OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SoK: Authenticated Prefix Relations -- A Unified Perspective On Relative Time-Stamping and Append-Only Logs
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Secure relative timestamping and secure append-only logs are two historically mostly independent lines of research, which we show to be sides of the same coin -- the authentication of prefix relations. From this more general viewpoint, we derive several complexity criteria not yet considered in previous literature. We define transitive prefix authentication graphs, a graph class that captures all hash-based timestamping and log designs we know of. We survey existing schemes by expressing them as transitive prefix authentication graphs, which yields more compact definitions and more complete evaluations than in the existing literature.
Solving Math Word Problem with Problem Type Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Math word problems (MWPs) require analyzing text descriptions and generating mathematical equations to derive solutions. Existing works focus on solving MWPs with two types of solvers: tree-based solver and large language model (LLM) solver. However, these approaches always solve MWPs by a single solver, which will bring the following problems: (1) Single type of solver is hard to solve all types of MWPs well. (2) A single solver will result in poor performance due to over-fitting. To address these challenges, this paper utilizes multiple ensemble approaches to improve MWP-solving ability. Firstly, We propose a problem type classifier that combines the strengths of the tree-based solver and the LLM solver. This ensemble approach leverages their respective advantages and broadens the range of MWPs that can be solved. Furthermore, we also apply ensemble techniques to both tree-based solver and LLM solver to improve their performance. For the tree-based solver, we propose an ensemble learning framework based on ten-fold cross-validation and voting mechanism. In the LLM solver, we adopt self-consistency (SC) method to improve answer selection. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these ensemble approaches in enhancing MWP-solving ability. The comprehensive evaluation showcases improved performance, validating the advantages of our proposed approach. Our code is available at this url: https://github.com/zhouzihao501/NLPCC2023-Shared-Task3-ChineseMWP.
Digital Twin conceptual framework for the O&M process of cubature building objects
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The broader construction industry is struggling with data loss, inefficient processes and low productivity in asset management. The remedy to these problems seems to be the idea of Digital Twin (DT). However, the frameworks proposed so far do not always support a solution to these problems. This paper conducts an extensive literature review to develop a conceptual framework for the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) phase for cubic facilities. The conceptual framework takes into account the increasingly popular Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The presented framework, after appropriate modifications, can also be applied to infrastructure facilities or city fragments. The paper presents limitations and directions for further research. The DT paradigm has been adopted and its adoption is ongoing. Its implementation will progress in the coming years.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Domain-Adaptive Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is quite challenging due to the large distribution discrepancy between the source domain and the target domain. Inspired by diffusion models which have strong capability to gradually convert data distributions across a large gap, we consider to explore the diffusion technique to handle the challenging UDA task. However, using diffusion models to convert data distribution across different domains is a non-trivial problem as the standard diffusion models generally perform conversion from the Gaussian distribution instead of from a specific domain distribution. Besides, during the conversion, the semantics of the source-domain data needs to be preserved for classification in the target domain. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Domain-Adaptive Diffusion (DAD) module accompanied by a Mutual Learning Strategy (MLS), which can gradually convert data distribution from the source domain to the target domain while enabling the classification model to learn along the domain transition process. Consequently, our method successfully eases the challenge of UDA by decomposing the large domain gap into small ones and gradually enhancing the capacity of classification model to finally adapt to the target domain. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-arts by a large margin on three widely used UDA datasets.
Enhancement of database access performance by improving data consistency in a non-relational database system (NoSQL)
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

This study aims to enhance data consistency in NoSQL databases, traditionally designed with BASE properties, as opposed to the strong consistency guaranteed by ACID principles in RDBMS. We introduce a comprehensive four-stage server-side model engineered explicitly for MongoDB. This model covers transaction management, bifurcation of read and write transactions, assessment of transaction readiness, and transaction execution via a specialized locking algorithm. Utilizing the Yahoo Cloud Services Benchmark (YCSB), particularly for update-heavy workloads (A, B, and F), our model exhibited significant improvements. Specifically, the average throughput, read, and update latencies improved to 2864.726 ms, 32806.275 ms, and 51845.629 ms, respectively, from the baseline metrics of 2914.110 ms, 26510.930 ms, and 32457.662 ms. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed model in enhancing consistency not only in document-based NoSQL databases like MongoDB but also in other NoSQL database variants, including key-value, graph, and wide-column stores.
