OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Give Me a Choice: The Consequences of Restricting Choices Through AI-Support for Perceived Autonomy, Motivational Variables, and Decision Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Design optimizations in human-AI collaboration often focus on cognitive aspects like attention and task load. Drawing on work design literature, we propose that effective human-AI collaboration requires broader consideration of human needs (e.g., autonomy) that affect motivational variables (e.g., meaningfulness). In a simulated drone oversight experiment, participants (N=274, between-subject) faced 10 critical decision-making scenarios with varying levels of choice restrictions with an AI recommending only 1, 2, 4 or all 6 possible actions. Restricting participants to one selectable action improved task performance (with a perfect AI) but significantly reduced perceived autonomy and work meaningfulness, and these effects intensified over time. In conditions with multiple action choices, participants with higher perceived autonomy performed better. The findings underscore the importance of considering motivational factors to design successful long-term human-AI collaboration at work.
Partitioning Trillion Edge Graphs on Edge Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Processing large-scale graphs, containing billions of entities, is critical across fields like bioinformatics, high-performance computing, navigation and route planning, among others. Efficient graph partitioning, which divides a graph into sub-graphs while minimizing inter-block edges, is essential to graph processing, as it optimizes parallel computing and enhances data locality. Traditional in-memory partitioners, such as METIS and KaHIP, offer high-quality partitions but are often infeasible for enormous graphs due to their substantial memory overhead. Streaming partitioners reduce memory usage to O(n), where 'n' is the number of nodes of the graph, by loading nodes sequentially and assigning them to blocks on-the-fly. This paper introduces StreamCPI, a novel framework that further reduces the memory overhead of streaming partitioners through run-length compression of block assignments. Notably, StreamCPI enables the partitioning of trillion-edge graphs on edge devices. Additionally, within this framework, we propose a modification to the LA-vector bit vector for append support, which can be used for online run-length compression in other streaming applications. Empirical results show that StreamCPI reduces memory usage while maintaining or improving partition quality. For instance, using StreamCPI, the Fennel partitioner effectively partitions a graph with 17 billion nodes and 1.03 trillion edges on a Raspberry Pi, achieving significantly better solution quality than Hashing, the only other feasible algorithm on edge devices. StreamCPI thus advances graph processing by enabling high-quality partitioning on low-cost machines.
MGMapNet: Multi-Granularity Representation Learning for End-to-End Vectorized HD Map Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The construction of Vectorized High-Definition (HD) map typically requires capturing both category and geometry information of map elements. Current state-of-the-art methods often adopt solely either point-level or instance-level representation, overlooking the strong intrinsic relationships between points and instances. In this work, we propose a simple yet efficient framework named MGMapNet (Multi-Granularity Map Network) to model map element with a multi-granularity representation, integrating both coarse-grained instance-level and fine-grained point-level queries. Specifically, these two granularities of queries are generated from the multi-scale bird's eye view (BEV) features using a proposed Multi-Granularity Aggregator. In this module, instance-level query aggregates features over the entire scope covered by an instance, and the point-level query aggregates features locally. Furthermore, a Point Instance Interaction module is designed to encourage information exchange between instance-level and point-level queries. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MGMapNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing MapTRv2 by 5.3 mAP on nuScenes and 4.4 mAP on Argoverse2 respectively.
Design Method of a Kangaroo Robot with High Power Legs and an Articulated Soft Tail
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we focus on the kangaroo, which has powerful legs capable of jumping and a soft and strong tail. To incorporate these unique structure into a robot for utilization, we propose a design method that takes into account both the feasibility as a robot and the kangaroo-mimetic structure. Based on the kangaroo's musculoskeletal structure, we determine the structure of the robot that enables it to jump by analyzing the muscle arrangement and prior verification in simulation. Also, to realize a tail capable of body support, we use an articulated, elastic structure as a tail. In order to achieve both softness and high power output, the robot is driven by a direct-drive, high-power wire-winding mechanism, and weight of legs and the tail is reduced by placing motors in the torso. The developed kangaroo robot can jump with its hind legs, moving its tail, and supporting its body using its hind legs and tail.
