OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Optimal Digital Twinning of Random Systems with Twinning Rate Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

With the massive advancements in processing power, Digital Twins (DTs) have become powerful tools to monitor and analyze physical entities. However, due to the potentially very high number of Physical Systems (PSs) to be tracked and emulated, for instance, in a factory environment or an Internet of Things (IoT) network, continuous twinning might become infeasible. In this paper, a DT system is investigated with a set of random PSs, where the twinning rate is limited due to resource constraints. Three cost functions are considered to quantify and penalize the twinning delay. For these cost functions, the optimal twinning problem under twinning rate constraints is formulated. In a numerical example, the proposed cost functions are evaluated for two, one push-based and one pull-based, benchmark twinning policies. The proposed methodology is the first to investigate the optimal twinning problem with random PSs and twinning rate constraints, and serves as a guideline for real-world implementations on how frequently PSs should be twinned.
Learning Emergence of Interaction Patterns across Independent RL Agents in Multi-Agent Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Many real-world problems, such as controlling swarms of drones and urban traffic, naturally lend themselves to modeling as multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, existing multi-agent RL methods often suffer from scalability challenges, primarily due to the introduction of communication among agents. Consequently, a key challenge lies in adapting the success of deep learning in single-agent RL to the multi-agent setting. In response to this challenge, we propose an approach that fundamentally reimagines multi-agent environments. Unlike conventional methods that model each agent individually with separate networks, our approach, the Bottom Up Network (BUN), adopts a unique perspective. BUN treats the collective of multi-agents as a unified entity while employing a specialized weight initialization strategy that promotes independent learning. Furthermore, we dynamically establish connections among agents using gradient information, enabling coordination when necessary while maintaining these connections as limited and sparse to effectively manage the computational budget. Our extensive empirical evaluations across a variety of cooperative multi-agent scenarios, including tasks such as cooperative navigation and traffic control, consistently demonstrate BUN's superiority over baseline methods with substantially reduced computational costs.
An Edge-Computing based Industrial Gateway for Industry 4.0 using ARM TrustZone Technology
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Secure and efficient communication to establish a seamless nexus between the five levels of a typical automation pyramid is paramount to Industry 4.0. Specifically, vertical and horizontal integration of these levels is an overarching requirement to accelerate productivity and improve operational activities. Vertical integration can improve visibility, flexibility, and productivity by connecting systems and applications. Horizontal integration can provide better collaboration and adaptability by connecting internal production facilities, multi-site operations, and third-party partners in a supply chain. In this paper, we propose an Edge-computing-based Industrial Gateway for interfacing information technology and operational technology that can enable Industry 4.0 vertical and horizontal integration. Subsequently, we design and develop a working prototype to demonstrate a remote production-line maintenance use case with a strong focus on security aspects and the edge paradigm to bring computational resources and data storage closer to data sources.
Machine Learning Approaches for Active Queue Management: A Survey, Taxonomy, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Active Queue Management (AQM), a network-layer congestion control technique endorsed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), encourages routers to discard packets before the occurrence of buffer overflow. Traditional AQM techniques often employ heuristic approaches that require meticulous parameter adjustments, limiting their real-world applicability. In contrast, Machine Learning (ML) approaches offer highly adaptive, data-driven solutions custom to dynamic network conditions. Consequently, many researchers have adapted ML for AQM throughout the years, resulting in a wide variety of algorithms ranging from predicting congestion via supervised learning to discovering optimal packet-dropping policies with reinforcement learning. Despite these remarkable advancements, no previous work has compiled these methods in the form of a survey article. This paper presents the first thorough documentation and analysis of ML-based algorithms for AQM, in which the strengths and limitations of each proposed method are evaluated and compared. In addition, a novel taxonomy of ML approaches based on methodology is also established. The review is concluded by discussing unexplored research gaps and potential new directions for more robust ML-AQM methods.
