OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Data-Driven Predictive Analysis on Cyber Security Threats with Key Risk Factors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Cyber risk refers to the risk of defacing reputation, monetary losses, or disruption of an organization or individuals, and this situation usually occurs by the unconscious use of cyber systems. The cyber risk is unhurriedly increasing day by day and it is right now a global threat. Developing countries like Bangladesh face major cyber risk challenges. The growing cyber threat worldwide focuses on the need for effective modeling to predict and manage the associated risk. This paper exhibits a Machine Learning(ML) based model for predicting individuals who may be victims of cyber attacks by analyzing socioeconomic factors. We collected the dataset from victims and non-victims of cyberattacks based on socio-demographic features. The study involved the development of a questionnaire to gather data, which was then used to measure the significance of features. Through data augmentation, the dataset was expanded to encompass 3286 entries, setting the stage for our investigation and modeling. Among several ML models with 19, 20, 21, and 26 features, we proposed a novel Pertinent Features Random Forest (RF) model, which achieved maximum accuracy with 20 features (95.95\%) and also demonstrated the association among the selected features using the Apriori algorithm with Confidence (above 80\%) according to the victim. We generated 10 important association rules and presented the framework that is rigorously evaluated on real-world datasets, demonstrating its potential to predict cyberattacks and associated risk factors effectively. Looking ahead, future efforts will be directed toward refining the predictive model's precision and delving into additional risk factors, to fortify the proposed framework's efficacy in navigating the complex terrain of cybersecurity threats.
BEACON: Bayesian Experimental design Acceleration with Conditional Normalizing flows $-$ a case study in optimal monitor well placement for CO$_2$ sequestration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

CO$_2$ sequestration is a crucial engineering solution for mitigating climate change. However, the uncertain nature of reservoir properties, necessitates rigorous monitoring of CO$_2$ plumes to prevent risks such as leakage, induced seismicity, or breaching licensed boundaries. To address this, project managers use borehole wells for direct CO$_2$ and pressure monitoring at specific locations. Given the high costs associated with drilling, it is crucial to strategically place a limited number of wells to ensure maximally effective monitoring within budgetary constraints. Our approach for selecting well locations integrates fluid-flow solvers for forecasting plume trajectories with generative neural networks for plume inference uncertainty. Our methodology is extensible to three-dimensional domains and is developed within a Bayesian framework for optimal experimental design, ensuring scalability and mathematical optimality. We use a realistic case study to verify these claims by demonstrating our method's application in a large scale domain and optimal performance as compared to baseline well placement.
DVIS-DAQ: Improving Video Segmentation via Dynamic Anchor Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Modern video segmentation methods adopt object queries to perform inter-frame association and demonstrate satisfactory performance in tracking continuously appearing objects despite large-scale motion and transient occlusion. However, they all underperform on newly emerging and disappearing objects that are common in the real world because they attempt to model object emergence and disappearance through feature transitions between background and foreground queries that have significant feature gaps. We introduce Dynamic Anchor Queries (DAQ) to shorten the transition gap between the anchor and target queries by dynamically generating anchor queries based on the features of potential candidates. Furthermore, we introduce a query-level object Emergence and Disappearance Simulation (EDS) strategy, which unleashes DAQ's potential without any additional cost. Finally, we combine our proposed DAQ and EDS with DVIS to obtain DVIS-DAQ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVIS-DAQ achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on five mainstream video segmentation benchmarks. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/SkyworkAI/DAQ-VS}.
Modeling Large-Scale Walking and Cycling Networks: A Machine Learning Approach Using Mobile Phone and Crowdsourced Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Walking and cycling are known to bring substantial health, environmental, and economic advantages. However, the development of evidence-based active transportation planning and policies has been impeded by significant data limitations, such as biases in crowdsourced data and representativeness issues of mobile phone data. In this study, we develop and apply a machine learning based modeling approach for estimating daily walking and cycling volumes across a large-scale regional network in New South Wales, Australia that includes 188,999 walking links and 114,885 cycling links. The modeling methodology leverages crowdsourced and mobile phone data as well as a range of other datasets on population, land use, topography, climate, etc. The study discusses the unique challenges and limitations related to all three aspects of model training, testing, and inference given the large geographical extent of the modeled networks and relative scarcity of observed walking and cycling count data. The study also proposes a new technique to identify model estimate outliers and to mitigate their impact. Overall, the study provides a valuable resource for transportation modelers, policymakers and urban planners seeking to enhance active transportation infrastructure planning and policies with advanced emerging data-driven modeling methodologies.
