OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Generalized Physical-knowledge-guided Dynamic Model for Underwater Image Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Underwater images often suffer from color distortion and low contrast resulting in various image types, due to the scattering and absorption of light by water. While it is difficult to obtain high-quality paired training samples with a generalized model. To tackle these challenges, we design a Generalized Underwater image enhancement method via a Physical-knowledge-guided Dynamic Model (short for GUPDM), consisting of three parts: Atmosphere-based Dynamic Structure (ADS), Transmission-guided Dynamic Structure (TDS), and Prior-based Multi-scale Structure (PMS). In particular, to cover complex underwater scenes, this study changes the global atmosphere light and the transmission to simulate various underwater image types (e.g., the underwater image color ranging from yellow to blue) through the formation model. We then design ADS and TDS that use dynamic convolutions to adaptively extract prior information from underwater images and generate parameters for PMS. These two modules enable the network to select appropriate parameters for various water types adaptively. Besides, the multi-scale feature extraction module in PMS uses convolution blocks with different kernel sizes and obtains weights for each feature map via channel attention block and fuses them to boost the receptive field of the network. The source code will be available at \href{https://github.com/shiningZZ/GUPDM}{https://github.com/shiningZZ/GUPDM}.
LLM As DBA
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Database administrators (DBAs) play a crucial role in managing, maintaining and optimizing a database system to ensure data availability, performance, and reliability. However, it is hard and tedious for DBAs to manage a large number of database instances (e.g., millions of instances on the cloud databases). Recently large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to understand valuable documents and accordingly generate reasonable answers. Thus, we propose D-Bot, a LLM-based database administrator that can continuously acquire database maintenance experience from textual sources, and provide reasonable, well-founded, in-time diagnosis and optimization advice for target databases. This paper presents a revolutionary LLM-centric framework for database maintenance, including (i) database maintenance knowledge detection from documents and tools, (ii) tree of thought reasoning for root cause analysis, and (iii) collaborative diagnosis among multiple LLMs. Our preliminary experimental results that D-Bot can efficiently and effectively diagnose the root causes and our code is available at github.com/TsinghuaDatabaseGroup/DB-GPT.
Measuring the spatial Acuity of vibrotactile Stimuli: A new Approach to determine universal and individual Thresholds
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Tactile perception is an increasingly popular gateway in human-machine interaction, yet universal design guidelines for tactile displays are still lacking, largely due to the absence of methods to measure sensibility across skin areas. In this study, we address this gap by developing and evaluating two fully automated vibrotactile tasks that require subjects to discriminate the position of vibrotactile stimuli using a two-interval forced-choice procedure (2IFC). Of the two methodologies, one was initially validated through a preliminary study involving 13 participants. Subsequently, we applied the validated and improved vibrotactile testing procedure to a larger sample of 23 participants, enabling a direct and valid comparison with static perception. Our findings reveal a significantly finer spatial acuity for static stimuli perception compared to vibrotactile stimuli perception from a stimulus separation of 15 mm onwards. This study introduces a novel method for generating both universal thresholds and individual person-specific data for vibratory perception, marking a critical step towards the development of functional vibrotactile displays. The results underline the need for further research in this area and provide a foundation for the development of universal design guidelines for tactile displays.
EFX Allocations Exist for Binary Valuations
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

We study the fair division problem and the existence of allocations satisfying the fairness criterion envy-freeness up to any item (EFX). The existence of EFX allocations is a major open problem in the fair division literature. We consider binary valuations where the marginal gain of the value by receiving an extra item is either $0$ or $1$. Babaioff et al. [2021] proved that EFX allocations always exist for binary and submodular valuations. In this paper, by using completely different techniques, we extend this existence result to general binary valuations that are not necessarily submodular, and we present a polynomial time algorithm for computing an EFX allocation.