Assessing the Viability of Synthetic Physical Copy Detection Patterns on Different Imaging Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the potential of synthetic physical Copy Detection Patterns (CDP) to improve the robustness of anti-counterfeiting systems. By leveraging synthetic physical CDP, we aim at enhancing security and cost-effectiveness across various real-world applications. Our research demonstrates that synthetic CDP offer substantial improvements in authentication accuracy compared to one based on traditional digital templates. We conducted extensive tests using both a scanner and a diverse range of mobile phones, validating our approach through ROC analysis. The results indicate that synthetic CDP can reliably differentiate between original and fake samples, making this approach a viable solution for real-world applications, though requires an additional research to make this technology scalable across a variety of imaging devices.
Ethio-Fake: Cutting-Edge Approaches to Combat Fake News in Under-Resourced Languages Using Explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a significant threat to the integrity of information dissemination, particularly on social media platforms. Misinformation can spread quickly due to the ease of creating and disseminating content, affecting public opinion and sociopolitical events. Identifying false information is therefore essential to reducing its negative consequences and maintaining the reliability of online news sources. Traditional approaches to fake news detection often rely solely on content-based features, overlooking the crucial role of social context in shaping the perception and propagation of news articles. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach that integrates social context-based features with news content features to enhance the accuracy of fake news detection in under-resourced languages. We perform several experiments utilizing a variety of methodologies, including traditional machine learning, neural networks, ensemble learning, and transfer learning. Assessment of the outcomes of the experiments shows that the ensemble learning approach has the highest accuracy, achieving a 0.99 F1 score. Additionally, when compared with monolingual models, the fine-tuned model with the target language outperformed others, achieving a 0.94 F1 score. We analyze the functioning of the models, considering the important features that contribute to model performance, using explainable AI techniques.
Plots Unlock Time-Series Understanding in Multimodal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

While multimodal foundation models can now natively work with data beyond text, they remain underutilized in analyzing the considerable amounts of multi-dimensional time-series data in fields like healthcare, finance, and social sciences, representing a missed opportunity for richer, data-driven insights. This paper proposes a simple but effective method that leverages the existing vision encoders of these models to "see" time-series data via plots, avoiding the need for additional, potentially costly, model training. Our empirical evaluations show that this approach outperforms providing the raw time-series data as text, with the additional benefit that visual time-series representations demonstrate up to a 90% reduction in model API costs. We validate our hypothesis through synthetic data tasks of increasing complexity, progressing from simple functional form identification on clean data, to extracting trends from noisy scatter plots. To demonstrate generalizability from synthetic tasks with clear reasoning steps to more complex, real-world scenarios, we apply our approach to consumer health tasks - specifically fall detection, activity recognition, and readiness assessment - which involve heterogeneous, noisy data and multi-step reasoning. The overall success in plot performance over text performance (up to an 120% performance increase on zero-shot synthetic tasks, and up to 150% performance increase on real-world tasks), across both GPT and Gemini model families, highlights our approach's potential for making the best use of the native capabilities of foundation models.
Deconstructing Recurrence, Attention, and Gating: Investigating the transferability of Transformers and Gated Recurrent Neural Networks in forecasting of dynamical systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning architectures, including transformers and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have revolutionized forecasting in applications ranging from text processing to extreme weather. Notably, advanced network architectures, tuned for applications such as natural language processing, are transferable to other tasks such as spatiotemporal forecasting tasks. However, there is a scarcity of ablation studies to illustrate the key components that enable this forecasting accuracy. The absence of such studies, although explainable due to the associated computational cost, intensifies the belief that these models ought to be considered as black boxes. In this work, we decompose the key architectural components of the most powerful neural architectures, namely gating and recurrence in RNNs, and attention mechanisms in transformers. Then, we synthesize and build novel hybrid architectures from the standard blocks, performing ablation studies to identify which mechanisms are effective for each task. The importance of considering these components as hyper-parameters that can augment the standard architectures is exhibited on various forecasting datasets, from the spatiotemporal chaotic dynamics of the multiscale Lorenz 96 system, the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation, as well as standard real world time-series benchmarks. A key finding is that neural gating and attention improves the performance of all standard RNNs in most tasks, while the addition of a notion of recurrence in transformers is detrimental. Furthermore, our study reveals that a novel, sparsely used, architecture which integrates Recurrent Highway Networks with neural gating and attention mechanisms, emerges as the best performing architecture in high-dimensional spatiotemporal forecasting of dynamical systems.