CT respiratory motion synthesis using joint supervised and adversarial learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: Four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) imaging consists in reconstructing a CT acquisition into multiple phases to track internal organ and tumor motion. It is commonly used in radiotherapy treatment planning to establish planning target volumes. However, 4DCT increases protocol complexity, may not align with patient breathing during treatment, and lead to higher radiation delivery. Approach: In this study, we propose a deep synthesis method to generate pseudo respiratory CT phases from static images for motion-aware treatment planning. The model produces patient-specific deformation vector fields (DVFs) by conditioning synthesis on external patient surface-based estimation, mimicking respiratory monitoring devices. A key methodological contribution is to encourage DVF realism through supervised DVF training while using an adversarial term jointly not only on the warped image but also on the magnitude of the DVF itself. This way, we avoid excessive smoothness typically obtained through deep unsupervised learning, and encourage correlations with the respiratory amplitude. Main results: Performance is evaluated using real 4DCT acquisitions with smaller tumor volumes than previously reported. Results demonstrate for the first time that the generated pseudo-respiratory CT phases can capture organ and tumor motion with similar accuracy to repeated 4DCT scans of the same patient. Mean inter-scans tumor center-of-mass distances and Dice similarity coefficients were $1.97$mm and $0.63$, respectively, for real 4DCT phases and $2.35$mm and $0.71$ for synthetic phases, and compares favorably to a state-of-the-art technique (RMSim).
A Sequential Quadratic Programming Approach to the Solution of Open-Loop Generalized Nash Equilibria for Autonomous Racing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Dynamic games can be an effective approach for modeling interactive behavior between multiple competitive agents in autonomous racing and they provide a theoretical framework for simultaneous prediction and control in such scenarios. In this work, we propose DG-SQP, a numerical method for the solution of local generalized Nash equilibria (GNE) for open-loop general-sum dynamic games for agents with nonlinear dynamics and constraints. In particular, we formulate a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) approach which requires only the solution of a single convex quadratic program at each iteration. The three key elements of the method are a non-monotonic line search for solving the associated KKT equations, a merit function to handle zero sum costs, and a decaying regularization scheme for SQP step selection. We show that our method achieves linear convergence in the neighborhood of local GNE and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in the context of head-to-head car racing, where we show significant improvement in solver success rate when comparing against the state-of-the-art PATH solver for dynamic games. An implementation of our solver can be found at https://github.com/zhu-edward/DGSQP.
DataAgent: Evaluating Large Language Models' Ability to Answer Zero-Shot, Natural Language Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Conventional processes for analyzing datasets and extracting meaningful information are often time-consuming and laborious. Previous work has identified manual, repetitive coding and data collection as major obstacles that hinder data scientists from undertaking more nuanced labor and high-level projects. To combat this, we evaluated OpenAI's GPT-3.5 as a "Language Data Scientist" (LDS) that can extrapolate key findings, including correlations and basic information, from a given dataset. The model was tested on a diverse set of benchmark datasets to evaluate its performance across multiple standards, including data science code-generation based tasks involving libraries such as NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, and TensorFlow, and was broadly successful in correctly answering a given data science query related to the benchmark dataset. The LDS used various novel prompt engineering techniques to effectively answer a given question, including Chain-of-Thought reinforcement and SayCan prompt engineering. Our findings demonstrate great potential for leveraging Large Language Models for low-level, zero-shot data analysis.
GuaranTEE: Towards Attestable and Private ML with CCA
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Machine-learning (ML) models are increasingly being deployed on edge devices to provide a variety of services. However, their deployment is accompanied by challenges in model privacy and auditability. Model providers want to ensure that (i) their proprietary models are not exposed to third parties; and (ii) be able to get attestations that their genuine models are operating on edge devices in accordance with the service agreement with the user. Existing measures to address these challenges have been hindered by issues such as high overheads and limited capability (processing/secure memory) on edge devices. In this work, we propose GuaranTEE, a framework to provide attestable private machine learning on the edge. GuaranTEE uses Confidential Computing Architecture (CCA), Arm's latest architectural extension that allows for the creation and deployment of dynamic Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) within which models can be executed. We evaluate CCA's feasibility to deploy ML models by developing, evaluating, and openly releasing a prototype. We also suggest improvements to CCA to facilitate its use in protecting the entire ML deployment pipeline on edge devices.
