OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Logit Poisoning Attack in Distillation-based Federated Learning and its Countermeasures
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Distillation-based federated learning has emerged as a promising collaborative learning approach, where clients share the output logit vectors of a public dataset rather than their private model parameters. This practice reduces the risk of privacy invasion attacks and facilitates heterogeneous learning. The landscape of poisoning attacks within distillation-based federated learning is complex, with existing research employing traditional data poisoning strategies targeting the models' parameters. However, these attack schemes primarily have shortcomings rooted in their original designs, which target the model parameters rather than the logit vectors. Furthermore, they do not adequately consider the role of logit vectors in carrying information during the knowledge transfer process. This misalignment results in less efficiency in the context of distillation-based federated learning. Due to the limitations of existing methodologies, our research delves into the intrinsic properties of the logit vector, striving for a more nuanced understanding. We introduce a two-stage scheme for logit poisoning attacks, addressing previous shortcomings. Initially, we collect the local logits, generate the representative vectors, categorize the logit elements within the vector, and design a shuffling table to maximize information entropy. Then, we intentionally scale the shuffled logit vectors to enhance the magnitude of the target vectors. Concurrently, we propose an efficient defense algorithm to counter this new poisoning scheme by calculating the distance between estimated benign vectors and vectors uploaded by users. Through extensive experiments, our study illustrates the significant threat posed by the proposed logit poisoning attack and highlights the effectiveness of our defense algorithm.
Design and Testbed Deployment of Frequency-Domain Equalization Full Duplex Radios
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Full-duplex (FD) wireless can significantly enhance spectrum efficiency but requires effective self-interference (SI) cancellers. RF SI cancellation (SIC) via frequency-domain equalization (FDE), where bandpass filters channelize the SI, is suited for integrated circuits (ICs). In this paper, we explore the limits and higher layer challenges associated with using such cancellers. We evaluate the performance of a custom FDE-based canceller using two testbeds; one with mobile FD radios and the other with upgraded, static FD radios in the PAWR COSMOS testbed. The latter is a lasting artifact for the research community, alongside a dataset containing baseband waveforms captured on the COSMOS FD radios, facilitating FD-related experimentation at the higher networking layers. We evaluate the performance of the FDE-based FD radios in both testbeds, with experiments showing 95 dB overall achieved SIC (52 dB from RF SIC) across 20 MHz bandwidth, and an average link-level FD rate gain of 1.87x. We also conduct experiments in (i) uplink-downlink networks with inter-user interference, and (ii) heterogeneous networks with half-duplex and FD users. The experimental FD gains in the two types of networks depend on the users' SNR values and the number of FD users, and are 1.14x-1.25x and 1.25x-1.73x, respectively, confirming previous analytical results.
A Policy Gradient Primal-Dual Algorithm for Constrained MDPs with Uniform PAC Guarantees
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We study a primal-dual (PD) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for online constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs). Despite its widespread practical use, the existing theoretical literature on PD-RL algorithms for this problem only provides sublinear regret guarantees and fails to ensure convergence to optimal policies. In this paper, we introduce a novel policy gradient PD algorithm with uniform probably approximate correctness (Uniform-PAC) guarantees, simultaneously ensuring convergence to optimal policies, sublinear regret, and polynomial sample complexity for any target accuracy. Notably, this represents the first Uniform-PAC algorithm for the online CMDP problem. In addition to the theoretical guarantees, we empirically demonstrate in a simple CMDP that our algorithm converges to optimal policies, while baseline algorithms exhibit oscillatory performance and constraint violation.
QTFlow: Quantitative Timing-Sensitive Information Flow for Security-Aware Hardware Design on RTL
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In contemporary Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools, security often takes a backseat to the primary goals of power, performance, and area optimization. Commonly, the security analysis is conducted by hand, leading to vulnerabilities in the design remaining unnoticed. Security-aware EDA tools assist the designer in the identification and removal of security threats while keeping performance and area in mind. Cutting-edge methods employ information flow analysis to identify inadvertent information leaks in design structures. Current information leakage detection methods use quantitative information flow analysis to quantify the leaks. However, handling sequential circuits poses challenges for state-of-the-art techniques due to their time-agnostic nature, overlooking timing channels, and introducing false positives. To address this, we introduce QTFlow, a timing-sensitive framework for quantifying hardware information leakages during the design phase. Illustrating its effectiveness on open-source benchmarks, QTFlow autonomously identifies timing channels and diminishes all false positives arising from time-agnostic analysis when contrasted with current state-of-the-art techniques.
