OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Research on Key Technologies of Infrastructure Digitalization based on Multimodal Spatial Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Since NASA put forward the concept of the digital twin in 2010, many industries have put forward the dynamic goal of digital development, and the transportation industry is also among them. With more and more companies laying out on this virgin land, the digital twin transportation industry has grown rapidly and gradually formed a complete scientific research system. However, under the largely mature framework, there are still many loophole problems that need to be solved. In the process of constructing a road network with point cloud information, we summarize several major features of the point cloud collected by laser scanners and analyze the potential problems of constructing the network, such as misjudging the feature points as ground points and grid voids. On this basis, we reviewed relevant literature and proposed targeted solutions, such as building a point cloud pyramid modeled after the image pyramid, expanding the virtual grid, etc., applying CSF for ground-point cloud extraction, and constructing a road network model using the PTD (progressive density-based filter) algorithm. For the problem of road sign detection, we optimize the remote sensing data in the ground point cloud by enhancing the information density using edge detection, improving the data quality by removing the low intensity points, and achieving 90% accuracy of road text recognition using PaddleOCR and Densenet. As for the real-time digital twin traffic, we design the P2PRN network using the backbone of MPR-GAN for 2D feature generation and SuperGlue for 2D feature matching, rendering the viewpoints according to the matching optimization points, completing the multimodal matching task after several iterations, and successfully calculating the road camera position with 10° and 15m accuracy.
APP-RUSS: Automated Path Planning for Robotic Ultrasound System
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous robotic ultrasound System (RUSS) has been extensively studied. However, fully automated ultrasound image acquisition is still challenging, partly due to the lack of study in combining two phases of path planning: guiding the ultrasound probe to the scan target and covering the scan surface or volume. This paper presents a system of Automated Path Planning for RUSS (APP-RUSS). Our focus is on the first phase of automation, which emphasizes directing the ultrasound probe's path toward the target over extended distances. Specifically, our APP-RUSS system consists of a RealSense D405 RGB-D camera that is employed for visual guidance of the UR5e robotic arm and a cubic Bezier curve path planning model that is customized for delivering the probe to the recognized target. APP-RUSS can contribute to understanding the integration of the two phases of path planning in robotic ultrasound imaging, paving the way for its clinical adoption.
Neural Text Sanitization with Privacy Risk Indicators: An Empirical Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Text sanitization is the task of redacting a document to mask all occurrences of (direct or indirect) personal identifiers, with the goal of concealing the identity of the individual(s) referred in it. In this paper, we consider a two-step approach to text sanitization and provide a detailed analysis of its empirical performance on two recently published datasets: the Text Anonymization Benchmark (Pilán et al., 2022) and a collection of Wikipedia biographies (Papadopoulou et al., 2022). The text sanitization process starts with a privacy-oriented entity recognizer that seeks to determine the text spans expressing identifiable personal information. This privacy-oriented entity recognizer is trained by combining a standard named entity recognition model with a gazetteer populated by person-related terms extracted from Wikidata. The second step of the text sanitization process consists in assessing the privacy risk associated with each detected text span, either isolated or in combination with other text spans. We present five distinct indicators of the re-identification risk, respectively based on language model probabilities, text span classification, sequence labelling, perturbations, and web search. We provide a contrastive analysis of each privacy indicator and highlight their benefits and limitations, notably in relation to the available labeled data.
Intent Contrastive Learning with Cross Subsequences for Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

The user purchase behaviors are mainly influenced by their intentions (e.g., buying clothes for decoration, buying brushes for painting, etc.). Modeling a user's latent intention can significantly improve the performance of recommendations. Previous works model users' intentions by considering the predefined label in auxiliary information or introducing stochastic data augmentation to learn purposes in the latent space. However, the auxiliary information is sparse and not always available for recommender systems, and introducing stochastic data augmentation may introduce noise and thus change the intentions hidden in the sequence. Therefore, leveraging user intentions for sequential recommendation (SR) can be challenging because they are frequently varied and unobserved. In this paper, Intent contrastive learning with Cross Subsequences for sequential Recommendation (ICSRec) is proposed to model users' latent intentions. Specifically, ICSRec first segments a user's sequential behaviors into multiple subsequences by using a dynamic sliding operation and takes these subsequences into the encoder to generate the representations for the user's intentions. To tackle the problem of no explicit labels for purposes, ICSRec assumes different subsequences with the same target item may represent the same intention and proposes a coarse-grain intent contrastive learning to push these subsequences closer. Then, fine-grain intent contrastive learning is mentioned to capture the fine-grain intentions of subsequences in sequential behaviors. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ICSRec model compared with baseline methods.