Mono-hydra: Real-time 3D scene graph construction from monocular camera input with IMU
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The ability of robots to autonomously navigate through 3D environments depends on their comprehension of spatial concepts, ranging from low-level geometry to high-level semantics, such as objects, places, and buildings. To enable such comprehension, 3D scene graphs have emerged as a robust tool for representing the environment as a layered graph of concepts and their relationships. However, building these representations using monocular vision systems in real-time remains a difficult task that has not been explored in depth. This paper puts forth a real-time spatial perception system Mono-Hydra, combining a monocular camera and an IMU sensor setup, focusing on indoor scenarios. However, the proposed approach is adaptable to outdoor applications, offering flexibility in its potential uses. The system employs a suite of deep learning algorithms to derive depth and semantics. It uses a robocentric visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithm based on square-root information, thereby ensuring consistent visual odometry with an IMU and a monocular camera. This system achieves sub-20 cm error in real-time processing at 15 fps, enabling real-time 3D scene graph construction using a laptop GPU (NVIDIA 3080). This enhances decision-making efficiency and effectiveness in simple camera setups, augmenting robotic system agility. We make Mono-Hydra publicly available at: https://github.com/UAV-Centre-ITC/Mono_Hydra
Checkpoint Placement for Systematic Fault-Injection Campaigns
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

Shrinking hardware structures and decreasing operating voltages lead to an increasing number of transient hardware faults,which thus become a core problem to consider for safety-critical systems. Here, systematic fault injection (FI), where one program-under-test is systematically stressed with faults, provides an in-depth resilience analysis in the presence of faults. However, FI campaigns require many independent injection experiments and, combined, long run times, especially if we aim for a high coverage of the fault space. One cost factor is the forwarding phase, which is the time required to bring the system-under test into the fault-free state at injection time. One common technique to speed up the forwarding are checkpoints of the fault-free system state at fixed points in time. In this paper, we show that the placement of checkpoints has a significant influence on the required forwarding cycles, especially if we place faults non-uniformly on the time axis. For this, we discuss the checkpoint-selection problem in general, formalize it as a maximum-weight reward path problem in graphs, propose an ILP formulation and a dynamic programming algorithm that find the optimal solution, and provide a heuristic checkpoint-selection method based on a genetic algorithm. Applied to the MiBench benchmark suite, our approach consistently reduces the forward-phase cycles by at least 88 percent and up to 99.934 percent when placing 16 checkpoints.
Accountability of Things: Large-Scale Tamper-Evident Logging for Smart Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Our modern world relies on a growing number of interconnected and interacting devices, leading to a plethora of logs establishing audit trails for all kinds of events. Simultaneously, logs become increasingly important for forensic investigations, and thus, an adversary will aim to alter logs to avoid culpability, e.g., by compromising devices that generate and store logs. Thus, it is essential to ensure that no one can tamper with any logs without going undetected. However, existing approaches to establish tamper evidence of logs do not scale and cannot protect the increasingly large number of devices found today, as they impose large storage or network overheads. Additionally, most schemes do not provide an efficient mechanism to prove that individual events have been logged to establish accountability when different devices interact. This paper introduces a novel scheme for practical large-scale tamper-evident logging with the help of a trusted third party. To achieve this, we present a new binary hash tree construction designed around timestamps to achieve constant storage overhead with a configured temporal resolution. Additionally, our design enables the efficient construction of shareable proofs, proving that an event was indeed logged. Our evaluation shows that - using practical parameters - our scheme can localize any tampering of logs with a sub-second resolution, with a constant overhead of ~8KB per hour per device.
Exploring Linguistic Similarity and Zero-Shot Learning for Multilingual Translation of Dravidian Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Current research in zero-shot translation is plagued by several issues such as high compute requirements, increased training time and off target translations. Proposed remedies often come at the cost of additional data or compute requirements. Pivot based neural machine translation is preferred over a single-encoder model for most settings despite the increased training and evaluation time. In this work, we overcome the shortcomings of zero-shot translation by taking advantage of transliteration and linguistic similarity. We build a single encoder-decoder neural machine translation system for Dravidian-Dravidian multilingual translation and perform zero-shot translation. We compare the data vs zero-shot accuracy tradeoff and evaluate the performance of our vanilla method against the current state of the art pivot based method. We also test the theory that morphologically rich languages require large vocabularies by restricting the vocabulary using an optimal transport based technique. Our model manages to achieves scores within 3 BLEU of large-scale pivot-based models when it is trained on 50\% of the language directions.
Category Feature Transformer for Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Aggregation of multi-stage features has been revealed to play a significant role in semantic segmentation. Unlike previous methods employing point-wise summation or concatenation for feature aggregation, this study proposes the Category Feature Transformer (CFT) that explores the flow of category embedding and transformation among multi-stage features through the prevalent multi-head attention mechanism. CFT learns unified feature embeddings for individual semantic categories from high-level features during each aggregation process and dynamically broadcasts them to high-resolution features. Integrating the proposed CFT into a typical feature pyramid structure exhibits superior performance over a broad range of backbone networks. We conduct extensive experiments on popular semantic segmentation benchmarks. Specifically, the proposed CFT obtains a compelling 55.1% mIoU with greatly reduced model parameters and computations on the challenging ADE20K dataset.