VLM-Social-Nav: Socially Aware Robot Navigation through Scoring using Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We propose VLM-Social-Nav, a novel Vision-Language Model (VLM) based navigation approach to compute a robot's motion in human-centered environments. Our goal is to make real-time decisions on robot actions that are socially compliant with human expectations. We utilize a perception model to detect important social entities and prompt a VLM to generate guidance for socially compliant robot behavior. VLM-Social-Nav uses a VLM-based scoring module that computes a cost term that ensures socially appropriate and effective robot actions generated by the underlying planner. Our overall approach reduces reliance on large training datasets and enhances adaptability in decision-making. In practice, it results in improved socially compliant navigation in human-shared environments. We demonstrate and evaluate our system in four different real-world social navigation scenarios with a Turtlebot robot. We observe at least 27.38% improvement in the average success rate and 19.05% improvement in the average collision rate in the four social navigation scenarios. Our user study score shows that VLM-Social-Nav generates the most socially compliant navigation behavior.
Injecting New Knowledge into Large Language Models via Supervised Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in generating human-like text, proving to be a valuable asset across various applications. However, adapting these models to incorporate new, out-of-domain knowledge remains a challenge, particularly for facts and events that occur after the model's knowledge cutoff date. This paper investigates the effectiveness of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) as a method for knowledge injection in LLMs, specifically focusing on the domain of recent sporting events. We compare different dataset generation strategies -- token-based and fact-based scaling -- to create training data that helps the model learn new information. Our experiments on GPT-4 demonstrate that while token-based scaling can lead to improvements in Q&A accuracy, it may not provide uniform coverage of new knowledge. Fact-based scaling, on the other hand, offers a more systematic approach to ensure even coverage across all facts. We present a novel dataset generation process that leads to more effective knowledge ingestion through SFT, and our results show considerable performance improvements in Q&A tasks related to out-of-domain knowledge. This study contributes to the understanding of domain adaptation for LLMs and highlights the potential of SFT in enhancing the factuality of LLM responses in specific knowledge domains.
Is Factuality Enhancement a Free Lunch For LLMs? Better Factuality Can Lead to Worse Context-Faithfulness
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

As the modern tools of choice for text understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) are expected to accurately output answers by leveraging the input context. This requires LLMs to possess both context-faithfulness and factual accuracy. Extensive efforts have been made to enable better outputs from LLMs by mitigating hallucinations through factuality enhancement methods. However, they also pose risks of hindering context-faithfulness, as factuality enhancement can lead LLMs to become overly confident in their parametric knowledge, causing them to overlook the relevant input context. In this work, we argue that current factuality enhancement methods can significantly undermine the context-faithfulness of LLMs. We first revisit the current factuality enhancement methods and evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing factual accuracy. Next, we evaluate their performance on knowledge editing tasks to assess the potential impact on context-faithfulness. The experimental results reveal that while these methods may yield inconsistent improvements in factual accuracy, they also cause a more severe decline in context-faithfulness, with the largest decrease reaching a striking 69.7\%. To explain these declines, we analyze the hidden states and logit distributions for the tokens representing new knowledge and parametric knowledge respectively, highlighting the limitations of current approaches. Our finding highlights the complex trade-offs inherent in enhancing LLMs. Therefore, we recommend that more research on LLMs' factuality enhancement make efforts to reduce the sacrifice of context-faithfulness.
Attention-based Shape-Deformation Networks for Artifact-Free Geometry Reconstruction of Lumbar Spine from MR Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Lumbar disc degeneration, a progressive structural wear and tear of lumbar intervertebral disc, is regarded as an essential role on low back pain, a significant global health concern. Automated lumbar spine geometry reconstruction from MR images will enable fast measurement of medical parameters to evaluate the lumbar status, in order to determine a suitable treatment. Existing image segmentation-based techniques often generate erroneous segments or unstructured point clouds, unsuitable for medical parameter measurement. In this work, we present $\textit{UNet-DeformSA}$ and $\textit{TransDeformer}$: novel attention-based deep neural networks that reconstruct the geometry of the lumbar spine with high spatial accuracy and mesh correspondence across patients, and we also present a variant of $\textit{TransDeformer}$ for error estimation. Specially, we devise new attention modules with a new attention formula, which integrate image features and tokenized contour features to predict the displacements of the points on a shape template without the need for image segmentation. The deformed template reveals the lumbar spine geometry in an image. Experiment results show that our networks generate artifact-free geometry outputs, and the variant of $\textit{TransDeformer}$ can predict the errors of a reconstructed geometry. Our code is available at https://github.com/linchenq/TransDeformer-Mesh.
