OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PROXI: Challenging the GNNs for Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Over the past decade, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have transformed graph representation learning. In the widely adopted message-passing GNN framework, nodes refine their representations by aggregating information from neighboring nodes iteratively. While GNNs excel in various domains, recent theoretical studies have raised concerns about their capabilities. GNNs aim to address various graph-related tasks by utilizing such node representations, however, this one-size-fits-all approach proves suboptimal for diverse tasks. Motivated by these observations, we conduct empirical tests to compare the performance of current GNN models with more conventional and direct methods in link prediction tasks. Introducing our model, PROXI, which leverages proximity information of node pairs in both graph and attribute spaces, we find that standard machine learning (ML) models perform competitively, even outperforming cutting-edge GNN models when applied to these proximity metrics derived from node neighborhoods and attributes. This holds true across both homophilic and heterophilic networks, as well as small and large benchmark datasets, including those from the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Moreover, we show that augmenting traditional GNNs with PROXI significantly boosts their link prediction performance. Our empirical findings corroborate the previously mentioned theoretical observations and imply that there exists ample room for enhancement in current GNN models to reach their potential.
Enhancing transparency in AI-powered customer engagement
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses the critical challenge of building consumer trust in AI-powered customer engagement by emphasising the necessity for transparency and accountability. Despite the potential of AI to revolutionise business operations and enhance customer experiences, widespread concerns about misinformation and the opacity of AI decision-making processes hinder trust. Surveys highlight a significant lack of awareness among consumers regarding their interactions with AI, alongside apprehensions about bias and fairness in AI algorithms. The paper advocates for the development of explainable AI models that are transparent and understandable to both consumers and organisational leaders, thereby mitigating potential biases and ensuring ethical use. It underscores the importance of organisational commitment to transparency practices beyond mere regulatory compliance, including fostering a culture of accountability, prioritising clear data policies and maintaining active engagement with stakeholders. By adopting a holistic approach to transparency and explainability, businesses can cultivate trust in AI technologies, bridging the gap between technological innovation and consumer acceptance, and paving the way for more ethical and effective AI-powered customer engagements. KEYWORDS: artificial intelligence (AI), transparency
Automatic Scene Generation: State-of-the-Art Techniques, Models, Datasets, Challenges, and Future Prospects
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic scene generation is an essential area of research with applications in robotics, recreation, visual representation, training and simulation, education, and more. This survey provides a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-arts in automatic scene generation, focusing on techniques that leverage machine learning, deep learning, embedded systems, and natural language processing (NLP). We categorize the models into four main types: Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Transformers, and Diffusion Models. Each category is explored in detail, discussing various sub-models and their contributions to the field. We also review the most commonly used datasets, such as COCO-Stuff, Visual Genome, and MS-COCO, which are critical for training and evaluating these models. Methodologies for scene generation are examined, including image-to-3D conversion, text-to-3D generation, UI/layout design, graph-based methods, and interactive scene generation. Evaluation metrics such as Frechet Inception Distance (FID), Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence, Inception Score (IS), Intersection over Union (IoU), and Mean Average Precision (mAP) are discussed in the context of their use in assessing model performance. The survey identifies key challenges and limitations in the field, such as maintaining realism, handling complex scenes with multiple objects, and ensuring consistency in object relationships and spatial arrangements. By summarizing recent advances and pinpointing areas for improvement, this survey aims to provide a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working on automatic scene generation.
Ethical software requirements from user reviews: A systematic literature review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Context: The growing focus on ethics within SE, primarily due to the significant reliance of individuals' lives on software and the consequential social and ethical considerations that impact both people and society has brought focus on ethical software requirements identification and elicitation. User safety, privacy, and security concerns are of prime importance while developing software due to the widespread use of software across healthcare, education, and business domains. Thus, identifying and elicitating ethical software requirements from app user reviews, focusing on various aspects such as privacy, security, accountability, accessibility, transparency, fairness, safety, and social solidarity, are essential for developing trustworthy software solutions. Objective: This SLR aims to identify and analyze existing ethical requirements identification and elicitation techniques in the context of the formulated research questions. Method: We conducted an SLR based on Kitchenham et al's methodology. We identified and selected 47 primary articles for this study based on a predefined search protocol. Result: Ethical requirements gathering has recently driven drastic interest in the research community due to the rise of ML and AI-based approaches in decision-making within software applications. This SLR provides an overview of ethical requirements identification techniques and the implications of extracting and addressing them. This study also reports the data sources used for analyzing user reviews. Conclusion: This SLR provides an understanding of the ethical software requirements and underscores the importance of user reviews in developing trustworthy software. The findings can also help inform future research and guide software engineers or researchers in addressing software ethical requirements.