Usability Assessment of the OnlyKey Hardware Two-Factor Authentication Key Among Low Vision or Blind Users
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Hardware security keys undoubtedly have advantage for users as "usability" pain is trivial compared to the maximum "security" gain in authentication. Naturally, the hardware factor in the authentication received a widespread adoption amongst average users, as it is ergonomically less demanding than phone texts or authentication prompts. This ergonomic advantage in particular is essential for users who are blind or low vision, as their interaction with a phone is impractical. However, the "usability" for low vision or blind users pain might be much higher than an average well-bodied user for the same "security" gain. In an effort to learn more we conducted a usability assessment with ten low vision or blind users setting up the OnlyKey two-factor authentication key. First, the setup process was insurmountable for more than half of the participants, resulting in a situation where the hardware key was abandoned. Secondly, the lack of tactile orientation led participants to consider it as both impractical, and prone to difficulties locating or loosing it. We discuss the implications of our findings for future improvements in usable authentication for visually impaired users.
A Smart Robotic System for Industrial Plant Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In today's chemical plants, human field operators perform frequent integrity checks to guarantee high safety standards, and thus are possibly the first to encounter dangerous operating conditions. To alleviate their task, we present a system consisting of an autonomously navigating robot integrated with various sensors and intelligent data processing. It is able to detect methane leaks and estimate its flow rate, detect more general gas anomalies, recognize oil films, localize sound sources and detect failure cases, map the environment in 3D, and navigate autonomously, employing recognition and avoidance of dynamic obstacles. We evaluate our system at a wastewater facility in full working conditions. Our results demonstrate that the system is able to robustly navigate the plant and provide useful information about critical operating conditions.
A Neural Network Based Choice Model for Assortment Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Discrete-choice models are used in economics, marketing and revenue management to predict customer purchase probabilities, say as a function of prices and other features of the offered assortment. While they have been shown to be expressive, capturing customer heterogeneity and behaviour, they are also hard to estimate, often based on many unobservables like utilities; and moreover, they still fail to capture many salient features of customer behaviour. A natural question then, given their success in other contexts, is if neural networks can eliminate the necessity of carefully building a context-dependent customer behaviour model and hand-coding and tuning the estimation. It is unclear however how one would incorporate assortment effects into such a neural network, and also how one would optimize the assortment with such a black-box generative model of choice probabilities. In this paper we investigate first whether a single neural network architecture can predict purchase probabilities for datasets from various contexts and generated under various models and assumptions. Next, we develop an assortment optimization formulation that is solvable by off-the-shelf integer programming solvers. We compare against a variety of benchmark discrete-choice models on simulated as well as real-world datasets, developing training tricks along the way to make the neural network prediction and subsequent optimization robust and comparable in performance to the alternates.
Exploring Deep Learning Approaches to Predict Person and Vehicle Trips: An Analysis of NHTS Data
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Modern transportation planning relies heavily on accurate predictions of person and vehicle trips. However, traditional planning models often fail to account for the intricacies and dynamics of travel behavior, leading to less-than-optimal accuracy in these predictions. This study explores the potential of deep learning techniques to transform the way we approach trip predictions, and ultimately, transportation planning. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset from the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), we developed and trained a deep learning model for predicting person and vehicle trips. The proposed model leverages the vast amount of information in the NHTS data, capturing complex, non-linear relationships that were previously overlooked by traditional models. As a result, our deep learning model achieved an impressive accuracy of 98% for person trip prediction and 96% for vehicle trip estimation. This represents a significant improvement over the performances of traditional transportation planning models, thereby demonstrating the power of deep learning in this domain. The implications of this study extend beyond just more accurate predictions. By enhancing the accuracy and reliability of trip prediction models, planners can formulate more effective, data-driven transportation policies, infrastructure, and services. As such, our research underscores the need for the transportation planning field to embrace advanced techniques like deep learning. The detailed methodology, along with a thorough discussion of the results and their implications, are presented in the subsequent sections of this paper.
