OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Twits, Toxic Tweets, and Tribal Tendencies: Trends in Politically Polarized Posts on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Social media platforms are often blamed for exacerbating political polarization and worsening public dialogue. Many claim that hyperpartisan users post pernicious content, slanted to their political views, inciting contentious and toxic conversations. However, what factors are actually associated with increased online toxicity and negative interactions? In this work, we explore the role that partisanship and affective polarization play in contributing to toxicity both on an individual user level and a topic level on Twitter/X. To do this, we train and open-source a DeBERTa-based toxicity detector with a contrastive objective that outperforms the Google Jigsaw Perspective Toxicity detector on the Civil Comments test dataset. Then, after collecting 89.6 million tweets from 43,151 Twitter/X users, we determine how several account-level characteristics, including partisanship along the US left-right political spectrum and account age, predict how often users post toxic content. Fitting a Generalized Additive Model to our data, we find that the diversity of views and the toxicity of the other accounts with which that user engages has a more marked effect on their own toxicity. Namely, toxic comments are correlated with users who engage with a wider array of political views. Performing topic analysis on the toxic content posted by these accounts using the large language model MPNet and a version of the DP-Means clustering algorithm, we find similar behavior across 5,288 individual topics, with users becoming more toxic as they engage with a wider diversity of politically charged topics.
GOOSE Algorithm: A Powerful Optimization Tool for Real-World Engineering Challenges and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This study proposes the GOOSE algorithm as a novel metaheuristic algorithm based on the goose's behavior during rest and foraging. The goose stands on one leg and keeps his balance to guard and protect other individuals in the flock. The GOOSE algorithm is benchmarked on 19 well-known benchmark test functions, and the results are verified by a comparative study with genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), dragonfly algorithm (DA), and fitness dependent optimizer (FDO). In addition, the proposed algorithm is tested on 10 modern benchmark functions, and the gained results are compared with three recent algorithms, such as the dragonfly algorithm, whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and salp swarm algorithm (SSA). Moreover, the GOOSE algorithm is tested on 5 classical benchmark functions, and the obtained results are evaluated with six algorithms, such as fitness dependent optimizer (FDO), FOX optimizer, butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA), whale optimization algorithm, dragonfly algorithm, and chimp optimization algorithm (ChOA). The achieved findings attest to the proposed algorithm's superior performance compared to the other algorithms that were utilized in the current study. The technique is then used to optimize Welded beam design and Economic Load Dispatch Problem, three renowned real-world engineering challenges, and the Pathological IgG Fraction in the Nervous System. The outcomes of the engineering case studies illustrate how well the suggested approach can optimize issues that arise in the real-world.
Bridging Intelligence and Instinct: A New Control Paradigm for Autonomous Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

As the advent of artificial general intelligence (AGI) progresses at a breathtaking pace, the application of large language models (LLMs) as AI Agents in robotics remains in its nascent stage. A significant concern that hampers the seamless integration of these AI Agents into robotics is the unpredictability of the content they generate, a phenomena known as ``hallucination''. Drawing inspiration from biological neural systems, we propose a novel, layered architecture for autonomous robotics, bridging AI agent intelligence and robot instinct. In this context, we define Robot Instinct as the innate or learned set of responses and priorities in an autonomous robotic system that ensures survival-essential tasks, such as safety assurance and obstacle avoidance, are carried out in a timely and effective manner. This paradigm harmoniously combines the intelligence of LLMs with the instinct of robotic behaviors, contributing to a more safe and versatile autonomous robotic system. As a case study, we illustrate this paradigm within the context of a mobile robot, demonstrating its potential to significantly enhance autonomous robotics and enabling a future where robots can operate independently and safely across diverse environments.
Topics, Authors, and Institutions in Large Language Model Research: Trends from 17K arXiv Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are dramatically influencing AI research, spurring discussions on what has changed so far and how to shape the field's future. To clarify such questions, we analyze a new dataset of 16,979 LLM-related arXiv papers, focusing on recent trends in 2023 vs. 2018-2022. First, we study disciplinary shifts: LLM research increasingly considers societal impacts, evidenced by 20x growth in LLM submissions to the Computers and Society sub-arXiv. An influx of new authors -- half of all first authors in 2023 -- are entering from non-NLP fields of CS, driving disciplinary expansion. Second, we study industry and academic publishing trends. Surprisingly, industry accounts for a smaller publication share in 2023, largely due to reduced output from Google and other Big Tech companies; universities in Asia are publishing more. Third, we study institutional collaboration: while industry-academic collaborations are common, they tend to focus on the same topics that industry focuses on rather than bridging differences. The most prolific institutions are all US- or China-based, but there is very little cross-country collaboration. We discuss implications around (1) how to support the influx of new authors, (2) how industry trends may affect academics, and (3) possible effects of (the lack of) collaboration.
