OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Change Detection in Multivariate data streams: Online Analysis with Kernel-QuantTree
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present Kernel-QuantTree Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (KQT-EWMA), a non-parametric change-detection algorithm that combines the Kernel-QuantTree (KQT) histogram and the EWMA statistic to monitor multivariate data streams online. The resulting monitoring scheme is very flexible, since histograms can be used to model any stationary distribution, and practical, since the distribution of test statistics does not depend on the distribution of datastream in stationary conditions (non-parametric monitoring). KQT-EWMA enables controlling false alarms by operating at a pre-determined Average Run Length ($ARL_0$), which measures the expected number of stationary samples to be monitored before triggering a false alarm. The latter peculiarity is in contrast with most non-parametric change-detection tests, which rarely can control the $ARL_0$ a priori. Our experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that KQT-EWMA can control $ARL_0$ while achieving detection delays comparable to or lower than state-of-the-art methods designed to work in the same conditions.
Quantity vs. Quality of Monolingual Source Data in Automatic Text Translation: Can It Be Too Little If It Is Too Good?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Monolingual data, being readily available in large quantities, has been used to upscale the scarcely available parallel data to train better models for automatic translation. Self-learning, where a model is made to learn from its output, is one approach to exploit such data. However, it has been shown that too much of this data can be detrimental to the performance of the model if the available parallel data is comparatively extremely low. In this study, we investigate whether the monolingual data can also be too little and if this reduction, based on quality, has any effect on the performance of the translation model. Experiments have shown that on English-German low-resource NMT, it is often better to select only the most useful additional data, based on quality or closeness to the domain of the test data, than utilizing all of the available data.
VidPanos: Generative Panoramic Videos from Casual Panning Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Panoramic image stitching provides a unified, wide-angle view of a scene that extends beyond the camera's field of view. Stitching frames of a panning video into a panoramic photograph is a well-understood problem for stationary scenes, but when objects are moving, a still panorama cannot capture the scene. We present a method for synthesizing a panoramic video from a casually-captured panning video, as if the original video were captured with a wide-angle camera. We pose panorama synthesis as a space-time outpainting problem, where we aim to create a full panoramic video of the same length as the input video. Consistent completion of the space-time volume requires a powerful, realistic prior over video content and motion, for which we adapt generative video models. Existing generative models do not, however, immediately extend to panorama completion, as we show. We instead apply video generation as a component of our panorama synthesis system, and demonstrate how to exploit the strengths of the models while minimizing their limitations. Our system can create video panoramas for a range of in-the-wild scenes including people, vehicles, and flowing water, as well as stationary background features.
A Unified View of Delta Parameter Editing in Post-Trained Large-Scale Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Post-training has emerged as a crucial paradigm for adapting large-scale pre-trained models to various tasks, whose effects are fully reflected by delta parameters (i.e., the disparity between post-trained and pre-trained parameters). While numerous studies have explored delta parameter properties via operations like pruning, quantization, low-rank approximation, and extrapolation, a unified framework for systematically examining these characteristics has been lacking. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective based on Riemann sum approximation of the loss function to elucidate delta parameter editing operations. Our analysis categorizes existing methods into three classes based on their post-editing performance: competitive, decreased, and improved, explaining how they are expressed by the Riemann sum approximation term and how they alter the model performance. Extensive experiments on both visual and language models, including ViT, LLaMA 3, Qwen 2, and Mistral, corroborate our theoretical findings. Furthermore, we introduce extensions to existing techniques like DARE and BitDelta, highlighting their limitations in leveraging the properties of delta parameters and reorganizing them into general expressions to enhance the applicability and effectiveness of delta parameter editing in post-trained models.
Janus: Decoupling Visual Encoding for Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce Janus, an autoregressive framework that unifies multimodal understanding and generation. Prior research often relies on a single visual encoder for both tasks, such as Chameleon. However, due to the differing levels of information granularity required by multimodal understanding and generation, this approach can lead to suboptimal performance, particularly in multimodal understanding. To address this issue, we decouple visual encoding into separate pathways, while still leveraging a single, unified transformer architecture for processing. The decoupling not only alleviates the conflict between the visual encoder's roles in understanding and generation, but also enhances the framework's flexibility. For instance, both the multimodal understanding and generation components can independently select their most suitable encoding methods. Experiments show that Janus surpasses previous unified model and matches or exceeds the performance of task-specific models. The simplicity, high flexibility, and effectiveness of Janus make it a strong candidate for next-generation unified multimodal models.