Public interest in science or bots? Selective amplification of scientific articles on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false public interest in given research, affecting policies impacting the public's lives in the real world, this topic warrants critical study and attention. We used the Altmetric dataset in combination with data collected through the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and the Botometer API. We combined the data into an extensive dataset with academic articles, several features from the article and a label indicating whether the article had excessive bot activity on Twitter or not. We analyzed the data to see the possibility of bot activity based on different characteristics of the article. We also trained machine-learning models using this dataset to identify possible bot activity in any given article. Our machine-learning models were capable of identifying possible bot activity in any academic article with an accuracy of 0.70. We also found that articles related to "Health and Human Science" are more prone to bot activity compared to other research areas. Without arguing the maliciousness of the bot activity, our work presents a tool to identify the presence of bot activity in the dissemination of an academic article and creates a baseline for future research in this direction.
Urban Anomalies: A Simulated Human Mobility Dataset with Injected Anomalies
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Human mobility anomaly detection based on location is essential in areas such as public health, safety, welfare, and urban planning. Developing models and approaches for location-based anomaly detection requires a comprehensive dataset. However, privacy concerns and the absence of ground truth hinder the availability of publicly available datasets. With this paper, we provide extensive simulated human mobility datasets featuring various anomaly types created using an existing Urban Patterns of Life Simulation. To create these datasets, we inject changes in the logic of individual agents to change their behavior. Specifically, we create four of anomalous agent behavior by (1) changing the agents' appetite (causing agents to have meals more frequently), (2) changing their group of interest (causing agents to interact with different agents from another group). (3) changing their social place selection (causing agents to visit different recreational places) and (4) changing their work schedule (causing agents to skip work), For each type of anomaly, we use three degrees of behavioral change to tune the difficulty of detecting the anomalous agents. To select agents to inject anomalous behavior into, we employ three methods: (1) Random selection using a centralized manipulation mechanism, (2) Spread based selection using an infectious disease model, and (3) through exposure of agents to a specific location. All datasets are split into normal and anomalous phases. The normal phase, which can be used for training models of normalcy, exhibits no anomalous behavior. The anomalous phase, which can be used for testing for anomalous detection algorithm, includes ground truth labels that indicate, for each five-minute simulation step, which agents are anomalous at that time. Datasets are generated using the maps (roads and buildings) for Atlanta and Berlin, having 1k agents in each simulation.
Learning the Optimal Path and DNN Partition for Collaborative Edge Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have catalyzed the development of numerous intelligent mobile applications and services. However, they also introduce significant computational challenges for resource-constrained mobile devices. To address this, collaborative edge inference has been proposed. This method involves partitioning a DNN inference task into several subtasks and distributing these across multiple network nodes. Despite its potential, most current approaches presume known network parameters -- like node processing speeds and link transmission rates -- or rely on a fixed sequence of nodes for processing the DNN subtasks. In this paper, we tackle a more complex scenario where network parameters are unknown and must be learned, and multiple network paths are available for distributing inference tasks. Specifically, we explore the learning problem of selecting the optimal network path and assigning DNN layers to nodes along this path, considering potential security threats and the costs of switching paths. We begin by deriving structural insights from the DNN layer assignment with complete network information, which narrows down the decision space and provides crucial understanding of optimal assignments. We then cast the learning problem with incomplete network information as a novel adversarial group linear bandits problem with switching costs, featuring rewards generation through a combined stochastic and adversarial process. We introduce a new bandit algorithm, B-EXPUCB, which combines elements of the classical blocked EXP3 and LinUCB algorithms, and demonstrate its sublinear regret. Extensive simulations confirm B-EXPUCB's superior performance in learning for collaborative edge inference over existing algorithms.