DiLM: Distilling Dataset into Language Model for Text-level Dataset Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Dataset distillation aims to compress a training dataset by creating a small number of informative synthetic samples such that neural networks trained on them perform as well as those trained on the original training dataset. Current text dataset distillation methods create each synthetic sample as a sequence of word embeddings instead of a text to apply gradient-based optimization; however, such embedding-level distilled datasets cannot be used for training other models whose word embedding weights are different from the model used for distillation. To address this issue, we propose a novel text dataset distillation approach, called Distilling dataset into Language Model (DiLM), which trains a language model to generate informative synthetic training samples as text data, instead of directly optimizing synthetic samples. We evaluated DiLM on various text classification datasets and showed that distilled synthetic datasets from DiLM outperform those from current coreset selection methods. DiLM achieved remarkable generalization performance in training different types of models and in-context learning of large language models. Our code will be available at https://github.com/arumaekawa/DiLM.
HSIMamba: Hyperpsectral Imaging Efficient Feature Learning with Bidirectional State Space for Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Classifying hyperspectral images is a difficult task in remote sensing, due to their complex high-dimensional data. To address this challenge, we propose HSIMamba, a novel framework that uses bidirectional reversed convolutional neural network pathways to extract spectral features more efficiently. Additionally, it incorporates a specialized block for spatial analysis. Our approach combines the operational efficiency of CNNs with the dynamic feature extraction capability of attention mechanisms found in Transformers. However, it avoids the associated high computational demands. HSIMamba is designed to process data bidirectionally, significantly enhancing the extraction of spectral features and integrating them with spatial information for comprehensive analysis. This approach improves classification accuracy beyond current benchmarks and addresses computational inefficiencies encountered with advanced models like Transformers. HSIMamba were tested against three widely recognized datasets Houston 2013, Indian Pines, and Pavia University and demonstrated exceptional performance, surpassing existing state-of-the-art models in HSI classification. This method highlights the methodological innovation of HSIMamba and its practical implications, which are particularly valuable in contexts where computational resources are limited. HSIMamba redefines the standards of efficiency and accuracy in HSI classification, thereby enhancing the capabilities of remote sensing applications. Hyperspectral imaging has become a crucial tool for environmental surveillance, agriculture, and other critical areas that require detailed analysis of the Earth surface. Please see our code in HSIMamba for more details.
Cognitive Planning for Object Goal Navigation using Generative AI Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in Generative AI, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), offer new possibilities for integrating cognitive planning into robotic systems. In this work, we present a novel framework for solving the object goal navigation problem that generates efficient exploration strategies. Our approach enables a robot to navigate unfamiliar environments by leveraging LLMs and LVLMs to understand the semantic structure of the scene. To address the challenge of representing complex environments without overwhelming the system, we propose a 3D modular scene representation, enriched with semantic descriptions. This representation is dynamically pruned using an LLM-based mechanism, which filters irrelevant information and focuses on task-specific data. By combining these elements, our system generates high-level sub-goals that guide the exploration of the robot toward the target object. We validate our approach in simulated environments, demonstrating its ability to enhance object search efficiency while maintaining scalability in complex settings.
Learning Trimaps via Clicks for Image Matting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite significant advancements in image matting, existing models heavily depend on manually-drawn trimaps for accurate results in natural image scenarios. However, the process of obtaining trimaps is time-consuming, lacking user-friendliness and device compatibility. This reliance greatly limits the practical application of all trimap-based matting methods. To address this issue, we introduce Click2Trimap, an interactive model capable of predicting high-quality trimaps and alpha mattes with minimal user click inputs. Through analyzing real users' behavioral logic and characteristics of trimaps, we successfully propose a powerful iterative three-class training strategy and a dedicated simulation function, making Click2Trimap exhibit versatility across various scenarios. Quantitative and qualitative assessments on synthetic and real-world matting datasets demonstrate Click2Trimap's superior performance compared to all existing trimap-free matting methods. Especially, in the user study, Click2Trimap achieves high-quality trimap and matting predictions in just an average of 5 seconds per image, demonstrating its substantial practical value in real-world applications.
Deep Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Car Path Planning and Control: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Combining data-driven applications with control systems plays a key role in recent Autonomous Car research. This thesis offers a structured review of the latest literature on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) within the realm of autonomous vehicle Path Planning and Control. It collects a series of DRL methodologies and algorithms and their applications in the field, focusing notably on their roles in trajectory planning and dynamic control. In this review, we delve into the application outcomes of DRL technologies in this domain. By summarizing these literatures, we highlight potential challenges, aiming to offer insights that might aid researchers engaged in related fields.