Global Precipitation Nowcasting of Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM: A U-Net Convolutional LSTM Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a deep learning architecture for nowcasting of precipitation almost globally every 30 min with a 4-hour lead time. The architecture fuses a U-Net and a convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network and is trained using data from the Integrated MultisatellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) and a few key precipitation drivers from the Global Forecast System (GFS). The impacts of different training loss functions, including the mean-squared error (regression) and the focal-loss (classification), on the quality of precipitation nowcasts are studied. The results indicate that the regression network performs well in capturing light precipitation (below 1.6 mm/hr), but the classification network can outperform the regression network for nowcasting of precipitation extremes (>8 mm/hr), in terms of the critical success index (CSI).. Using the Wasserstein distance, it is shown that the predicted precipitation by the classification network has a closer class probability distribution to the IMERG than the regression network. It is uncovered that the inclusion of the physical variables can improve precipitation nowcasting, especially at longer lead times in both networks. Taking IMERG as a relative reference, a multi-scale analysis in terms of fractions skill score (FSS), shows that the nowcasting machine remains skillful (FSS > 0.5) at the resolution of 10 km compared to 50 km for GFS. For precipitation rates greater than 4~mm/hr, only the classification network remains FSS-skillful on scales greater than 50 km within a 2-hour lead time.
Investigating VTubing as a Reconstruction of Streamer Self-Presentation: Identity, Performance, and Gender
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

VTubers, or Virtual YouTubers, are live streamers who create streaming content using animated 2D or 3D virtual avatars. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of VTuber creators and viewers across the globe. This practise has drawn research attention into topics such as viewers' engagement behaviors and perceptions, however, as animated avatars offer more identity and performance flexibility than traditional live streaming where one uses their own body, little research has focused on how this flexibility influences how creators present themselves. This research thus seeks to fill this gap by presenting results from a qualitative study of 16 Chinese-speaking VTubers' streaming practices. The data revealed that the virtual avatars that were used while live streaming afforded creators opportunities to present themselves using inflated presentations and resulted in inclusive interactions with viewers. The results also unveiled the inflated, and often sexualized, gender expressions of VTubers while they were situated in misogynistic environments. The socio-technical facets of VTubing were found to potentially reduce sexual harassment and sexism, whilst also raising self-objectification concerns.
Exact Community Recovery in the Geometric SBM
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

We study the problem of exact community recovery in the Geometric Stochastic Block Model (GSBM), where each vertex has an unknown community label as well as a known position, generated according to a Poisson point process in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Edges are formed independently conditioned on the community labels and positions, where vertices may only be connected by an edge if they are within a prescribed distance of each other. The GSBM thus favors the formation of dense local subgraphs, which commonly occur in real-world networks, a property that makes the GSBM qualitatively very different from the standard Stochastic Block Model (SBM). We propose a linear-time algorithm for exact community recovery, which succeeds down to the information-theoretic threshold, confirming a conjecture of Abbe, Baccelli, and Sankararaman. The algorithm involves two phases. The first phase exploits the density of local subgraphs to propagate estimated community labels among sufficiently occupied subregions, and produces an almost-exact vertex labeling. The second phase then refines the initial labels using a Poisson testing procedure. Thus, the GSBM enjoys local to global amplification just as the SBM, with the advantage of admitting an information-theoretically optimal, linear-time algorithm.
Sensing Aided Covert Communications: Turning Interference into Allies
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we investigate the realization of covert communication in a general radar-communication cooperation system, which includes integrated sensing and communications as a special example. We explore the possibility of utilizing the sensing ability of radar to track and jam the aerial adversary target attempting to detect the transmission. Based on the echoes from the target, the extended Kalman filtering technique is employed to predict its trajectory as well as the corresponding channels. Depending on the maneuvering altitude of adversary target, two channel state information (CSI) models are considered, with the aim of maximizing the covert transmission rate by jointly designing the radar waveform and communication transmit beamforming vector based on the constructed channels. For perfect CSI under the free-space propagation model, by decoupling the joint design, we propose an efficient algorithm to guarantee that the target cannot detect the transmission. For imperfect CSI due to the multi-path components, a robust joint transmission scheme is proposed based on the property of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The convergence behaviour, tracking MSE, false alarm and missed detection probabilities, and covert transmission rate are evaluated. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve accurate tracking. For both channel models, the proposed sensing-assisted covert transmission design is able to guarantee the covertness, and significantly outperforms the conventional schemes.