Simplifying complex machine learning by linearly separable network embedding spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Low-dimensional embeddings are a cornerstone in the modelling and analysis of complex networks. However, most existing approaches for mining network embedding spaces rely on computationally intensive machine learning systems to facilitate downstream tasks. In the field of NLP, word embedding spaces capture semantic relationships \textit{linearly}, allowing for information retrieval using \textit{simple linear operations} on word embedding vectors. Here, we demonstrate that there are structural properties of network data that yields this linearity. We show that the more homophilic the network representation, the more linearly separable the corresponding network embedding space, yielding better downstream analysis results. Hence, we introduce novel graphlet-based methods enabling embedding of networks into more linearly separable spaces, allowing for their better mining. Our fundamental insights into the structure of network data that enable their \textit{\textbf{linear}} mining and exploitation enable the ML community to build upon, towards efficiently and explainably mining of the complex network data.
Enhancing LLM Fine-tuning for Text-to-SQLs by SQL Quality Measurement
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Text-to-SQLs enables non-expert users to effortlessly retrieve desired information from relational databases using natural language queries. While recent advancements, particularly with Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT and T5, have shown impressive performance on large-scale benchmarks such as BIRD, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM-based Text-to-SQLs models often require significant efforts to develop auxiliary tools like SQL classifiers to achieve high performance. This paper proposed a novel approach that only needs SQL Quality Measurement to enhance LLMs-based Text-to-SQLs performance. It establishes a SQL quality evaluation mechanism to assess the generated SQL queries against predefined criteria and actual database responses. This feedback loop enables continuous learning and refinement of model outputs based on both syntactic correctness and semantic accuracy. The proposed method undergoes comprehensive validation on the BIRD benchmark, assessing Execution Accuracy (EX) and Valid Efficiency Score (VES) across various Text-to-SQLs difficulty levels. Experimental results reveal competitive performance in both EX and VES compared to SOTA models like GPT4 and T5.
Is uniform expressivity too restrictive? Towards efficient expressivity of graph neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Uniform expressivity guarantees that a Graph Neural Network (GNN) can express a query without the parameters depending on the size of the input graphs. This property is desirable in applications in order to have number of trainable parameters that is independent of the size of the input graphs. Uniform expressivity of the two variable guarded fragment (GC2) of first order logic is a well-celebrated result for Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) GNNs [Barcelo & al., 2020]. In this article, we prove that uniform expressivity of GC2 queries is not possible for GNNs with a wide class of Pfaffian activation functions (including the sigmoid and tanh), answering a question formulated by [Grohe, 2021]. We also show that despite these limitations, many of those GNNs can still efficiently express GC2 queries in a way that the number of parameters remains logarithmic on the maximal degree of the input graphs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a log-log dependency on the degree is achievable for a certain choice of activation function. This shows that uniform expressivity can be successfully relaxed by covering large graphs appearing in practical applications. Our experiments illustrates that our theoretical estimates hold in practice.
A Spark of Vision-Language Intelligence: 2-Dimensional Autoregressive Transformer for Efficient Finegrained Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This work tackles the information loss bottleneck of vector-quantization (VQ) autoregressive image generation by introducing a novel model architecture called the 2-Dimensional Autoregression (DnD) Transformer. The DnD-Transformer predicts more codes for an image by introducing a new autoregression direction, \textit{model depth}, along with the sequence length direction. Compared to traditional 1D autoregression and previous work utilizing similar 2D image decomposition such as RQ-Transformer, the DnD-Transformer is an end-to-end model that can generate higher quality images with the same backbone model size and sequence length, opening a new optimization perspective for autoregressive image generation. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that the DnD-Transformer's potential extends beyond generating natural images. It can even generate images with rich text and graphical elements in a self-supervised manner, demonstrating an understanding of these combined modalities. This has not been previously demonstrated for popular vision generative models such as diffusion models, showing a spark of vision-language intelligence when trained solely on images. Code, datasets and models are open at https://github.com/chenllliang/DnD-Transformer.
