrics, datasets, architectures, and experimental settings makes comparisons meaningless. Also, a lack of methods unification exists and text data augmentation research would benefit from unified metrics to compare different augmentation methods. Thus, academics and the industry endeavor relevant evaluation metrics for text data augmentation techniques. The contribution of this work is to provide a taxonomy of evaluation metrics for text augmentation methods and serve as a direction for a unified benchmark. The proposed taxonomy organizes categories that include tools for implementation and metrics calculation. Finally, with this study, we intend to present opportunities to explore the unification and standardization of text data augmentation metrics.
Precoded Polar Product Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Precoded polar product codes are proposed, where selected component codes enable successive cancellation list decoding to generate bit-wise soft messages efficiently for iterative decoding while targeting optimized distance spectrum as opposed to eBCH or polar component codes. Rate compatibility is a byproduct of $1$-bit granularity in the component code design.
Twenty Constructionist Things to Do with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we build on the 1971 memo "Twenty Things to Do With a Computer" by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon and propose twenty constructionist things to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Several proposals build on ideas developed in the original memo while others are new and address topics in science, mathematics, and the arts. In reviewing the big themes, we notice a renewed interest in children's engagement not just for technical proficiency but also to cultivate a deeper understanding of their own cognitive processes. Furthermore, the ideas stress the importance of designing personally relevant AI/ML applications, moving beyond isolated models and off-the-shelf datasets disconnected from their interests. We also acknowledge the social aspects of data production involved in making AI/ML applications. Finally, we highlight the critical dimensions necessary to address potential harmful algorithmic biases and consequences of AI/ML applications.
Towards Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler-Guide Dog Interactions for Informed Guide Dog Robot Design
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Dog guides are favored by blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals for their ability to enhance independence and confidence by reducing safety concerns and increasing navigation efficiency compared to traditional mobility aids. However, only a relatively small proportion of BLV individuals work with dog guides due to their limited availability and associated maintenance responsibilities. There is considerable recent interest in addressing this challenge by developing legged guide dog robots. This study was designed to determine critical aspects of the handler-guide dog interaction and better understand handler needs to inform guide dog robot development. We conducted semi-structured interviews and observation sessions with 23 dog guide handlers and 5 trainers. Thematic analysis revealed critical limitations in guide dog work, desired personalization in handler-guide dog interaction, and important perspectives on future guide dog robots. Grounded on these findings, we discuss pivotal design insights for guide dog robots aimed for adoption within the BLV community.
Squidgets: Sketch-based Widget Design and Direct Manipulation of 3D Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Squidgets or 'sketch-widgets' is a novel stroke-based UI framework for direct scene manipulation. Squidgets is motivated by the observation that sketch strokes comprising visual abstractions of scene elements implicitly provide natural handles for the direct manipulation of scene parameters. Configurations of such strokes can further be explicitly drawn by users to author custom widgets associated with scene attributes. Users manipulate a scene by simply drawing strokes: a squidget is selected by partially matching the drawn stroke against both implicit scene contours and explicitly authored curves, and used in-situ to interactively control scene parameters associated with the squidget. We present an implementation of squidgets within the 3D modeling animation system Maya, and report on an evaluation of squidget creation and manipulation, by both casual users and professional artists.
The Complexity of Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problem Seen from the Other Side
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the framework of the left-hand side restricted promise constraint satisfaction problem, which includes problems like approximating clique number of a graph. We study the parameterized complexity of problems in this class and provide some initial results. The main technical contribution is a sufficient condition for W[1]-hardness which, in particular, covers left-hand side restricted bounded arity CSPs.