Iterative Reweighted Least Squares Networks With Convergence Guarantees for Solving Inverse Imaging Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this work we present a novel optimization strategy for image reconstruction tasks under analysis-based image regularization, which promotes sparse and/or low-rank solutions in some learned transform domain. We parameterize such regularizers using potential functions that correspond to weighted extensions of the $\ell_p^p$-vector and $\mathcal{S}_p^p$ Schatten-matrix quasi-norms with $0 < p \le 1$. Our proposed minimization strategy extends the Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) method, typically used for synthesis-based $\ell_p$ and $\mathcal{S}_p$ norm and analysis-based $\ell_1$ and nuclear norm regularization. We prove that under mild conditions our minimization algorithm converges linearly to a stationary point, and we provide an upper bound for its convergence rate. Further, to select the parameters of the regularizers that deliver the best results for the problem at hand, we propose to learn them from training data by formulating the supervised learning process as a stochastic bilevel optimization problem. We show that thanks to the convergence guarantees of our proposed minimization strategy, such optimization can be successfully performed with a memory-efficient implicit back-propagation scheme. We implement our learned IRLS variants as recurrent networks and assess their performance on the challenging image reconstruction tasks of non-blind deblurring, super-resolution and demosaicking. The comparisons against other existing learned reconstruction approaches demonstrate that our overall method is very competitive and in many cases outperforms existing unrolled networks, whose number of parameters is orders of magnitude higher than in our case.
Recognizing Handwritten Mathematical Expressions of Vertical Addition and Subtraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition (HMER) is a challenging task with many educational applications. Recent methods for HMER have been developed for complex mathematical expressions in standard horizontal format. However, solutions for elementary mathematical expression, such as vertical addition and subtraction, have not been explored in the literature. This work proposes a new handwritten elementary mathematical expression dataset composed of addition and subtraction expressions in a vertical format. We also extended the MNIST dataset to generate artificial images with this structure. Furthermore, we proposed a solution for offline HMER, able to recognize vertical addition and subtraction expressions. Our analysis evaluated the object detection algorithms YOLO v7, YOLO v8, YOLO-NAS, NanoDet and FCOS for identifying the mathematical symbols. We also proposed a transcription method to map the bounding boxes from the object detection stage to a mathematical expression in the LATEX markup sequence. Results show that our approach is efficient, achieving a high expression recognition rate. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Danielgol/HME-VAS
DiLogics: Creating Web Automation Programs With Diverse Logics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge workers frequently encounter repetitive web data entry tasks, like updating records or placing orders. Web automation increases productivity, but translating tasks to web actions accurately and extending to new specifications is challenging. Existing tools can automate tasks that perform the same logical trace of UI actions (e.g., input text in each field in order), but do not support tasks requiring different executions based on varied input conditions. We present DiLogics, a programming-by-demonstration system that utilizes NLP to assist users in creating web automation programs that handle diverse specifications. DiLogics first semantically segments input data to structured task steps. By recording user demonstrations for each step, DiLogics generalizes the web macros to novel but semantically similar task requirements. Our evaluation showed that non-experts can effectively use DiLogics to create automation programs that fulfill diverse input instructions. DiLogics provides an efficient, intuitive, and expressive method for developing web automation programs satisfying diverse specifications.
Aphid Cluster Recognition and Detection in the Wild Using Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Aphid infestation poses a significant threat to crop production, rural communities, and global food security. While chemical pest control is crucial for maximizing yields, applying chemicals across entire fields is both environmentally unsustainable and costly. Hence, precise localization and management of aphids are essential for targeted pesticide application. The paper primarily focuses on using deep learning models for detecting aphid clusters. We propose a novel approach for estimating infection levels by detecting aphid clusters. To facilitate this research, we have captured a large-scale dataset from sorghum fields, manually selected 5,447 images containing aphids, and annotated each individual aphid cluster within these images. To facilitate the use of machine learning models, we further process the images by cropping them into patches, resulting in a labeled dataset comprising 151,380 image patches. Then, we implemented and compared the performance of four state-of-the-art object detection models (VFNet, GFLV2, PAA, and ATSS) on the aphid dataset. Extensive experimental results show that all models yield stable similar performance in terms of average precision and recall. We then propose to merge close neighboring clusters and remove tiny clusters caused by cropping, and the performance is further boosted by around 17%. The study demonstrates the feasibility of automatically detecting and managing insects using machine learning models. The labeled dataset will be made openly available to the research community.