OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Coordination for Distributed Discrete-Event Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Timing control while preserving determinism is often a key requirement for ensuring the safety and correctness of distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS). Discrete-event (DE) systems provide a suitable model of computation (MoC) for time-sensitive distributed CPS. The high-level architecture (HLA) is a useful tool for the distributed simulation of DE systems, but its techniques can be adapted for implementing distributed CPS. However, HLA incurs considerable overhead in network messages conveying timing information between the distributed nodes and the centralized run-time infrastructure (RTI). This paper gives a novel approach and implementation that reduces such network messages while preserving DE semantics. An evaluation of our runtime demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces the volume of messages for timing information in HLA.
A Decomposition Approach to the Weighted $k$-server Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

A natural variant of the classical online $k$-server problem is the Weighted $k$-server problem, where the cost of moving a server is its weight times the distance through which it moves. Despite its apparent simplicity, the weighted $k$-server problem is extremely poorly understood. Specifically, even on uniform metric spaces, finding the optimum competitive ratio of randomized algorithms remains an open problem -- the best upper bound known is $2^{2^{k+O(1)}}$ due to a deterministic algorithm (Bansal et al., 2018), and the best lower bound known is $Ω(2^k)$ (Ayyadevara and Chiplunkar, 2021). With the aim of closing this exponential gap between the upper and lower bounds, we propose a decomposition approach for designing a randomized algorithm for weighted $k$-server on uniform metrics. Our first contribution includes two relaxed versions of the problem and a technique to obtain an algorithm for weighted $k$-server from algorithms for the two relaxed versions. Specifically, we prove that if there exists an $α_1$-competitive algorithm for one version (which we call Weighted $k$-Server - Service Pattern Construction (W$k$S-SPC) and there exists an $α_2$-competitive algorithm for the other version (which we call Weighted $k$-server - Revealed Service Pattern (W$k$S-RSP)), then there exists an $(α_1α_2)$-competitive algorithm for weighted $k$-server on uniform metric spaces. Our second contribution is a $2^{O(k^2)}$-competitive randomized algorithm for W$k$S-RSP. As a consequence, the task of designing a $2^{poly(k)}$-competitive randomized algorithm for weighted $k$-server on uniform metrics reduces to designing a $2^{poly(k)}$-competitive randomized algorithm for W$k$S-SPC. Finally, we also prove that the $Ω(2^k)$ lower bound for weighted $k$-server, in fact, holds for W$k$S-RSP.
The Sampling-Gaussian for stereo matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The soft-argmax operation is widely adopted in neural network-based stereo matching methods to enable differentiable regression of disparity. However, network trained with soft-argmax is prone to being multimodal due to absence of explicit constraint to the shape of the probability distribution. Previous methods leverages Laplacian distribution and cross-entropy for training but failed to effectively improve the accuracy and even compromises the efficiency of the network. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis of the previous distribution-based methods and propose a novel supervision method for stereo matching, Sampling-Gaussian. We sample from the Gaussian distribution for supervision. Moreover, we interpret the training as minimizing the distance in vector space and propose a combined loss of L1 loss and cosine similarity loss. Additionally, we leveraged bilinear interpolation to upsample the cost volume. Our method can be directly applied to any soft-argmax-based stereo matching method without a reduction in efficiency. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the superior performance of our Sampling-Gaussian. The experimental results prove that we have achieved better accuracy on five baseline methods and two datasets. Our method is easy to implement, and the code is available online.
Investigating Cost-Efficiency of LLM-Generated Training Data for Conversational Semantic Frame Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies have demonstrated that few-shot learning allows LLMs to generate training data for supervised models at a low cost. However, the quality of LLM-generated data may not entirely match that of human-labeled data. This raises a crucial question: how should one balance the trade-off between the higher quality but more expensive human data and the lower quality yet substantially cheaper LLM-generated data? In this paper, we synthesized training data for conversational semantic frame analysis using GPT-4 and examined how to allocate budgets optimally to achieve the best performance. Our experiments, conducted across various budget levels, reveal that optimal cost-efficiency is achieved by combining both human and LLM-generated data across a wide range of budget levels. Notably, as the budget decreases, a higher proportion of LLM-generated data becomes more preferable.