Influence of control polygon on the generalization of the conversion between ANCF and B-spline surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

The aim of this study is to establish a general transformation matrix between B-spline surfaces and ANCF surface elements. This study is a further study of the conversion between the ANCF and B-spline surfaces. In this paper, a general transformation matrix between the Bezier surfaces and ANCF surface element is established. This general transformation matrix essentially describes the linear relationship between ANCF and Bezier surfaces. Moreover, the general transformation matrix can help to improve the efficiency of the process to transfer the distorted configuration in the CAA back to the CAD, an urgent requirement in engineering practice. In addition, a special Bezier surface control polygon is given in this study. The Bezier surface described with this control polygon can be converted to an ANCF surface element with fewer d.o.f.. And the converted ANCF surface element with 36 d.o.f. was once addressed by Dufva and Shabana. So the special control polygon can be regarded as the geometric condition in conversion to an ANCF surface element with 36 d.o.f. Based on the fact that a B-spline surface can be seen as a set of Bezier surfaces connected together, the method to establish a general transformation matrix between the ANCF and lower-order B-spline surfaces is given. Specially, the general transformation is not in a recursive form, but in a simplified form.
LLM-Augmented Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with Landmark-Based Task Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is to take a complex task and be able to decompose it to subtasks that are simpler for the RL agent to learn. In this paper, we report on our work that would identify subtasks by using some given positive and negative trajectories for solving the complex task. We assume that the states are represented by first-order predicate logic using which we devise a novel algorithm to identify the subtasks. Then we employ a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate first-order logic rule templates for achieving each subtask. Such rules were then further fined tuned to a rule-based policy via an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP)-based RL agent. Through experiments, we verify the accuracy of our algorithm in detecting subtasks which successfully detect all of the subtasks correctly. We also investigated the quality of the common-sense rules produced by the language model to achieve the subtasks. Our experiments show that our LLM-guided rule template generation can produce rules that are necessary for solving a subtask, which leads to solving complex tasks with fewer assumptions about predefined first-order logic predicates of the environment.
Decentralized Collaborative Inertial Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Although people spend most of their time indoors, outdoor tracking systems, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), are predominantly used for location-based services. These systems are accurate outdoors, easy to use, and operate autonomously on each mobile device. In contrast, Indoor Tracking Systems~(ITS) lack standardization and are often difficult to operate because they require costly infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an indoor tracking algorithm that uses collected data from inertial sensors embedded in most mobile devices. In this setting, mobile devices autonomously estimate their location, hence removing the burden of deploying and maintaining complex and scattered hardware infrastructure. In addition, these devices collaborate by anonymously exchanging data with other nearby devices, using wireless communication, such as Bluetooth, to correct errors in their location estimates. Our collaborative algorithm relies on low-complexity geometry operations and can be deployed on any recent mobile device with commercial-grade sensors. We evaluate our solution on real-life data collected by different devices. Experimentation with 16 simultaneously moving and collaborating devices shows an average accuracy improvement of 44% compared to the standalone Pedestrian Dead Reckoning algorithm.
Review Non-convex Optimization Method for Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Non-convex optimization is a critical tool in advancing machine learning, especially for complex models like deep neural networks and support vector machines. Despite challenges such as multiple local minima and saddle points, non-convex techniques offer various pathways to reduce computational costs. These include promoting sparsity through regularization, efficiently escaping saddle points, and employing subsampling and approximation strategies like stochastic gradient descent. Additionally, non-convex methods enable model pruning and compression, which reduce the size of models while maintaining performance. By focusing on good local minima instead of exact global minima, non-convex optimization ensures competitive accuracy with faster convergence and lower computational overhead. This paper examines the key methods and applications of non-convex optimization in machine learning, exploring how it can lower computation costs while enhancing model performance. Furthermore, it outlines future research directions and challenges, including scalability and generalization, that will shape the next phase of non-convex optimization in machine learning.