A small vocabulary database of ultrasound image sequences of vocal tract dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a new database consisting of concurrent articulatory and acoustic speech data. The articulatory data correspond to ultrasound videos of the vocal tract dynamics, which allow the visualization of the tongue upper contour during the speech production process. Acoustic data is composed of 30 short sentences that were acquired by a directional cardioid microphone. This database includes data from 17 young subjects (8 male and 9 female) from the Santander region in Colombia, who reported not having any speech pathology.
SOK: Privacy Definitions and Classical Mechanisms in the Local Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper delves into the intricate landscape of privacy notions, specifically honed in on the local setting. Central to our discussion is the juxtaposition of point-wise protection and average-case protection, offering a comparative analysis that highlights the strengths and trade-offs inherent to each approach. Beyond this, we delineate between context-aware and context-free notions, examining the implications of both in diverse application scenarios. The study further differentiates between the interactive and non-interactive models, illuminating the complexities and nuances each model introduces. By systematically navigating these core themes, our goal is to provide a cohesive framework that aids researchers and practitioners in discerning the most suitable privacy notions for their specific requirements in the local setting.
Forensic Histopathological Recognition via a Context-Aware MIL Network Powered by Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Forensic pathology is critical in analyzing death manner and time from the microscopic aspect to assist in the establishment of reliable factual bases for criminal investigation. In practice, even the manual differentiation between different postmortem organ tissues is challenging and relies on expertise, considering that changes like putrefaction and autolysis could significantly change typical histopathological appearance. Developing AI-based computational pathology techniques to assist forensic pathologists is practically meaningful, which requires reliable discriminative representation learning to capture tissues' fine-grained postmortem patterns. To this end, we propose a framework called FPath, in which a dedicated self-supervised contrastive learning strategy and a context-aware multiple-instance learning (MIL) block are designed to learn discriminative representations from postmortem histopathological images acquired at varying magnification scales. Our self-supervised learning step leverages multiple complementary contrastive losses and regularization terms to train a double-tier backbone for fine-grained and informative patch/instance embedding. Thereafter, the context-aware MIL adaptively distills from the local instances a holistic bag/image-level representation for the recognition task. On a large-scale database of $19,607$ experimental rat postmortem images and $3,378$ real-world human decedent images, our FPath led to state-of-the-art accuracy and promising cross-domain generalization in recognizing seven different postmortem tissues. The source code will be released on \href{https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/forensic_pathology}{https://github.com/ladderlab-xjtu/forensic\_pathology}.
CTR is not Enough: a Novel Reinforcement Learning based Ranking Approach for Optimizing Session Clicks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Ranking is a crucial module using in the recommender system. In particular, the ranking module using in our YoungTao recommendation scenario is to provide an ordered list of items to users, to maximize the click number throughout the recommendation session for each user. However, we found that the traditional ranking method for optimizing Click-Through rate(CTR) cannot address our ranking scenario well, since it completely ignores user leaving, and CTR is the optimization goal for the one-step recommendation. To effectively undertake the purpose of our ranking module, we propose a long-term optimization goal, named as CTE (Click-Through quantity expectation), for explicitly taking the behavior of user leaving into account. Based on CTE, we propose an effective model trained by reinforcement learning. Moreover, we build a simulation environment from offline log data for estimating PBR and CTR. We conduct extensive experiments on offline datasets and an online e-commerce scenario in TaoBao. Experimental results show that our method can boost performance effectively
Uncertainty-aware Risk Assessment of Robotic Systems via Importance Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic approach to risk assessment of robot systems by focusing on the impact of uncertainties. While various approaches to identifying systematic hazards (e.g., bugs, design flaws, etc.) can be found in current literature, little attention has been devoted to evaluating risks in robot systems in a probabilistic manner. Existing methods rely on discrete notions for dangerous events and assume that the consequences of these can be described by simple logical operations. In this work, we consider measurement uncertainties as one main contributor to the evolvement of risks. Specifically, we study the impact of temporal and spatial uncertainties on the occurrence probability of dangerous failures, thereby deriving an approach for an uncertainty-aware risk assessment. Secondly, we introduce a method to improve the statistical significance of our results: While the rare occurrence of hazardous events makes it challenging to draw conclusions with reliable accuracy, we show that importance sampling -- a technique that successively generates samples in regions with sparse probability densities -- allows for overcoming this issue. We demonstrate the validity of our novel uncertainty-aware risk assessment method in three simulation scenarios from the domain of human-robot collaboration. Finally, we show how the results can be used to evaluate arbitrary safety limits of robot systems.