Offline Diversity Maximization Under Imitation Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

There has been significant recent progress in the area of unsupervised skill discovery, utilizing various information-theoretic objectives as measures of diversity. Despite these advances, challenges remain: current methods require significant online interaction, fail to leverage vast amounts of available task-agnostic data and typically lack a quantitative measure of skill utility. We address these challenges by proposing a principled offline algorithm for unsupervised skill discovery that, in addition to maximizing diversity, ensures that each learned skill imitates state-only expert demonstrations to a certain degree. Our main analytical contribution is to connect Fenchel duality, reinforcement learning, and unsupervised skill discovery to maximize a mutual information objective subject to KL-divergence state occupancy constraints. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the standard offline benchmark D4RL and on a custom offline dataset collected from a 12-DoF quadruped robot for which the policies trained in simulation transfer well to the real robotic system.
Simulation of Turing machines with analytic discrete ODEs: FPTIME and FPSPACE over the reals characterised with discrete ordinary differential equations
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We prove that functions over the reals computable in polynomial time can be characterised using discrete ordinary differential equations (ODE), also known as finite differences. We also provide a characterisation of functions computable in polynomial space over the reals. In particular, this covers space complexity, while existing characterisations were only able to cover time complexity, and were restricted to functions over the integers. We prove furthermore that no artificial sign or test function is needed even for time complexity. At a technical level, this is obtained by proving that Turing machines can be simulated with analytic discrete ordinary differential equations. We believe this result opens the way to many applications, as it opens the possibility of programming with ODEs, with an underlying well-understood time and space complexity.
Bans vs. Warning Labels: Examining Bystanders' Support for Community-wide Moderation Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Social media platforms like Facebook and Reddit host thousands of user-governed online communities. These platforms sanction communities that frequently violate platform policies; however, public perceptions of such sanctions remain unclear. In a pre-registered survey conducted in the US, I explore bystander perceptions of content moderation for communities that frequently feature hate speech, violent content, and sexually explicit content. Two community-wide moderation interventions are tested: (1) community bans, where all community posts are removed, and (2) community warning labels, where an interstitial warning label precedes access. I examine how third-person effects and support for free speech influence user approval of these interventions on any platform. My regression analyses show that presumed effects on others are a significant predictor of backing for both interventions, while free speech beliefs significantly influence participants' inclination for using warning labels. Analyzing the open-ended responses, I find that community-wide bans are often perceived as too coarse, and users instead value sanctions in proportion to the severity and type of infractions. I report on concerns that norm-violating communities could reinforce inappropriate behaviors and show how users' choice of sanctions is influenced by their perceived effectiveness. I discuss the implications of these results for HCI research on online harms and content moderation.
Mercer Large-Scale Kernel Machines from Ridge Function Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

To present Mercer large-scale kernel machines from a ridge function perspective, we recall the results by Lin and Pinkus from {\it Fundamentality of ridge functions}. We consider the main result of the recent paper by Rachimi and Recht, 2008, {\it Random features for large-scale kernel machines} from the Approximation Theory point of view. We study which kernels could be approximated by a sum of products of cosine functions with arguments depending on $x$ and $y$ and present the obstacles of such an approach. The results of this article are applied to Image Processing by procedure "one-vs-rest".
Estimating temperatures with low-cost infrared cameras using deep neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Low-cost thermal cameras are inaccurate (usually $\pm 3^\circ C$) and have space-variant nonuniformity across their detector. Both inaccuracy and nonuniformity are dependent on the ambient temperature of the camera. The goal of this work was to estimate temperatures with low-cost infrared cameras, and rectify the nonuniformity. A nonuniformity simulator that accounts for the ambient temperature was developed. An end-to-end neural network that incorporates both the physical model of the camera and the ambient camera temperature was introduced. The neural network was trained with the simulated nonuniformity data to estimate the object's temperature and correct the nonuniformity, using only a single image and the ambient temperature measured by the camera itself. Results of the proposed method significantly improved the mean temperature error compared to previous works by up to $0.5^\circ C$. In addition, constraining the physical model of the camera with the network lowered the error by an additional $0.1^\circ C$. The mean temperature error over an extensive validation dataset was $0.37^\circ C$. The method was verified on real data in the field and produced equivalent results.