Revisit Large-Scale Image-Caption Data in Pre-training Multimodal Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining Short Synthetic Captions (SSC) towards Dense Synthetic Captions (DSC+) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models.
ReLIC: A Recipe for 64k Steps of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Embodied AI
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Intelligent embodied agents need to quickly adapt to new scenarios by integrating long histories of experience into decision-making. For instance, a robot in an unfamiliar house initially wouldn't know the locations of objects needed for tasks and might perform inefficiently. However, as it gathers more experience, it should learn the layout of its environment and remember where objects are, allowing it to complete new tasks more efficiently. To enable such rapid adaptation to new tasks, we present ReLIC, a new approach for in-context reinforcement learning (RL) for embodied agents. With ReLIC, agents are capable of adapting to new environments using 64,000 steps of in-context experience with full attention while being trained through self-generated experience via RL. We achieve this by proposing a novel policy update scheme for on-policy RL called "partial updates'' as well as a Sink-KV mechanism that enables effective utilization of a long observation history for embodied agents. Our method outperforms a variety of meta-RL baselines in adapting to unseen houses in an embodied multi-object navigation task. In addition, we find that ReLIC is capable of few-shot imitation learning despite never being trained with expert demonstrations. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of ReLIC, highlighting that the combination of large-scale RL training, the proposed partial updates scheme, and the Sink-KV are essential for effective in-context learning. The code for ReLIC and all our experiments is at https://github.com/aielawady/relic
Forecasting Smog Clouds With Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this proof-of-concept study, we conduct multivariate timeseries forecasting for the concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and (fine) particulate matter (PM10 & PM2.5) with meteorological covariates between two locations using various deep learning models, with a focus on long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) architectures. In particular, we propose an integrated, hierarchical model architecture inspired by air pollution dynamics and atmospheric science that employs multi-task learning and is benchmarked by unidirectional and fully-connected models. Results demonstrate that, above all, the hierarchical GRU proves itself as a competitive and efficient method for forecasting the concentration of smog-related pollutants.
Enhancing Mental Health Support through Human-AI Collaboration: Toward Secure and Empathetic AI-enabled chatbots
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Access to mental health support remains limited, particularly in marginalized communities where structural and cultural barriers hinder timely care. This paper explores the potential of AI-enabled chatbots as a scalable solution, focusing on advanced large language models (LLMs)-GPT v4, Mistral Large, and LLama V3.1-and assessing their ability to deliver empathetic, meaningful responses in mental health contexts. While these models show promise in generating structured responses, they fall short in replicating the emotional depth and adaptability of human therapists. Additionally, trustworthiness, bias, and privacy challenges persist due to unreliable datasets and limited collaboration with mental health professionals. To address these limitations, we propose a federated learning framework that ensures data privacy, reduces bias, and integrates continuous validation from clinicians to enhance response quality. This approach aims to develop a secure, evidence-based AI chatbot capable of offering trustworthy, empathetic, and bias-reduced mental health support, advancing AI's role in digital mental health care.
Robust Symmetry Detection via Riemannian Langevin Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Symmetries are ubiquitous across all kinds of objects, whether in nature or in man-made creations. While these symmetries may seem intuitive to the human eye, detecting them with a machine is nontrivial due to the vast search space. Classical geometry-based methods work by aggregating "votes" for each symmetry but struggle with noise. In contrast, learning-based methods may be more robust to noise, but often overlook partial symmetries due to the scarcity of annotated data. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing a novel symmetry detection method that marries classical symmetry detection techniques with recent advances in generative modeling. Specifically, we apply Langevin dynamics to a redefined symmetry space to enhance robustness against noise. We provide empirical results on a variety of shapes that suggest our method is not only robust to noise, but can also identify both partial and global symmetries. Moreover, we demonstrate the utility of our detected symmetries in various downstream tasks, such as compression and symmetrization of noisy shapes.