Social Commonsense-Guided Search Query Generation for Open-Domain Knowledge-Powered Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Open-domain dialog involves generating search queries that help obtain relevant knowledge for holding informative conversations. However, it can be challenging to determine what information to retrieve when the user is passive and does not express a clear need or request. To tackle this issue, we present a novel approach that focuses on generating internet search queries that are guided by social commonsense. Specifically, we leverage a commonsense dialog system to establish connections related to the conversation topic, which subsequently guides our query generation. Our proposed framework addresses passive user interactions by integrating topic tracking, commonsense response generation and instruction-driven query generation. Through extensive evaluations, we show that our approach overcomes limitations of existing query generation techniques that rely solely on explicit dialog information, and produces search queries that are more relevant, specific, and compelling, ultimately resulting in more engaging responses.
Self-Assistant: Portable Progressive Muscle Relaxation Training Interface for Anxiety Reduction in Office Workers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Workload often triggers anxiety for office workers. While a variety of stress intervention and management techniques have been explored, there exist only a few of portable tangible interfaces for anxiety reduction. Contributing to the body of work, we introduce Self-Assistant, a portable anxiety intervention training interface. This is based on progressive muscle relaxation training which is an effective way for reducing stress and raise awareness of tension, and provide feelings of deep relaxation. This interface incorporates a stress ball with a pressure sensor and visual indicators which help track the user's anxiety level through squeeze actions. This is designed to help improve self-awareness of anxiety and stress, in turn self-regulating bodily functions, offering rapid and low-sensory stimulus training for anxiety relief. Finally, we discuss application scenarios and future work with Self-Assistant.
Is ChatGPT a game changer for geocoding -- a benchmark for geocoding address parsing techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The remarkable success of GPT models across various tasks, including toponymy recognition motivates us to assess the performance of the GPT-3 model in the geocoding address parsing task. To ensure that the evaluation more accurately mirrors performance in real-world scenarios with diverse user input qualities and resolve the pressing need for a 'gold standard' evaluation dataset for geocoding systems, we introduce a benchmark dataset of low-quality address descriptions synthesized based on human input patterns mining from actual input logs of a geocoding system in production. This dataset has 21 different input errors and variations; contains over 239,000 address records that are uniquely selected from streets across all U.S. 50 states and D.C.; and consists of three subsets to be used as training, validation, and testing sets. Building on this, we train and gauge the performance of the GPT-3 model in extracting address components, contrasting its performance with transformer-based and LSTM-based models. The evaluation results indicate that Bidirectional LSTM-CRF model has achieved the best performance over these transformer-based models and GPT-3 model. Transformer-based models demonstrate very comparable results compared to the Bidirectional LSTM-CRF model. The GPT-3 model, though trailing in performance, showcases potential in the address parsing task with few-shot examples, exhibiting room for improvement with additional fine-tuning. We open source the code and data of this presented benchmark so that researchers can utilize it for future model development or extend it to evaluate similar tasks, such as document geocoding.
A Quantitative Evaluation of Dense 3D Reconstruction of Sinus Anatomy from Monocular Endoscopic Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Generating accurate 3D reconstructions from endoscopic video is a promising avenue for longitudinal radiation-free analysis of sinus anatomy and surgical outcomes. Several methods for monocular reconstruction have been proposed, yielding visually pleasant 3D anatomical structures by retrieving relative camera poses with structure-from-motion-type algorithms and fusion of monocular depth estimates. However, due to the complex properties of the underlying algorithms and endoscopic scenes, the reconstruction pipeline may perform poorly or fail unexpectedly. Further, acquiring medical data conveys additional challenges, presenting difficulties in quantitatively benchmarking these models, understanding failure cases, and identifying critical components that contribute to their precision. In this work, we perform a quantitative analysis of a self-supervised approach for sinus reconstruction using endoscopic sequences paired with optical tracking and high-resolution computed tomography acquired from nine ex-vivo specimens. Our results show that the generated reconstructions are in high agreement with the anatomy, yielding an average point-to-mesh error of 0.91 mm between reconstructions and CT segmentations. However, in a point-to-point matching scenario, relevant for endoscope tracking and navigation, we found average target registration errors of 6.58 mm. We identified that pose and depth estimation inaccuracies contribute equally to this error and that locally consistent sequences with shorter trajectories generate more accurate reconstructions. These results suggest that achieving global consistency between relative camera poses and estimated depths with the anatomy is essential. In doing so, we can ensure proper synergy between all components of the pipeline for improved reconstructions that will facilitate clinical application of this innovative technology.