Learning Low-Level Causal Relations using a Simulated Robotic Arm
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Causal learning allows humans to predict the effect of their actions on the known environment and use this knowledge to plan the execution of more complex actions. Such knowledge also captures the behaviour of the environment and can be used for its analysis and the reasoning behind the behaviour. This type of knowledge is also crucial in the design of intelligent robotic systems with common sense. In this paper, we study causal relations by learning the forward and inverse models based on data generated by a simulated robotic arm involved in two sensorimotor tasks. As a next step, we investigate feature attribution methods for the analysis of the forward model, which reveals the low-level causal effects corresponding to individual features of the state vector related to both the arm joints and the environment features. This type of analysis provides solid ground for dimensionality reduction of the state representations, as well as for the aggregation of knowledge towards the explainability of causal effects at higher levels.
QoS-Nets: Adaptive Approximate Neural Network Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In order to vary the arithmetic resource consumption of neural network applications at runtime, this work proposes the flexible reuse of approximate multipliers for neural network layer computations. We introduce a search algorithm that chooses an appropriate subset of approximate multipliers of a user-defined size from a larger search space and enables retraining to maximize task performance. Unlike previous work, our approach can output more than a single, static assignment of approximate multiplier instances to layers. These different operating points allow a system to gradually adapt its Quality of Service (QoS) to changing environmental conditions by increasing or decreasing its accuracy and resource consumption. QoS-Nets achieves this by reassigning the selected approximate multiplier instances to layers at runtime. To combine multiple operating points with the use of retraining, we propose a fine-tuning scheme that shares the majority of parameters between operating points, with only a small amount of additional parameters required per operating point. In our evaluation on MobileNetV2, QoS-Nets is used to select four approximate multiplier instances for three different operating points. These operating points result in power savings for multiplications between 15.3% and 42.8% at a Top-5 accuracy loss between 0.3 and 2.33 percentage points. Through our fine-tuning scheme, all three operating points only increase the model's parameter count by only 2.75%.
Enhancing Hyperspectral Image Prediction with Contrastive Learning in Low-Label Regime
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Self-supervised contrastive learning is an effective approach for addressing the challenge of limited labelled data. This study builds upon the previously established two-stage patch-level, multi-label classification method for hyperspectral remote sensing imagery. We evaluate the method's performance for both the single-label and multi-label classification tasks, particularly under scenarios of limited training data. The methodology unfolds in two stages. Initially, we focus on training an encoder and a projection network using a contrastive learning approach. This step is crucial for enhancing the ability of the encoder to discern patterns within the unlabelled data. Next, we employ the pre-trained encoder to guide the training of two distinct predictors: one for multi-label and another for single-label classification. Empirical results on four public datasets show that the predictors trained with our method perform better than those trained under fully supervised techniques. Notably, the performance is maintained even when the amount of training data is reduced by $50\%$. This advantage is consistent across both tasks. The method's effectiveness comes from its streamlined architecture. This design allows for retraining the encoder along with the predictor. As a result, the encoder becomes more adaptable to the features identified by the classifier, improving the overall classification performance. Qualitative analysis reveals the contrastive-learning-based encoder's capability to provide representations that allow separation among classes and identify location-based features despite not being explicitly trained for that. This observation indicates the method's potential in uncovering implicit spatial information within the data.
Rewriting Conversational Utterances with Instructed Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Many recent studies have shown the ability of large language models (LLMs) to achieve state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks, such as question answering, text summarization, coding, and translation. In some cases, the results provided by LLMs are on par with those of human experts. These models' most disruptive innovation is their ability to perform tasks via zero-shot or few-shot prompting. This capability has been successfully exploited to train instructed LLMs, where reinforcement learning with human feedback is used to guide the model to follow the user's requests directly. In this paper, we investigate the ability of instructed LLMs to improve conversational search effectiveness by rewriting user questions in a conversational setting. We study which prompts provide the most informative rewritten utterances that lead to the best retrieval performance. Reproducible experiments are conducted on publicly-available TREC CAST datasets. The results show that rewriting conversational utterances with instructed LLMs achieves significant improvements of up to 25.2% in MRR, 31.7% in Precision@1, 27% in NDCG@3, and 11.5% in Recall@500 over state-of-the-art techniques.