Tackling the Curse of Dimensionality with Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The curse-of-dimensionality taxes computational resources heavily with exponentially increasing computational cost as the dimension increases. This poses great challenges in solving high-dimensional PDEs, as Richard E. Bellman first pointed out over 60 years ago. While there has been some recent success in solving numerically partial differential equations (PDEs) in high dimensions, such computations are prohibitively expensive, and true scaling of general nonlinear PDEs to high dimensions has never been achieved. We develop a new method of scaling up physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to solve arbitrary high-dimensional PDEs. The new method, called Stochastic Dimension Gradient Descent (SDGD), decomposes a gradient of PDEs into pieces corresponding to different dimensions and randomly samples a subset of these dimensional pieces in each iteration of training PINNs. We prove theoretically the convergence and other desired properties of the proposed method. We demonstrate in various diverse tests that the proposed method can solve many notoriously hard high-dimensional PDEs, including the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) and the Schrödinger equations in tens of thousands of dimensions very fast on a single GPU using the PINNs mesh-free approach. Notably, we solve nonlinear PDEs with nontrivial, anisotropic, and inseparable solutions in 100,000 effective dimensions in 12 hours on a single GPU using SDGD with PINNs. Since SDGD is a general training methodology of PINNs, it can be applied to any current and future variants of PINNs to scale them up for arbitrary high-dimensional PDEs.
SCRAPS: Speech Contrastive Representations of Acoustic and Phonetic Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Numerous examples in the literature proved that deep learning models have the ability to work well with multimodal data. Recently, CLIP has enabled deep learning systems to learn shared latent spaces between images and text descriptions, with outstanding zero- or few-shot results in downstream tasks. In this paper we explore the same idea proposed by CLIP but applied to the speech domain, where the phonetic and acoustic spaces usually coexist. We train a CLIP-based model with the aim to learn shared representations of phonetic and acoustic spaces. The results show that the proposed model is sensible to phonetic changes, with a 91% of score drops when replacing 20% of the phonemes at random, while providing substantial robustness against different kinds of noise, with a 10% performance drop when mixing the audio with 75% of Gaussian noise. We also provide empirical evidence showing that the resulting embeddings are useful for a variety of downstream applications, such as intelligibility evaluation and the ability to leverage rich pre-trained phonetic embeddings in speech generation task. Finally, we discuss potential applications with interesting implications for the speech generation and recognition fields.
Embedding Integer Lattices as Ideals into Polynomial Rings
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Many lattice-based crypstosystems employ ideal lattices for high efficiency. However, the additional algebraic structure of ideal lattices usually makes us worry about the security, and it is widely believed that the algebraic structure will help us solve the hard problems in ideal lattices more efficiently. In this paper, we study the additional algebraic structure of ideal lattices further and find that a given ideal lattice in a polynomial ring can be embedded as an ideal into infinitely many different polynomial rings by the coefficient embedding. We design an algorithm to verify whether a given full-rank lattice in $\mathbb{Z}^n$ is an ideal lattice and output all the polynomial rings that the given lattice can be embedded into as an ideal with time complexity $\mathcal{O}(n^3B(B+\log n)$, where $n$ is the dimension of the lattice and $B$ is the upper bound of the bit length of the entries of the input lattice basis. We would like to point out that Ding and Lindner proposed an algorithm for identifying ideal lattices and outputting a single polynomial ring that the input lattice can be embedded into with time complexity $\mathcal{O}(n^5B^2)$ in 2007. However, we find a flaw in Ding and Lindner's algorithm that causes some ideal lattices can't be identified by their algorithm.
Knapsack: Connectedness, Path, and Shortest-Path
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the knapsack problem with graph theoretic constraints. That is, we assume that there exists a graph structure on the set of items of knapsack and the solution also needs to satisfy certain graph theoretic properties on top of knapsack constraints. In particular, we need to compute in the connected knapsack problem a connected subset of items which has maximum value subject to the size of knapsack constraint. We show that this problem is strongly NP-complete even for graphs of maximum degree four and NP-complete even for star graphs. On the other hand, we develop an algorithm running in time $O\left(2^{tw\log tw}\cdot\text{poly}(\min\{s^2,d^2\})\right)$ where $tw,s,d$ are respectively treewidth of the graph, size, and target value of the knapsack. We further exhibit a $(1-ε)$ factor approximation algorithm running in time $O\left(2^{tw\log tw}\cdot\text{poly}(n,1/ε)\right)$ for every $ε>0$. We show similar results for several other graph theoretic properties, namely path and shortest-path under the problem names path-knapsack and shortestpath-knapsack. Our results seems to indicate that connected-knapsack is computationally hardest followed by path-knapsack and shortestpath-knapsack.