Bi-Encoders based Species Normalization -- Pairwise Sentence Learning to Rank
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Motivation: Biomedical named-entity normalization involves connecting biomedical entities with distinct database identifiers in order to facilitate data integration across various fields of biology. Existing systems for biomedical named entity normalization heavily rely on dictionaries, manually created rules, and high-quality representative features such as lexical or morphological characteristics. However, recent research has investigated the use of neural network-based models to reduce dependence on dictionaries, manually crafted rules, and features. Despite these advancements, the performance of these models is still limited due to the lack of sufficiently large training datasets. These models have a tendency to overfit small training corpora and exhibit poor generalization when faced with previously unseen entities, necessitating the redesign of rules and features. Contribution: We present a novel deep learning approach for named entity normalization, treating it as a pair-wise learning to rank problem. Our method utilizes the widely-used information retrieval algorithm Best Matching 25 to generate candidate concepts, followed by the application of bi-directional encoder representation from the encoder (BERT) to re-rank the candidate list. Notably, our approach eliminates the need for feature-engineering or rule creation. We conduct experiments on species entity types and evaluate our method against state-of-the-art techniques using LINNAEUS and S800 biomedical corpora. Our proposed approach surpasses existing methods in linking entities to the NCBI taxonomy. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing neural network-based approach for species normalization in the literature.
ARCOQ: Arabic Closest Opposite Questions Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a dataset for closest opposite questions in Arabic language. The dataset is the first of its kind for the Arabic language. It is beneficial for the assessment of systems on the aspect of antonymy detection. The structure is similar to that of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) closest opposite questions dataset for the English language. The introduced dataset consists of 500 questions, each contains a query word for which the closest opposite needs to be determined from among a set of candidate words. Each question is also associated with the correct answer. We publish the dataset publicly in addition to providing standard splits of the dataset into development and test sets. Moreover, the paper provides a benchmark for the performance of different Arabic word embedding models on the introduced dataset.
Clustering Students Based on Gamification User Types and Learning Styles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The aim of this study is clustering students according to their gamification user types and learning styles with the purpose of providing instructors with a new perspective of grouping students in case of clustering which cannot be done by hand when there are multiple scales in data. The data used consists of 251 students who were enrolled at a Turkish state university. When grouping students, K-means algorithm has been utilized as clustering algorithm. As for determining the gamification user types and learning styles of students, Gamification User Type Hexad Scale and Grasha-Riechmann Student Learning Style Scale have been used respectively. Silhouette coefficient is utilized as clustering quality measure. After fitting the algorithm in several ways, highest Silhouette coefficient obtained was 0.12 meaning that results are neutral but not satisfactory. All the statistical operations and data visualizations were made using Python programming language.
Fairness-aware Optimal Graph Filter Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graphs are mathematical tools that can be used to represent complex real-world interconnected systems, such as financial markets and social networks. Hence, machine learning (ML) over graphs has attracted significant attention recently. However, it has been demonstrated that ML over graphs amplifies the already existing bias towards certain under-represented groups in various decision-making problems due to the information aggregation over biased graph structures. Faced with this challenge, here we take a fresh look at the problem of bias mitigation in graph-based learning by borrowing insights from graph signal processing. Our idea is to introduce predesigned graph filters within an ML pipeline to reduce a novel unsupervised bias measure, namely the correlation between sensitive attributes and the underlying graph connectivity. We show that the optimal design of said filters can be cast as a convex problem in the graph spectral domain. We also formulate a linear programming (LP) problem informed by a theoretical bias analysis, which attains a closed-form solution and leads to a more efficient fairness-aware graph filter. Finally, for a design whose degrees of freedom are independent of the input graph size, we minimize the bias metric over the family of polynomial graph convolutional filters. Our optimal filter designs offer complementary strengths to explore favorable fairness-utility-complexity tradeoffs. For performance evaluation, we conduct extensive and reproducible node classification experiments over real-world networks. Our results show that the proposed framework leads to better fairness measures together with similar utility compared to state-of-the-art fairness-aware baselines.