Gyroscope-Assisted Motion Deblurring Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image research has shown substantial attention in deblurring networks in recent years. Yet, their practical usage in real-world deblurring, especially motion blur, remains limited due to the lack of pixel-aligned training triplets (background, blurred image, and blur heat map) and restricted information inherent in blurred images. This paper presents a simple yet efficient framework to synthetic and restore motion blur images using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Notably, the framework includes a strategy for training triplet generation, and a Gyroscope-Aided Motion Deblurring (GAMD) network for blurred image restoration. The rationale is that through harnessing IMU data, we can determine the transformation of the camera pose during the image exposure phase, facilitating the deduction of the motion trajectory (aka. blur trajectory) for each point inside the three-dimensional space. Thus, the synthetic triplets using our strategy are inherently close to natural motion blur, strictly pixel-aligned, and mass-producible. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework: only two-pixel errors between our synthetic and real-world blur trajectories, a marked improvement (around 33.17%) of the state-of-the-art deblurring method MIMO on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR).
Can LLMs Recognize Toxicity? A Structured Investigation Framework and Toxicity Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the pursuit of developing Large Language Models (LLMs) that adhere to societal standards, it is imperative to detect the toxicity in the generated text. The majority of existing toxicity metrics rely on encoder models trained on specific toxicity datasets, which are susceptible to out-of-distribution (OOD) problems and depend on the dataset's definition of toxicity. In this paper, we introduce a robust metric grounded on LLMs to flexibly measure toxicity according to the given definition. We first analyze the toxicity factors, followed by an examination of the intrinsic toxic attributes of LLMs to ascertain their suitability as evaluators. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our metric with detailed analysis. Our empirical results demonstrate outstanding performance in measuring toxicity within verified factors, improving on conventional metrics by 12 points in the F1 score. Our findings also indicate that upstream toxicity significantly influences downstream metrics, suggesting that LLMs are unsuitable for toxicity evaluations within unverified factors.
Topological Neural Networks: Mitigating the Bottlenecks of Graph Neural Networks via Higher-Order Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The irreducible complexity of natural phenomena has led Graph Neural Networks to be employed as a standard model to perform representation learning tasks on graph-structured data. While their capacity to capture local and global patterns is remarkable, the implications associated with long-range and higher-order dependencies pose considerable challenges to such models. This work starts with a theoretical framework to reveal the impact of network's width, depth, and graph topology on the over-squashing phenomena in message-passing neural networks. Then, the work drifts towards, higher-order interactions and multi-relational inductive biases via Topological Neural Networks. Such models propagate messages through higher-dimensional structures, providing shortcuts or additional routes for information flow. With this construction, the underlying computational graph is no longer coupled with the input graph structure, thus mitigating the aforementioned bottlenecks while accounting also for higher-order interactions. Inspired by Graph Attention Networks, two topological attention networks are proposed: Simplicial and Cell Attention Networks. The rationale behind these architecture is to leverage the extended notion of neighbourhoods provided by the arrangement of groups of nodes within a simplicial or cell complex to design anisotropic aggregations able to measure the importance of the information coming from different regions of the domain. By doing so, they capture dependencies that conventional Graph Neural Networks might miss. Finally, a multi-way communication scheme is introduced with Enhanced Cellular Isomorphism Networks, which augment topological message passing schemes to enable a direct interactions among groups of nodes arranged in ring-like structures.
A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Decoding methods play an indispensable role in converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. Prior research on decoding methods, primarily focusing on task-specific models, may not extend to the current era of general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the recent influx of decoding strategies has further complicated this landscape. This paper provides a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of various decoding methods within the context of LLMs, evaluating their performance, robustness to hyperparameter changes, and decoding speeds across a wide range of tasks, models, and deployment environments. Our findings reveal that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent and influenced by factors such as alignment, model size, and quantization. Intriguingly, sensitivity analysis exposes that certain methods achieve superior performance at the cost of extensive hyperparameter tuning, highlighting the trade-off between attaining optimal results and the practicality of implementation in varying contexts.
Synthesizing CTA Image Data for Type-B Aortic Dissection using Stable Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Stable Diffusion (SD) has gained a lot of attention in recent years in the field of Generative AI thus helping in synthesizing medical imaging data with distinct features. The aim is to contribute to the ongoing effort focused on overcoming the limitations of data scarcity and improving the capabilities of ML algorithms for cardiovascular image processing. Therefore, in this study, the possibility of generating synthetic cardiac CTA images was explored by fine-tuning stable diffusion models based on user defined text prompts, using only limited number of CTA images as input. A comprehensive evaluation of the synthetic data was conducted by incorporating both quantitative analysis and qualitative assessment, where a clinician assessed the quality of the generated data. It has been shown that Cardiac CTA images can be successfully generated using using Text to Image (T2I) stable diffusion model. The results demonstrate that the tuned T2I CTA diffusion model was able to generate images with features that are typically unique to acute type B aortic dissection (TBAD) medical conditions.