RoMo: A Robust Solver for Full-body Unlabeled Optical Motion Capture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Optical motion capture (MoCap) is the "gold standard" for accurately capturing full-body motions. To make use of raw MoCap point data, the system labels the points with corresponding body part locations and solves the full-body motions. However, MoCap data often contains mislabeling, occlusion and positional errors, requiring extensive manual correction. To alleviate this burden, we introduce RoMo, a learning-based framework for robustly labeling and solving raw optical motion capture data. In the labeling stage, RoMo employs a divide-and-conquer strategy to break down the complex full-body labeling challenge into manageable subtasks: alignment, full-body segmentation and part-specific labeling. To utilize the temporal continuity of markers, RoMo generates marker tracklets using a K-partite graph-based clustering algorithm, where markers serve as nodes, and edges are formed based on positional and feature similarities. For motion solving, to prevent error accumulation along the kinematic chain, we introduce a hybrid inverse kinematic solver that utilizes joint positions as intermediate representations and adjusts the template skeleton to match estimated joint positions. We demonstrate that RoMo achieves high labeling and solving accuracy across multiple metrics and various datasets. Extensive comparisons show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art research methods. On a real dataset, RoMo improves the F1 score of hand labeling from 0.94 to 0.98, and reduces joint position error of body motion solving by 25%. Furthermore, RoMo can be applied in scenarios where commercial systems are inadequate. The code and data for RoMo are available at https://github.com/non-void/RoMo.
Logic-Free Building Automation: Learning the Control of Room Facilities with Wall Switches and Ceiling Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial intelligence enables smarter control in building automation by its learning capability of users' preferences on facility control. Reinforcement learning (RL) was one of the approaches to this, but it has many challenges in real-world implementations. We propose a new architecture for logic-free building automation (LFBA) that leverages deep learning (DL) to control room facilities without predefined logic. Our approach differs from RL in that it uses wall switches as supervised signals and a ceiling camera to monitor the environment, allowing the DL model to learn users' preferred controls directly from the scenes and switch states. This LFBA system is tested by our testbed with various conditions and user activities. The results demonstrate the efficacy, achieving 93%-98% control accuracy with VGG, outperforming other DL models such as Vision Transformer and ResNet. This indicates that LFBA can achieve smarter and more user-friendly control by learning from the observable scenes and user interactions.
Estimating Body Volume and Height Using 3D Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate body weight estimation is critical in emergency medicine for proper dosing of weight-based medications, yet direct measurement is often impractical in urgent situations. This paper presents a non-invasive method for estimating body weight by calculating total body volume and height using 3D imaging technology. A RealSense D415 camera is employed to capture high-resolution depth maps of the patient, from which 3D models are generated. The Convex Hull Algorithm is then applied to calculate the total body volume, with enhanced accuracy achieved by segmenting the point cloud data into multiple sections and summing their individual volumes. The height is derived from the 3D model by identifying the distance between key points on the body. This combined approach provides an accurate estimate of body weight, improving the reliability of medical interventions where precise weight data is unavailable. The proposed method demonstrates significant potential to enhance patient safety and treatment outcomes in emergency settings.
A Soft Robotic Exosuit For Knee Extension Using Hyper-Bending Actuators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Movement disorders impact muscle strength and mobility, and despite therapeutic efforts, many people with movement disorders have challenges functioning independently. Soft wearable robots, or exosuits, offer a promising solution for continuous daily support, however, commercially viable devices are not widely available. Here, we introduce a design framework for lower limb exosuits centered on a soft pneumatically driven fabric-based actuator. Our design consists of a novel multi-material textile sleeve that incorporates braided mesh and knit-elastic materials to realize hyper-bending actuators. The actuators incorporate 3D-printed self-sealing end caps that are attached to a semi-rigid human-robot interface to secure them to the body. We will demonstrate the effectiveness of our exosuit in generating enough force to assist during sit-to-stand transitions.