Differentiable Robot Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Vision foundation models trained on massive amounts of visual data have shown unprecedented reasoning and planning skills in open-world settings. A key challenge in applying them to robotic tasks is the modality gap between visual data and action data. We introduce differentiable robot rendering, a method allowing the visual appearance of a robot body to be directly differentiable with respect to its control parameters. Our model integrates a kinematics-aware deformable model and Gaussians Splatting and is compatible with any robot form factors and degrees of freedom. We demonstrate its capability and usage in applications including reconstruction of robot poses from images and controlling robots through vision language models. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our differentiable rendering model provides effective gradients for robotic control directly from pixels, setting the foundation for the future applications of vision foundation models in robotics.
$γ-$MoD: Exploring Mixture-of-Depth Adaptation for Multimodal Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the significant progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their high computational cost remains a barrier to real-world deployment. Inspired by the mixture of depths (MoDs) in natural language processing, we aim to address this limitation from the perspective of ``activated tokens''. Our key insight is that if most tokens are redundant for the layer computation, then can be skipped directly via the MoD layer. However, directly converting the dense layers of MLLMs to MoD layers leads to substantial performance degradation. To address this issue, we propose an innovative MoD adaptation strategy for existing MLLMs called $γ$-MoD. In $γ$-MoD, a novel metric is proposed to guide the deployment of MoDs in the MLLM, namely rank of attention maps (ARank). Through ARank, we can effectively identify which layer is redundant and should be replaced with the MoD layer. Based on ARank, we further propose two novel designs to maximize the computational sparsity of MLLM while maintaining its performance, namely shared vision-language router and masked routing learning. With these designs, more than 90% dense layers of the MLLM can be effectively converted to the MoD ones. To validate our method, we apply it to three popular MLLMs, and conduct extensive experiments on 9 benchmark datasets. Experimental results not only validate the significant efficiency benefit of $γ$-MoD to existing MLLMs but also confirm its generalization ability on various MLLMs. For example, with a minor performance drop, i.e., -1.5%, $γ$-MoD can reduce the training and inference time of LLaVA-HR by 31.0% and 53.2%, respectively.
Explaining an image classifier with a generative model conditioned by uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We propose to condition a generative model by a given image classifier uncertainty in order to analyze and explain its behavior. Preliminary experiments on synthetic data and a corrupted version of MNIST dataset illustrate the idea.
Satellite Streaming Video QoE Prediction: A Real-World Subjective Database and Network-Level Prediction Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Demand for streaming services, including satellite, continues to exhibit unprecedented growth. Internet Service Providers find themselves at the crossroads of technological advancements and rising customer expectations. To stay relevant and competitive, these ISPs must ensure their networks deliver optimal video streaming quality, a key determinant of user satisfaction. Towards this end, it is important to have accurate Quality of Experience prediction models in place. However, achieving robust performance by these models requires extensive data sets labeled by subjective opinion scores on videos impaired by diverse playback disruptions. To bridge this data gap, we introduce the LIVE-Viasat Real-World Satellite QoE Database. This database consists of 179 videos recorded from real-world streaming services affected by various authentic distortion patterns. We also conducted a comprehensive subjective study involving 54 participants, who contributed both continuous-time opinion scores and endpoint (retrospective) QoE scores. Our analysis sheds light on various determinants influencing subjective QoE, such as stall events, spatial resolutions, bitrate, and certain network parameters. We demonstrate the usefulness of this unique new resource by evaluating the efficacy of prevalent QoE-prediction models on it. We also created a new model that maps the network parameters to predicted human perception scores, which can be used by ISPs to optimize the video streaming quality of their networks. Our proposed model, which we call SatQA, is able to accurately predict QoE using only network parameters, without any access to pixel data or video-specific metadata, estimated by Spearman's Rank Order Correlation Coefficient (SROCC), Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC), and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), indicating high accuracy and reliability.