Ventilator pressure prediction using recurrent neural network
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a recurrent neural network approach to simulating mechanical ventilator pressure. The traditional mechanical ventilator has a control pressure that is monitored by a medical practitioner and can behave incorrectly if the proper pressure is not applied. This paper takes advantage of recent research and develops a simulator based on a deep sequence model to predict airway pressure in the respiratory circuit during the inspiratory phase of a breath given a time series of control parameters and lung attributes. This method demonstrates the effectiveness of neural network-based controllers in tracking pressure wave forms significantly better than the current industry standard and provides insights into the development of effective and robust pressure-controlled mechanical ventilators. The paper will measure as the mean absolute error between the predicted and actual pressures during the inspiratory phase of each breath.
Text Proxy: Decomposing Retrieval from a 1-to-N Relationship into N 1-to-1 Relationships for Text-Video Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Text-video retrieval (TVR) has seen substantial advancements in recent years, fueled by the utilization of pre-trained models and large language models (LLMs). Despite these advancements, achieving accurate matching in TVR remains challenging due to inherent disparities between video and textual modalities and irregularities in data representation. In this paper, we propose Text-Video-ProxyNet (TV-ProxyNet), a novel framework designed to decompose the conventional 1-to-N relationship of TVR into N distinct 1-to-1 relationships. By replacing a single text query with a series of text proxies, TV-ProxyNet not only broadens the query scope but also achieves a more precise expansion. Each text proxy is crafted through a refined iterative process, controlled by mechanisms we term as the director and dash, which regulate the proxy's direction and distance relative to the original text query. This setup not only facilitates more precise semantic alignment but also effectively manages the disparities and noise inherent in multimodal data. Our experiments on three representative video-text retrieval benchmarks, MSRVTT, DiDeMo, and ActivityNet Captions, demonstrate the effectiveness of TV-ProxyNet. The results show an improvement of 2.0% to 3.3% in R@1 over the baseline. TV-ProxyNet achieved state-of-the-art performance on MSRVTT and ActivityNet Captions, and a 2.0% improvement on DiDeMo compared to existing methods, validating our approach's ability to enhance semantic mapping and reduce error propensity.
Open-RGBT: Open-vocabulary RGB-T Zero-shot Semantic Segmentation in Open-world Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic segmentation is a critical technique for effective scene understanding. Traditional RGB-T semantic segmentation models often struggle to generalize across diverse scenarios due to their reliance on pretrained models and predefined categories. Recent advancements in Visual Language Models (VLMs) have facilitated a shift from closed-set to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods. However, these models face challenges in dealing with intricate scenes, primarily due to the heterogeneity between RGB and thermal modalities. To address this gap, we present Open-RGBT, a novel open-vocabulary RGB-T semantic segmentation model. Specifically, we obtain instance-level detection proposals by incorporating visual prompts to enhance category understanding. Additionally, we employ the CLIP model to assess image-text similarity, which helps correct semantic consistency and mitigates ambiguities in category identification. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Open-RGBT achieves superior performance in diverse and challenging real-world scenarios, even in the wild, significantly advancing the field of RGB-T semantic segmentation.
Performance Evaluation in Multimedia Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Performance evaluation in multimedia retrieval, as in the information retrieval domain at large, relies heavily on retrieval experiments, employing a broad range of techniques and metrics. These can involve human-in-the-loop and machine-only settings for the retrieval process itself and the subsequent verification of results. Such experiments can be elaborate and use-case-specific, which can make them difficult to compare or replicate. In this paper, we present a formal model to express all relevant aspects of such retrieval experiments, as well as a flexible open-source evaluation infrastructure that implements the model. These contributions intend to make a step towards lowering the hurdles for conducting retrieval experiments and improving their reproducibility.
Large Language Models as Code Executors: An Exploratory Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly evolved, extending from natural language processing to complex tasks like code understanding and generation. We expand the scope of LLMs' capabilities to a broader context, using LLMs to execute code snippets to obtain the output. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs as code executors, where code snippets are directly fed to the models for execution, and outputs are returned. We are the first to comprehensively examine this feasibility across various LLMs, including OpenAI's o1, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, DeepSeek, and Qwen-Coder. Notably, the o1 model achieved over 90% accuracy in code execution, while others demonstrated lower accuracy levels. Furthermore, we introduce an Iterative Instruction Prompting (IIP) technique that processes code snippets line by line, enhancing the accuracy of weaker models by an average of 7.22% (with the highest improvement of 18.96%) and an absolute average improvement of 3.86% against CoT prompting (with the highest improvement of 19.46%). Our study not only highlights the transformative potential of LLMs in coding but also lays the groundwork for future advancements in automated programming and the completion of complex tasks.