A Novel Multi-scale Attention Feature Extraction Block for Aerial Remote Sensing Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Classification of very high-resolution (VHR) aerial remote sensing (RS) images is a well-established research area in the remote sensing community as it provides valuable spatial information for decision-making. Existing works on VHR aerial RS image classification produce an excellent classification performance; nevertheless, they have a limited capability to well-represent VHR RS images having complex and small objects, thereby leading to performance instability. As such, we propose a novel plug-and-play multi-scale attention feature extraction block (MSAFEB) based on multi-scale convolution at two levels with skip connection, producing discriminative/salient information at a deeper/finer level. The experimental study on two benchmark VHR aerial RS image datasets (AID and NWPU) demonstrates that our proposal achieves a stable/consistent performance (minimum standard deviation of $0.002$) and competent overall classification performance (AID: 95.85\% and NWPU: 94.09\%).
Pilot Power Allocation for Channel Estimation in a Multi-RIS Aided Communication System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology that enables the customization of electromagnetic propagation environments in next-generation wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate the optimal pilot power allocation during the channel estimation stage to improve the ergodic channel gain of RIS-assisted systems under practical imperfect channel state information (CSI). Specifically, we commence by deriving an explicit closed-form expression of the ergodic channel gain of a multi-RIS-aided communication system that takes into account channel estimation errors. Then, we formulate the pilot power allocation problem to maximize the ergodic channel gain under imperfect CSI, subject to the average pilot power constraint. Then, the method of Lagrange multipliers is invoked to obtain the optimal pilot power allocation solution, which indicates that allocating more power to the pilots for estimating the weak reflection channels is capable of effectively improving the ergodic channel gain under imperfect CSI. Finally, extensive simulation results corroborate our theoretical analysis.
Superpixels algorithms through network community detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Community detection is a powerful tool from complex networks analysis that finds applications in various research areas. Several image segmentation methods rely for instance on community detection algorithms as a black box in order to compute undersegmentations, i.e. a small number of regions that represent areas of interest of the image. However, to the best of our knowledge, the efficiency of such an approach w.r.t. superpixels, that aim at representing the image at a smaller level while preserving as much as possible original information, has been neglected so far. The only related work seems to be the one by Liu et. al. (IET Image Processing, 2022) that developed a superpixels algorithm using a so-called modularity maximization approach, leading to relevant results. We follow this line of research by studying the efficiency of superpixels computed by state-of-the-art community detection algorithms on a 4-connected pixel graph, so-called pixel-grid. We first detect communities on such a graph and then apply a simple merging procedure that allows to obtain the desired number of superpixels. As we shall see, such methods result in the computation of relevant superpixels as emphasized by both qualitative and quantitative experiments, according to different widely-used metrics based on ground-truth comparison or on superpixels only. We observe that the choice of the community detection algorithm has a great impact on the number of communities and hence on the merging procedure. Similarly, small variations on the pixel-grid may provide different results from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints. For the sake of completeness, we compare our results with those of several state-of-the-art superpixels algorithms as computed by Stutz et al. (Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 2018).
Cheap Lunch for Medical Image Segmentation by Fine-tuning SAM on Few Exemplars
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities of scaled-up segmentation models, enabling zero-shot generalization across a variety of domains. By leveraging large-scale foundational models as pre-trained models, it is a natural progression to fine-tune SAM for specific domains to further enhance performances. However, the adoption of foundational models in the medical domain presents a challenge due to the difficulty and expense of labeling sufficient data for adaptation within hospital systems. In this paper, we introduce an efficient and practical approach for fine-tuning SAM using a limited number of exemplars, making it suitable for such scenarios. Our approach combines two established techniques from the literature: an exemplar-guided synthesis module and the widely recognized Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning strategy, serving as data-level and model-level attempts respectively. Interestingly, our empirical findings suggest that SAM can be effectively aligned within the medical domain even with few labeled data. We validate our approach through experiments on brain tumor segmentation (BraTS) and multi-organ CT segmentation (Synapse). The comprehensive results underscore the feasibility and effectiveness of such an approach, paving the way for the practical application of SAM in the medical domain.