Treatment-wise Glioblastoma Survival Inference with Multi-parametric Preoperative MRI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we aim to predict the survival time (ST) of glioblastoma (GBM) patients undergoing different treatments based on preoperative magnetic resonance (MR) scans. The personalized and precise treatment planning can be achieved by comparing the ST of different treatments. It is well established that both the current status of the patient (as represented by the MR scans) and the choice of treatment are the cause of ST. While previous related MR-based glioblastoma ST studies have focused only on the direct mapping of MR scans to ST, they have not included the underlying causal relationship between treatments and ST. To address this limitation, we propose a treatment-conditioned regression model for glioblastoma ST that incorporates treatment information in addition to MR scans. Our approach allows us to effectively utilize the data from all of the treatments in a unified manner, rather than having to train separate models for each of the treatments. Furthermore, treatment can be effectively injected into each convolutional layer through the adaptive instance normalization we employ. We evaluate our framework on the BraTS20 ST prediction task. Three treatment options are considered: Gross Total Resection (GTR), Subtotal Resection (STR), and no resection. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of injecting the treatment for estimating GBM survival.
Three Subtyping Algorithms for Binary Session Types and their Complexity Analyses (full version)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Session types are a type discipline for describing and specifying communication behaviours of concurrent processes. Session subtyping, firstly introduced by Gay and Hole, is widely used for enlarging typability of session programs. This paper gives the complexity analysis of three algorithms for subtyping of synchronous binary session types. First, we analyse the complexity of the algorithm from the original paper, which is based on an inductive tree search. We then introduce its optimised version, which improves the complexity, but is still exponential against the size of the two types. Finally, we propose a new quadratic algorithm based on a graph search using the concept of $\mathcal{XYZW}$-simulation, recently introduced by Silva et al.
Quantum Speedup for Spectral Approximation of Kronecker Products
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Given its widespread application in machine learning and optimization, the Kronecker product emerges as a pivotal linear algebra operator. However, its computational demands render it an expensive operation, leading to heightened costs in spectral approximation of it through traditional computation algorithms. Existing classical methods for spectral approximation exhibit a linear dependency on the matrix dimension denoted by $n$, considering matrices of size $A_1 \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ and $A_2 \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$. Our work introduces an innovative approach to efficiently address the spectral approximation of the Kronecker product $A_1 \otimes A_2$ using quantum methods. By treating matrices as quantum states, our proposed method significantly reduces the time complexity of spectral approximation to $O_{d,ε}(\sqrt{n})$.
Semi-Supervised Learning for Bilingual Lexicon Induction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the problem of aligning two sets of continuous word representations, corresponding to languages, to a common space in order to infer a bilingual lexicon. It was recently shown that it is possible to infer such lexicon, without using any parallel data, by aligning word embeddings trained on monolingual data. Such line of work is called unsupervised bilingual induction. By wondering whether it was possible to gain experience in the progressive learning of several languages, we asked ourselves to what extent we could integrate the knowledge of a given set of languages when learning a new one, without having parallel data for the latter. In other words, while keeping the core problem of unsupervised learning in the latest step, we allowed the access to other corpora of idioms, hence the name semi-supervised. This led us to propose a novel formulation, considering the lexicon induction as a ranking problem for which we used recent tools of this machine learning field. Our experiments on standard benchmarks, inferring dictionary from English to more than 20 languages, show that our approach consistently outperforms existing state of the art benchmark. In addition, we deduce from this new scenario several relevant conclusions allowing a better understanding of the alignment phenomenon.