Do Object Detection Localization Errors Affect Human Performance and Trust?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Bounding boxes are often used to communicate automatic object detection results to humans, aiding humans in a multitude of tasks. We investigate the relationship between bounding box localization errors and human task performance. We use observer performance studies on a visual multi-object counting task to measure both human trust and performance with different levels of bounding box accuracy. The results show that localization errors have no significant impact on human accuracy or trust in the system. Recall and precision errors impact both human performance and trust, suggesting that optimizing algorithms based on the F1 score is more beneficial in human-computer tasks. Lastly, the paper offers an improvement on bounding boxes in multi-object counting tasks with center dots, showing improved performance and better resilience to localization inaccuracy.
VR-based generation of photorealistic synthetic data for training hand-object tracking models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Supervised learning models for precise tracking of hand-object interactions (HOI) in 3D require large amounts of annotated data for training. Moreover, it is not intuitive for non-experts to label 3D ground truth (e.g. 6DoF object pose) on 2D images. To address these issues, we present "blender-hoisynth", an interactive synthetic data generator based on the Blender software. Blender-hoisynth can scalably generate and automatically annotate visual HOI training data. Other competing approaches usually generate synthetic HOI data compeletely without human input. While this may be beneficial in some scenarios, HOI applications inherently necessitate direct control over the HOIs as an expression of human intent. With blender-hoisynth, it is possible for users to interact with objects via virtual hands using standard Virtual Reality hardware. The synthetically generated data are characterized by a high degree of photorealism and contain visually plausible and physically realistic videos of hands grasping objects and moving them around in 3D. To demonstrate the efficacy of our data generation, we replace large parts of the training data in the well-known DexYCB dataset with hoisynth data and train a state-of-the-art HOI reconstruction model with it. We show that there is no significant degradation in the model performance despite the data replacement.
ReplaceAnything3D:Text-Guided 3D Scene Editing with Compositional Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce ReplaceAnything3D model (RAM3D), a novel text-guided 3D scene editing method that enables the replacement of specific objects within a scene. Given multi-view images of a scene, a text prompt describing the object to replace, and a text prompt describing the new object, our Erase-and-Replace approach can effectively swap objects in the scene with newly generated content while maintaining 3D consistency across multiple viewpoints. We demonstrate the versatility of ReplaceAnything3D by applying it to various realistic 3D scenes, showcasing results of modified foreground objects that are well-integrated with the rest of the scene without affecting its overall integrity.
Hi-SAM: Marrying Segment Anything Model for Hierarchical Text Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a profound vision foundation model pretrained on a large-scale dataset, breaks the boundaries of general segmentation and sparks various downstream applications. This paper introduces Hi-SAM, a unified model leveraging SAM for hierarchical text segmentation. Hi-SAM excels in segmentation across four hierarchies, including pixel-level text, word, text-line, and paragraph, while realizing layout analysis as well. Specifically, we first turn SAM into a high-quality pixel-level text segmentation (TS) model through a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach. We use this TS model to iteratively generate the pixel-level text labels in a semi-automatical manner, unifying labels across the four text hierarchies in the HierText dataset. Subsequently, with these complete labels, we launch the end-to-end trainable Hi-SAM based on the TS architecture with a customized hierarchical mask decoder. During inference, Hi-SAM offers both automatic mask generation (AMG) mode and promptable segmentation (PS) mode. In the AMG mode, Hi-SAM segments pixel-level text foreground masks initially, then samples foreground points for hierarchical text mask generation and achieves layout analysis in passing. As for the PS mode, Hi-SAM provides word, text-line, and paragraph masks with a single point click. Experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance of our TS model: 84.86% fgIOU on Total-Text and 88.96% fgIOU on TextSeg for pixel-level text segmentation. Moreover, compared to the previous specialist for joint hierarchical detection and layout analysis on HierText, Hi-SAM achieves significant improvements: 4.73% PQ and 5.39% F1 on the text-line level, 5.49% PQ and 7.39% F1 on the paragraph level layout analysis, requiring $20\times$ fewer training epochs. The code is available at https://github.com/ymy-k/Hi-SAM.