Calibrating Verbalized Probabilities for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Calibrating verbalized probabilities presents a novel approach for reliably assessing and leveraging outputs from black-box Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent methods have demonstrated improved calibration by applying techniques like Platt scaling or temperature scaling to the confidence scores generated by LLMs. In this paper, we explore the calibration of verbalized probability distributions for discriminative tasks. First, we investigate the capability of LLMs to generate probability distributions over categorical labels. We theoretically and empirically identify the issue of re-softmax arising from the scaling of verbalized probabilities, and propose using the invert softmax trick to approximate the "logit" by inverting verbalized probabilities. Through extensive evaluation on three public datasets, we demonstrate: (1) the robust capability of LLMs in generating class distributions, and (2) the effectiveness of the invert softmax trick in estimating logits, which, in turn, facilitates post-calibration adjustments.
Collective perception for tracking people with a robot swarm
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Swarm perception refers to the ability of a robot swarm to utilize the perception capabilities of each individual robot, forming a collective understanding of the environment. Their distributed nature enables robot swarms to continuously monitor dynamic environments by maintaining a constant presence throughout the space.In this study, we present a preliminary experiment on the collective tracking of people using a robot swarm. The experiment was conducted in simulation across four different office environments, with swarms of varying sizes. The robots were provided with images sampled from a dataset of real-world office environment pictures.We measured the time distribution required for a robot to detect a person changing location and to propagate this information to increasing fractions of the swarm. The results indicate that robot swarms show significant promise in monitoring dynamic environments.
BLAS-like Interface for Binary Tensor Contractions
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2024
Year: 2024

In the world of linear algebra computation, a well-established standard exists called BLAS(Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms). This standard has been crucial for the development of software using linear algebra operations. Its benefits include portability with efficiency and mitigation of suboptimal re-implementations of linear algebra operations. Multilinear algebra is an extension of linear algebra in which the central objects are tensors, which are generalizations of vectors and matrices. Though tensor operations are becoming more common, they do not have a standard like BLAS. Such standardization would be beneficial and decrease the now-visible replication of work, as many libraries nowadays use their own implementations. This master thesis aims to work towards such a standard by discovering whether or not a BLAS-like interface is possible for the operation binary tensor contraction. To answer this, an interface has been developed in the programming language C together with an implementation and tested to see if it would be sufficient. The interface developed is: xGETT(RANKA, EXTA, INCA, A, RANKB, EXTB, INCB, B, CONTS, CONTA, CONTB, PERM, INCC, C) with the implementation and tests, it has been deemed sufficient as a BLAS-like interface for binary tensor contractions and possible to use in a BLAS-like standardization for tensor operations.
HERM: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal LLMs for Human-Centric Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The significant advancements in visual understanding and instruction following from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened up more possibilities for broader applications in diverse and universal human-centric scenarios. However, existing image-text data may not support the precise modality alignment and integration of multi-grained information, which is crucial for human-centric visual understanding. In this paper, we introduce HERM-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating the human-centric understanding capabilities of MLLMs. Our work reveals the limitations of existing MLLMs in understanding complex human-centric scenarios. To address these challenges, we present HERM-100K, a comprehensive dataset with multi-level human-centric annotations, aimed at enhancing MLLMs' training. Furthermore, we develop HERM-7B, a MLLM that leverages enhanced training data from HERM-100K. Evaluations on HERM-Bench demonstrate that HERM-7B significantly outperforms existing MLLMs across various human-centric dimensions, reflecting the current inadequacy of data annotations used in MLLM training for human-centric visual understanding. This research emphasizes the importance of specialized datasets and benchmarks in advancing the MLLMs' capabilities for human-centric understanding.
A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Steiner Tree when Terminals Avoid a $K_4$-Minor
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study a special case of the Steiner Tree problem in which the input graph does not have a minor model of a complete graph on 4 vertices for which all branch sets contain a terminal. We show that this problem can be solved in $O(n^4)$ time, where $n$ denotes the number of vertices in the input graph. This generalizes a seminal paper by Erickson et al. [Math. Oper. Res., 1987] that solves Steiner tree on planar graphs with all terminals on one face in polynomial time.
Rethinking the Evaluation of Visible and Infrared Image Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visible and Infrared Image Fusion (VIF) has garnered significant interest across a wide range of high-level vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. However, the evaluation of VIF methods remains challenging due to the absence of ground truth. This paper proposes a Segmentation-oriented Evaluation Approach (SEA) to assess VIF methods by incorporating the semantic segmentation task and leveraging segmentation labels available in latest VIF datasets. Specifically, SEA utilizes universal segmentation models, capable of handling diverse images and classes, to predict segmentation outputs from fused images and compare these outputs with segmentation labels. Our evaluation of recent VIF methods using SEA reveals that their performance is comparable or even inferior to using visible images only, despite nearly half of the infrared images demonstrating better performance than visible images. Further analysis indicates that the two metrics most correlated to our SEA are the gradient-based fusion metric $Q_{\text{ABF}}$ and the visual information fidelity metric $Q_{\text{VIFF}}$ in conventional VIF evaluation metrics, which can serve as proxies when segmentation labels are unavailable. We hope that our evaluation will guide the development of novel and practical VIF methods. The code has been released in \url{https://github.com/Yixuan-2002/SEA/}.