Locally Uniform Hashing
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Hashing is a common technique used in data processing, with a strong impact on the time and resources spent on computation. Hashing also affects the applicability of theoretical results that often assume access to (unrealistic) uniform/fully-random hash functions. In this paper, we are concerned with designing hash functions that are practical and come with strong theoretical guarantees on their performance. To this end, we present tornado tabulation hashing, which is simple, fast, and exhibits a certain full, local randomness property that provably makes diverse algorithms perform almost as if (abstract) fully-random hashing was used. For example, this includes classic linear probing, the widely used HyperLogLog algorithm of Flajolet, Fusy, Gandouet, Meunier [AOFA 97] for counting distinct elements, and the one-permutation hashing of Li, Owen, and Zhang [NIPS 12] for large-scale machine learning. We also provide a very efficient solution for the classical problem of obtaining fully-random hashing on a fixed (but unknown to the hash function) set of $n$ keys using $O(n)$ space. As a consequence, we get more efficient implementations of the splitting trick of Dietzfelbinger and Rink [ICALP'09] and the succinct space uniform hashing of Pagh and Pagh [SICOMP'08]. Tornado tabulation hashing is based on a simple method to systematically break dependencies in tabulation-based hashing techniques.
Learning end-to-end inversion of circular Radon transforms in the partial radial setup
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present a deep learning-based computational algorithm for inversion of circular Radon transforms in the partial radial setup, arising in photoacoustic tomography. We first demonstrate that the truncated singular value decomposition-based method, which is the only traditional algorithm available to solve this problem, leads to severe artifacts which renders the reconstructed field as unusable. With the objective of overcoming this computational bottleneck, we train a ResBlock based U-Net to recover the inferred field that directly operates on the measured data. Numerical results with augmented Shepp-Logan phantoms, in the presence of noisy full and limited view data, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm.
Adaptive Assessment of Visualization Literacy
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Visualization literacy is an essential skill for accurately interpreting data to inform critical decisions. Consequently, it is vital to understand the evolution of this ability and devise targeted interventions to enhance it, requiring concise and repeatable assessments of visualization literacy for individuals. However, current assessments, such as the Visualization Literacy Assessment Test (VLAT), are time-consuming due to their fixed, lengthy format. To address this limitation, we develop two streamlined computerized adaptive tests (CATs) for visualization literacy, A-VLAT and A-CALVI, which measure the same set of skills as their original versions in half the number of questions. Specifically, we (1) employ item response theory (IRT) and non-psychometric constraints to construct adaptive versions of the assessments, (2) finalize the configurations of adaptation through simulation, (3) refine the composition of test items of A-CALVI via a qualitative study, and (4) demonstrate the test-retest reliability (ICC: 0.98 and 0.98) and convergent validity (correlation: 0.81 and 0.66) of both CATs via four online studies. We discuss practical recommendations for using our CATs and opportunities for further customization to leverage the full potential of adaptive assessments. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/a6258/.
Intergrated Segmentation and Detection Models for Dentex Challenge 2023
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Dental panoramic x-rays are commonly used in dental diagnosing. With the development of deep learning, auto detection of diseases from dental panoramic x-rays can help dentists to diagnose diseases more efficiently.The Dentex Challenge 2023 is a competition for automatic detection of abnormal teeth along with their enumeration ids from dental panoramic x-rays. In this paper, we propose a method integrating segmentation and detection models to detect abnormal teeth as well as obtain their enumeration ids.Our codes are available at https://github.com/xyzlancehe/DentexSegAndDet.
Using Knowledge Representation and Task Planning for Robot-agnostic Skills on the Example of Contact-Rich Wiping Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The transition to agile manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and high-mix-low-volume tasks require robot programming solutions that are flexible. However, most deployed robot solutions are still statically programmed and use stiff position control, which limit their usefulness. In this paper, we show how a single robot skill that utilizes knowledge representation, task planning, and automatic selection of skill implementations based on the input parameters can be executed in different contexts. We demonstrate how the skill-based control platform enables this with contact-rich wiping tasks on different robot systems. To achieve that in this case study, our approach needs to address different kinematics, gripper types, vendors, and fundamentally different control interfaces. We conducted the experiments with a mobile platform that has a Universal Robots UR5e 6 degree-of-freedom robot arm with position control and a 7 degree-of-freedom KUKA iiwa with torque control.