Detecting AI-Generated Texts in Cross-Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Existing tools to detect text generated by a large language model (LLM) have met with certain success, but their performance can drop when dealing with texts in new domains. To tackle this issue, we train a ranking classifier called RoBERTa-Ranker, a modified version of RoBERTa, as a baseline model using a dataset we constructed that includes a wider variety of texts written by humans and generated by various LLMs. We then present a method to fine-tune RoBERTa-Ranker that requires only a small amount of labeled data in a new domain. Experiments show that this fine-tuned domain-aware model outperforms the popular DetectGPT and GPTZero on both in-domain and cross-domain texts, where AI-generated texts may either be in a different domain or generated by a different LLM not used to generate the training datasets. This approach makes it feasible and economical to build a single system to detect AI-generated texts across various domains.
Personalized Adaptation via In-Context Preference Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align Language Models (LMs) with human preferences. However, existing approaches often neglect individual user preferences, leading to suboptimal personalization. We present the Preference Pretrained Transformer (PPT), a novel approach for adaptive personalization using online user feedback. PPT leverages the in-context learning capabilities of transformers to dynamically adapt to individual preferences. Our approach consists of two phases: (1) an offline phase where we train a single policy model using a history-dependent loss function, and (2) an online phase where the model adapts to user preferences through in-context learning. We demonstrate PPT's effectiveness in a contextual bandit setting, showing that it achieves personalized adaptation superior to existing methods while significantly reducing the computational costs. Our results suggest the potential of in-context learning for scalable and efficient personalization in large language models.
A Comparative Study on Accessibility for Autistic Individuals with Urban Mobility Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodivergent condition with a wide range of characteristics and support levels. Individuals with ASD can exhibit various combinations of traits such as difficulties in social interaction, communication, and language, alongside restricted interests and repetitive activities. Many adults with ASD live independently due to increased awareness and late diagnoses, which help them manage long-standing challenges. Predictability, clarity, and minimized sensory stimuli are crucial for the daily comfort of autistic individuals. In mobile applications, autistic users face significant cognitive overload compared to neurotypicals, resulting in higher effort and time to complete tasks. Urban mobility apps, essential for daily routines, often overlook the needs of autistic users, leading to cognitive overload issues. This study investigates the accessibility of urban mobility apps for autistic individuals using the Interfaces Accessibility Guide for Autism (GAIA). By evaluating various apps, we have identified a common gap regarding accessibility for people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This limitation relates to the absence of a functionality that allows users on the autism spectrum to customize the characteristics of the textual and visual elements of the software, such as changing the text font, altering the font type, and adjusting text colors, as well as native audio guidance within the applications themselves. Currently, the only function in this context is for visually impaired people, which completely changes the user experience in terms of navigation.
Style-Compress: An LLM-Based Prompt Compression Framework Considering Task-Specific Styles
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Prompt compression condenses contexts while maintaining their informativeness for different usage scenarios. It not only shortens the inference time and reduces computational costs during the usage of large language models, but also lowers expenses when using closed-source models. In a preliminary study, we discover that when instructing language models to compress prompts, different compression styles (e.g., extractive or abstractive) impact performance of compressed prompts on downstream tasks. Building on this insight, we propose Style-Compress, a lightweight framework that adapts a smaller language model to compress prompts for a larger model on a new task without additional training. Our approach iteratively generates and selects effective compressed prompts as task-specific demonstrations through style variation and in-context learning, enabling smaller models to act as efficient compressors with task-specific examples. Style-Compress outperforms two baseline compression models in four tasks: original prompt reconstruction, text summarization, multi-hop QA, and CoT reasoning. In addition, with only 10 samples and 100 queries for adaptation, prompts compressed by Style-Compress achieve performance on par with or better than original prompts at a compression ratio of 0.25 or 0.5.