Distilling Symbolic Priors for Concept Learning into Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Humans can learn new concepts from a small number of examples by drawing on their inductive biases. These inductive biases have previously been captured by using Bayesian models defined over symbolic hypothesis spaces. Is it possible to create a neural network that displays the same inductive biases? We show that inductive biases that enable rapid concept learning can be instantiated in artificial neural networks by distilling a prior distribution from a symbolic Bayesian model via meta-learning, an approach for extracting the common structure from a set of tasks. By generating the set of tasks used in meta-learning from the prior distribution of a Bayesian model, we are able to transfer that prior into a neural network. We use this approach to create a neural network with an inductive bias towards concepts expressed as short logical formulas. Analyzing results from previous behavioral experiments in which people learned logical concepts from a few examples, we find that our meta-trained models are highly aligned with human performance.
Nonlinear Modes as a Tool for Comparing the Mathematical Structure of Dynamic Models of Soft Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Continuum soft robots are nonlinear mechanical systems with theoretically infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs) that exhibit complex behaviors. Achieving motor intelligence under dynamic conditions necessitates the development of control-oriented reduced-order models (ROMs), which employ as few DoFs as possible while still accurately capturing the core characteristics of the theoretically infinite-dimensional dynamics. However, there is no quantitative way to measure if the ROM of a soft robot has succeeded in this task. In other fields, like structural dynamics or flexible link robotics, linear normal modes are routinely used to this end. Yet, this theory is not applicable to soft robots due to their nonlinearities. In this work, we propose to use the recent nonlinear extension in modal theory -- called eigenmanifolds -- as a means to evaluate control-oriented models for soft robots and compare them. To achieve this, we propose three similarity metrics relying on the projection of the nonlinear modes of the system into a task space of interest. We use this approach to compare quantitatively, for the first time, ROMs of increasing order generated under the piecewise constant curvature (PCC) hypothesis with a high-dimensional finite element (FE)-like model of a soft arm. Results show that by increasing the order of the discretization, the eigenmanifolds of the PCC model converge to those of the FE model.
Coordinated Flaw Disclosure for AI: Beyond Security Vulnerabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Harm reporting in Artificial Intelligence (AI) currently lacks a structured process for disclosing and addressing algorithmic flaws, relying largely on an ad-hoc approach. This contrasts sharply with the well-established Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) ecosystem in software security. While global efforts to establish frameworks for AI transparency and collaboration are underway, the unique challenges presented by machine learning (ML) models demand a specialized approach. To address this gap, we propose implementing a Coordinated Flaw Disclosure (CFD) framework tailored to the complexities of ML and AI issues. This paper reviews the evolution of ML disclosure practices, from ad hoc reporting to emerging participatory auditing methods, and compares them with cybersecurity norms. Our framework introduces innovations such as extended model cards, dynamic scope expansion, an independent adjudication panel, and an automated verification process. We also outline a forthcoming real-world pilot of CFD. We argue that CFD could significantly enhance public trust in AI systems. By balancing organizational and community interests, CFD aims to improve AI accountability in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Risk assessment and observation of driver with pedestrian using instantaneous heart rate and HRV
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Currently, human drivers outperform self-driving vehicles in many conditions such as collision avoidance. Therefore, understanding human driver behaviour in these conditions will provide insight for future autonomous vehicles. For understanding driver behaviour, risk assessment is applied so far as one of the approaches by using both subjective and objective measurement. Subjective measurement methods such as questionnaires may provide insight into driver risk assessment but there is often significant variability between drivers.Physiological measurements such as heart rate (HR), electroencephalogram (EEG), and electromyogram (EMG) provide more objective measurements of driver risk assessment. HR is often used for measuring driver risk assessment based on observed correlations between HR and risk perception. Previous work has used HR to measure driver risk assessment in self-driving systems, but pedestrian dynamics is not considered for the research. In this study, we observed driver behaviour in certain scenarios which have pedestrian on driving simulator. The scenarios have safe/unsafe situations (i.e., pedestrian crosses road and vehicle may hit pedestrian in one scenario), HR analysis in time/frequency domain is processed for risk assessment. As a result, HR analysis in frequency domain shows certain reasonability for driver risk assessment when driver has pedestrian in its traffic.