Fast Fourier transform via automorphism groups of rational function fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ computes evaluations of a given polynomial of degree less than $n$ at a specifically chosen set of $n$ distinct evaluation points in $\mathbb{F}_q$. If $q$ or $q-1$ is a smooth number, then the divide-and-conquer approach leads to the fastest known FFT algorithms. Depending on the type of group that the set of evaluation points forms, these algorithms are classified as multiplicative (Math of Comp. 1965) and additive (FOCS 2014) FFT algorithms. In this work, we provide a unified framework for FFT algorithms that include both multiplicative and additive FFT algorithms as special cases, and beyond: our framework also works when $q+1$ is smooth, while all known results require $q$ or $q-1$ to be smooth. For the new case where $q+1$ is smooth (this new case was not considered before in literature as far as we know), we show that if $n$ is a divisor of $q+1$ that is $B$-smooth for a real $B>0$, then our FFT needs $O(Bn\log n)$ arithmetic operations in $\mathbb{F}_q$. Our unified framework is a natural consequence of introducing the algebraic function fields into the study of FFT.
VQ-NeRF: Vector Quantization Enhances Implicit Neural Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advancements in implicit neural representations have contributed to high-fidelity surface reconstruction and photorealistic novel view synthesis. However, the computational complexity inherent in these methodologies presents a substantial impediment, constraining the attainable frame rates and resolutions in practical applications. In response to this predicament, we propose VQ-NeRF, an effective and efficient pipeline for enhancing implicit neural representations via vector quantization. The essence of our method involves reducing the sampling space of NeRF to a lower resolution and subsequently reinstating it to the original size utilizing a pre-trained VAE decoder, thereby effectively mitigating the sampling time bottleneck encountered during rendering. Although the codebook furnishes representative features, reconstructing fine texture details of the scene remains challenging due to high compression rates. To overcome this constraint, we design an innovative multi-scale NeRF sampling scheme that concurrently optimizes the NeRF model at both compressed and original scales to enhance the network's ability to preserve fine details. Furthermore, we incorporate a semantic loss function to improve the geometric fidelity and semantic coherence of our 3D reconstructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in achieving the optimal trade-off between rendering quality and efficiency. Evaluation on the DTU, BlendMVS, and H3DS datasets confirms the superior performance of our approach.
Counterfactual Explanation Generation with s(CASP)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning models that automate decision-making are increasingly being used in consequential areas such as loan approvals, pretrial bail, hiring, and many more. Unfortunately, most of these models are black-boxes, i.e., they are unable to reveal how they reach these prediction decisions. A need for transparency demands justification for such predictions. An affected individual might desire explanations to understand why a decision was made. Ethical and legal considerations may further require informing the individual of changes in the input attribute that could be made to produce a desirable outcome. This paper focuses on the latter problem of automatically generating counterfactual explanations. Our approach utilizes answer set programming and the s(CASP) goal-directed ASP system. Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known knowledge representation and reasoning paradigm. s(CASP) is a goal-directed ASP system that executes answer-set programs top-down without grounding them. The query-driven nature of s(CASP) allows us to provide justifications as proof trees, which makes it possible to analyze the generated counterfactual explanations. We show how counterfactual explanations are computed and justified by imagining multiple possible worlds where some or all factual assumptions are untrue and, more importantly, how we can navigate between these worlds. We also show how our algorithm can be used to find the Craig Interpolant for a class of answer set programs for a failing query.
Coyote C++: An Industrial-Strength Fully Automated Unit Testing Tool
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Coyote C++ is an automated testing tool that uses a sophisticated concolic-execution-based approach to realize fully automated unit testing for C and C++. While concolic testing has proven effective for languages such as C and Java, tools have struggled to achieve a practical level of automation for C++ due to its many syntactical intricacies and overall complexity. Coyote C++ is the first automated testing tool to breach the barrier and bring automated unit testing for C++ to a practical level suitable for industrial adoption, consistently reaching around 90% code coverage. Notably, this testing process requires no user involvement and performs test harness generation, test case generation and test execution with "one-click" automation. In this paper, we introduce Coyote C++ by outlining its high-level structure and discussing the core design decisions that shaped the implementation of its concolic execution engine. Finally, we demonstrate that Coyote C++ is capable of achieving high coverage results within a reasonable timespan by presenting the results from experiments on both open-source and industrial software.