SubPipe: A Submarine Pipeline Inspection Dataset for Segmentation and Visual-inertial Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents SubPipe, an underwater dataset for SLAM, object detection, and image segmentation. SubPipe has been recorded using a \gls{LAUV}, operated by OceanScan MST, and carrying a sensor suite including two cameras, a side-scan sonar, and an inertial navigation system, among other sensors. The AUV has been deployed in a pipeline inspection environment with a submarine pipe partially covered by sand. The AUV's pose ground truth is estimated from the navigation sensors. The side-scan sonar and RGB images include object detection and segmentation annotations, respectively. State-of-the-art segmentation, object detection, and SLAM methods are benchmarked on SubPipe to demonstrate the dataset's challenges and opportunities for leveraging computer vision algorithms. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first annotated underwater dataset providing a real pipeline inspection scenario. The dataset and experiments are publicly available online at https://github.com/remaro-network/SubPipe-dataset
CONCORD: Towards a DSL for Configurable Graph Code Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning is widely used to uncover hidden patterns in large code corpora. To achieve this, constructing a format that captures the relevant characteristics and features of source code is essential. Graph-based representations have gained attention for their ability to model structural and semantic information. However, existing tools lack flexibility in constructing graphs across different programming languages, limiting their use. Additionally, the output of these tools often lacks interoperability and results in excessively large graphs, making graph-based neural networks training slower and less scalable. We introduce CONCORD, a domain-specific language to build customizable graph representations. It implements reduction heuristics to reduce graphs' size complexity. We demonstrate its effectiveness in code smell detection as an illustrative use case and show that: first, CONCORD can produce code representations automatically per the specified configuration, and second, our heuristics can achieve comparable performance with significantly reduced size. CONCORD will help researchers a) create and experiment with customizable graph-based code representations for different software engineering tasks involving DL, b) reduce the engineering work to generate graph representations, c) address the issue of scalability in GNN models, and d) enhance the reproducibility of experiments in research through a standardized approach to code representation and analysis.
From Training-Free to Adaptive: Empirical Insights into MLLMs' Understanding of Detection Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the impressive capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in integrating text and image modalities, challenges remain in accurately interpreting detailed visual elements. Vision detection models excel at recognizing fine-grained image details, prompting researchers to use them to enhance MLLMs. One effective strategy is to infuse detection information in text format, which has proven simple and effective. However, most studies utilize this method without training, leaving the potential of adaptive training largely unexplored. Adaptive training could significantly enhance MLLMs' comprehension of unique inputs while filtering out irrelevant information. This paper addresses the crucial question: How does training impact MLLMs' understanding of infused textual detection information? We systematically experiment with various representative models to evaluate the effects of training-free, retraining, and fine-tuning strategies. We also examine the influence of training on MLLMs' original abilities and the interchangeability of detection models. Our findings indicate that fine-tuning a pre-trained MLLM to incorporate textual detection information delivers superior results compared to training-free and retraining methods, improving performance by 6.71% across 10 widely recognized benchmarks. Furthermore, fine-tuning enables MLLMs to retain performance enhancements even when detection models are swapped, indicating improved understanding of formatted textual data. We release our codes to support further exploration of fusion strategies for vision detection models and the enhancement of MLLMs' fine-grained multimodal capabilities.
Individual mapping of large polymorphic shrubs in high mountains using satellite images and deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Monitoring the distribution and size of long-living large shrubs, such as junipers, is crucial for assessing the long-term impacts of global change on high-mountain ecosystems. While deep learning models have shown remarkable success in object segmentation, adapting these models to detect shrub species with polymorphic nature remains challenging. In this research, we release a large dataset of individual shrub delineations on freely available satellite imagery and use an instance segmentation model to map all junipers over the treeline for an entire biosphere reserve (Sierra Nevada, Spain). To optimize performance, we introduced a novel dual data construction approach: using photo-interpreted (PI) data for model development and fieldwork (FW) data for validation. To account for the polymorphic nature of junipers during model evaluation, we developed a soft version of the Intersection over Union metric. Finally, we assessed the uncertainty of the resulting map in terms of canopy cover and density of shrubs per size class. Our model achieved an F1-score in shrub delineation of 87.87% on the PI data and 76.86% on the FW data. The R2 and RMSE of the observed versus predicted relationship were 0.63 and 6.67% for canopy cover, and 0.90 and 20.62 for shrub density. The greater density of larger shrubs in lower altitudes and smaller shrubs in higher altitudes observed in the model outputs was also present in the PI and FW data, suggesting an altitudinal uplift in the optimal performance of the species. This study demonstrates that deep learning applied on freely available high-resolution satellite imagery is useful to detect medium to large shrubs of high ecological value at the regional scale, which could be expanded to other high-mountains worldwide and to historical and forthcoming imagery.