On the Security and Design of Cryptosystems Using Gabidulin-Kronecker Product Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper is a preliminary study on the security and design of cryptosystems using Gabidulin-Kronecker Product Codes. In particular, we point out the design impracticality of the system, and propose ways to improve it.
Online Matching Meets Sampling Without Replacement
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Sampling without replacement is a natural online rounding strategy for converting fractional bipartite matching into an integral one. In Online Bipartite Matching, we can use the Balance algorithm to fractionally match each online vertex, and then sample an unmatched offline neighbor with probability proportional to the fractional matching. In Online Stochastic Matching, we can take the solution to a linear program relaxation as a reference, and then match each online vertex to an unmatched offline neighbor with probability proportional to the fractional matching of the online vertex's type. On the one hand, we find empirical evidence that online matching algorithms based on sampling without replacement outperform existing algorithms. On the other hand, the literature offers little theoretical understanding of the power of sampling without replacement in online matching problems. This paper fills the gap in the literature by giving the first non-trivial competitive analyses of sampling without replacement for online matching problems. In Online Stochastic Matching, we develop a potential function analysis framework to show that sampling without replacement is at least $0.707$-competitive. The new analysis framework further allows us to derandomize the algorithm to obtain the first polynomial-time deterministic algorithm that breaks the $1-\frac{1}{e}$ barrier. In Online Bipartite Matching, we show that sampling without replacement provides provable online correlated selection guarantees when the selection probabilities correspond to the fractional matching chosen by the Balance algorithm. As a result, we prove that sampling without replacement is at least $0.513$-competitive for Online Bipartite Matching.
Adaptive Refinement Protocols for Distributed Distribution Estimation under $\ell^p$-Losses
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Consider the communication-constrained estimation of discrete distributions under $\ell^p$ losses, where each distributed terminal holds multiple independent samples and uses limited number of bits to describe the samples. We obtain the minimax optimal rates of the problem in most parameter regimes. An elbow effect of the optimal rates at $p=2$ is clearly identified. To show the optimal rates, we first design estimation protocols to achieve them. The key ingredient of these protocols is to introduce adaptive refinement mechanisms, which first generate rough estimate by partial information and then establish refined estimate in subsequent steps guided by the rough estimate. The protocols leverage successive refinement, sample compression, thresholding and random hashing methods to achieve the optimal rates in different parameter regimes. The optimality of the protocols is shown by deriving compatible minimax lower bounds.
An Overview of zbMATH Open Digital Library
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Mathematical research thrives on the effective dissemination and discovery of knowledge. zbMATH Open has emerged as a pivotal platform in this landscape, offering a comprehensive repository of mathematical literature. Beyond indexing and abstracting, it serves as a unified quality-assured infrastructure for finding, evaluating, and connecting mathematical information that advances mathematical research as well as interdisciplinary exploration. zbMATH Open enables scientific quality control by post-publication reviews and promotes connections between researchers, institutions, and research outputs. This paper represents the functionalities of the most significant features of this open-access service, highlighting its role in shaping the future of mathematical information retrieval.
Control System Design and Experiments for Autonomous Underwater Helicopter Docking Procedure Based on Acoustic-inertial-optical Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

A control system structure for the underwater docking procedure of an Autonomous Underwater Helicopter (AUH) is proposed in this paper, which utilizes acoustic-inertial-optical guidance. Unlike conventional Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), the maneuverability requirements for AUHs are more stringent during the docking procedure, requiring it to remain stationary or have minimal horizontal movement while moving vertically. The docking procedure is divided into two stages: Homing and Landing, each stage utilizing different guidance methods. Additionally, a segmented aligning strategy operating at various altitudes and a linear velocity decision are both adopted in Landing stage. Due to the unique structure of the Subsea Docking System (SDS), the AUH is required to dock onto the SDS in a fixed orientation with specific attitude and altitude. Therefore, a particular criterion is proposed to determine whether the AUH has successfully docked onto the SDS. Furthermore, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed control method in AUH's docking procedure are demonstrated through pool experiments and sea trials.