DiFuseR: A Distributed Sketch-based Influence Maximization Algorithm for GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Influence Maximization (IM) aims to find a given number of "seed" vertices that can effectively maximize the expected spread under a given diffusion model. Due to the NP-Hardness of finding an optimal seed set, approximation algorithms are often used for IM. However, these algorithms require a large number of simulations to find good seed sets. In this work, we propose DiFuseR, a blazing-fast, high-quality IM algorithm that can run on multiple GPUs in a distributed setting. DiFuseR is designed to increase GPU utilization, reduce inter-node communication, and minimize overlapping data/computation among the nodes. Based on the experiments with various graphs, containing some of the largest networks available, and diffusion settings, the proposed approach is found to be 3.2x and 12x faster on average on a single GPU and 8 GPUs, respectively. It can achieve up to 8x and 233.7x speedup on the same hardware settings. Furthermore, thanks to its smart load-balancing mechanism, on 8 GPUs, it is on average 5.6x faster compared to its single-GPU performance.
Learning Metadata-Agnostic Representations for Text-to-SQL In-Context Example Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful paradigm where large language models (LLMs) benefit from task demonstrations added to the prompt. Yet, selecting optimal demonstrations is not trivial, especially for complex or multi-modal tasks where input and output distributions differ. We hypothesize that forming task-specific representations of the input is key. In this paper, we propose a method to align representations of natural language questions and those of SQL queries in a shared embedding space. Our technique, dubbed MARLO - Metadata-Agnostic Representation Learning for Text-tO-SQL - uses query structure to model querying intent without over-indexing on underlying database metadata (i.e. tables, columns, or domain-specific entities of a database referenced in the question or query). This allows MARLO to select examples that are structurally and semantically relevant for the task rather than examples that are spuriously related to a certain domain or question phrasing. When used to retrieve examples based on question similarity, MARLO shows superior performance compared to generic embedding models (on average +2.9\%pt. in execution accuracy) on the Spider benchmark. It also outperforms the next best method that masks metadata information by +0.8\%pt. in execution accuracy on average, while imposing a significantly lower inference latency.
An AI Guide to Enhance Accessibility of Social Virtual Reality for Blind People
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid growth of virtual reality (VR) has led to increased use of social VR platforms for interaction. However, these platforms lack adequate features to support blind and low vision (BLV) users, posing significant challenges in navigation, visual interpretation, and social interaction. One promising approach to these challenges is employing human guides in VR. However, this approach faces limitations with a lack of availability of humans to serve as guides, or the inability to customize the guidance a user receives from the human guide. We introduce an AI-powered guide to address these limitations. The AI guide features six personas, each offering unique behaviors and appearances to meet diverse user needs, along with visual interpretation and navigation assistance. We aim to use this AI guide in the future to help us understand BLV users' preferences for guide forms and functionalities.
Be My Donor. Transfer the NLP Datasets Between the Languages Using LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we investigated how one can use the LLM to transfer the dataset and its annotation from one language to another. This is crucial since sharing the knowledge between different languages could boost certain underresourced directions in the target language, saving lots of efforts in data annotation or quick prototyping. We experiment with English and Russian pairs translating the DEFT corpus. This corpus contains three layers of annotation dedicated to term-definition pair mining, which is a rare annotation type for Russian. We provide a pipeline for the annotation transferring using ChatGPT3.5-turbo and Llama-3.1-8b as core LLMs. In the end, we train the BERT-based models on the translated dataset to establish a baseline.
FORWARD: Feasibility Oriented Random-Walk Inspired Algorithm for Radial Reconfiguration in Distribution Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We consider an optimal flow distribution problem in which the goal is to find a radial configuration that minimizes resistance-induced quadratic distribution costs while ensuring delivery of inputs from multiple sources to all sinks to meet their demands. This problem has critical applications in various distribution systems, such as electricity, where efficient energy flow is crucial for both economic and environmental reasons. Due to its complexity, finding an optimal solution is computationally challenging and NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called FORWARD, which leverages graph theory to efficiently identify feasible configurations in polynomial time. By drawing parallels with random walk processes on electricity networks, our method simplifies the search space, significantly reducing computational effort while maintaining performance. The FORWARD algorithm employs a combination of network preprocessing, intelligent partitioning, and strategic sampling to construct radial configurations that meet flow requirements, finding a feasible solution in polynomial time. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting its potential for real-world applications in optimizing distribution networks.