Optimizing contrastive learning for cortical folding pattern detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The human cerebral cortex has many bumps and grooves called gyri and sulci. Even though there is a high inter-individual consistency for the main cortical folds, this is not the case when we examine the exact shapes and details of the folding patterns. Because of this complexity, characterizing the cortical folding variability and relating them to subjects' behavioral characteristics or pathologies is still an open scientific problem. Classical approaches include labeling a few specific patterns, either manually or semi-automatically, based on geometric distances, but the recent availability of MRI image datasets of tens of thousands of subjects makes modern deep-learning techniques particularly attractive. Here, we build a self-supervised deep-learning model to detect folding patterns in the cingulate region. We train a contrastive self-supervised model (SimCLR) on both Human Connectome Project (1101 subjects) and UKBioBank (21070 subjects) datasets with topological-based augmentations on the cortical skeletons, which are topological objects that capture the shape of the folds. We explore several backbone architectures (convolutional network, DenseNet, and PointNet) for the SimCLR. For evaluation and testing, we perform a linear classification task on a database manually labeled for the presence of the "double-parallel" folding pattern in the cingulate region, which is related to schizophrenia characteristics. The best model, giving a test AUC of 0.76, is a convolutional network with 6 layers, a 10-dimensional latent space, a linear projection head, and using the branch-clipping augmentation. This is the first time that a self-supervised deep learning model has been applied to cortical skeletons on such a large dataset and quantitatively evaluated. We can now envisage the next step: applying it to other brain regions to detect other biomarkers.
Exploring Public Opinion on Responsible AI Through The Lens of Cultural Consensus Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

As the societal implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continue to grow, the pursuit of responsible AI necessitates public engagement in its development and governance processes. This involvement is crucial for capturing diverse perspectives and promoting equitable practices and outcomes. We applied Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) to a nationally representative survey dataset on various aspects of AI to discern beliefs and attitudes about responsible AI in the United States. Our results offer valuable insights by identifying shared and contrasting views on responsible AI. Furthermore, these findings serve as critical reference points for developers and policymakers, enabling them to more effectively consider individual variances and group-level cultural perspectives when making significant decisions and addressing the public's concerns.
Zero-shot Sequential Neuro-symbolic Reasoning for Automatically Generating Architecture Schematic Designs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel automated system for generating architecture schematic designs aimed at streamlining complex decision-making at the multifamily real estate development project's outset. Leveraging the combined strengths of generative AI (neuro reasoning) and mathematical program solvers (symbolic reasoning), the method addresses both the reliance on expert insights and technical challenges in architectural schematic design. To address the large-scale and interconnected nature of design decisions needed for designing a whole building, we proposed a novel sequential neuro-symbolic reasoning approach, emulating traditional architecture design processes from initial concept to detailed layout. To remove the need to hand-craft a cost function to approximate the desired objectives, we propose a solution that uses neuro reasoning to generate constraints and cost functions that the symbolic solvers can use to solve. We also incorporate feedback loops for each design stage to ensure a tight integration between neuro and symbolic reasoning. Developed using GPT-4 without further training, our method's effectiveness is validated through comparative studies with real-world buildings. Our method can generate various building designs in accordance with the understanding of the neighborhood, showcasing its potential to transform the realm of architectural schematic design.
Exploitation Strategies in Conditional Markov Chain Search: A case study on the three-index assignment problem
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The Conditional Markov Chain Search (CMCS) is a framework for automated design of metaheuristics for discrete combinatorial optimisation problems. Given a set of algorithmic components such as hill climbers and mutations, CMCS decides in which order to apply those components. The decisions are dictated by the CMCS configuration that can be learnt offline. CMCS does not have an acceptance criterion; any moves are accepted by the framework. As a result, it is particularly good in exploration but is not as good at exploitation. In this study, we explore several extensions of the framework to improve its exploitation abilities. To perform a computational study, we applied the framework to the three-index assignment problem. The results of our experiments showed that a two-stage CMCS is indeed superior to a single-stage CMCS.
Modeling Access Differences to Reduce Disparity in Resource Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Motivated by COVID-19 vaccine allocation, where vulnerable subpopulations are simultaneously more impacted in terms of health and more disadvantaged in terms of access to the vaccine, we formalize and study the problem of resource allocation when there are inherent access differences that correlate with advantage and disadvantage. We identify reducing resource disparity as a key goal in this context and show its role as a proxy to more nuanced downstream impacts. We develop a concrete access model that helps quantify how a given allocation translates to resource flow for the advantaged vs. the disadvantaged, based on the access gap between them. We then provide a methodology for access-aware allocation. Intuitively, the resulting allocation leverages more vaccines in locations with higher vulnerable populations to mitigate the access gap and reduce overall disparity. Surprisingly, knowledge of the access gap is often not needed to perform access-aware allocation. To support this formalism, we provide empirical evidence for our access model and show that access-aware allocation can significantly reduce resource disparity and thus improve downstream outcomes. We demonstrate this at various scales, including at county, state, national, and global levels.