LaB-CL: Localized and Balanced Contrastive Learning for improving parking slot detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Parking slot detection is an essential technology in autonomous parking systems. In general, the classification problem of parking slot detection consists of two tasks, a task determining whether localized candidates are junctions of parking slots or not, and the other that identifies a shape of detected junctions. Both classification tasks can easily face biased learning toward the majority class, degrading classification performances. Yet, the data imbalance issue has been overlooked in parking slot detection. We propose the first supervised contrastive learning framework for parking slot detection, Localized and Balanced Contrastive Learning for improving parking slot detection (LaB-CL). The proposed LaB-CL framework uses two main approaches. First, we propose to include class prototypes to consider representations from all classes in every mini batch, from the local perspective. Second, we propose a new hard negative sampling scheme that selects local representations with high prediction error. Experiments with the benchmark dataset demonstrate that the proposed LaB-CL framework can outperform existing parking slot detection methods.
SNN-PAR: Energy Efficient Pedestrian Attribute Recognition via Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial neural network based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) has been widely studied in recent years, despite many progresses, however, the energy consumption is still high. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) based framework for energy-efficient attribute recognition. Specifically, we first adopt a spiking tokenizer module to transform the given pedestrian image into spiking feature representations. Then, the output will be fed into the spiking Transformer backbone networks for energy-efficient feature extraction. We feed the enhanced spiking features into a set of feed-forward networks for pedestrian attribute recognition. In addition to the widely used binary cross-entropy loss function, we also exploit knowledge distillation from the artificial neural network to the spiking Transformer network for more accurate attribute recognition. Extensive experiments on three widely used PAR benchmark datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed SNN-PAR framework. The source code of this paper is released on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenPAR}.
Executing Arithmetic: Fine-Tuning Large Language Models as Turing Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing and reasoning tasks. However, their performance in the foundational domain of arithmetic remains unsatisfactory. When dealing with arithmetic tasks, LLMs often memorize specific examples rather than learning the underlying computational logic, limiting their ability to generalize to new problems. In this paper, we propose a Composable Arithmetic Execution Framework (CAEF) that enables LLMs to learn to execute step-by-step computations by emulating Turing Machines, thereby gaining a genuine understanding of computational logic. Moreover, the proposed framework is highly scalable, allowing composing learned operators to significantly reduce the difficulty of learning complex operators. In our evaluation, CAEF achieves nearly 100% accuracy across seven common mathematical operations on the LLaMA 3.1-8B model, effectively supporting computations involving operands with up to 100 digits, a level where GPT-4o falls short noticeably in some settings.
Minimal Trellises for non-Degenerate and Degenerate Decoding of Quantum Stabilizer Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a comprehensive guide to designing minimal trellises for both non-degenerate and degenerate decoding of quantum stabilizer codes. For non-degenerate decoding, various strategies are explored, leveraging insights from classical rectangular codes to minimize the complexity associated with the non-degenerate maximum likelihood error estimation using the Viterbi algorithm. Additionally, novel techniques for constructing minimal multi-goal trellises for degenerate decoding are introduced, including a merging algorithm, a Shannon-product approach, and the BCJR-Wolf method. The study establishes essential properties of multi-goal trellises and provides bounds on the decoding complexity using the sum-product Viterbi decoding algorithm. These advancements decrease the decoding complexity by a factor $\mathcal{O}(n)$, where $n$ is the code length. Finally, the paper applies these results to CSS codes and demonstrates a reduction in complexity by independently applying degenerate decoding to $X$ and $Z$ errors.
Robustness Auditing for Linear Regression: To Singularity and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

It has recently been discovered that the conclusions of many highly influential econometrics studies can be overturned by removing a very small fraction of their samples (often less than $0.5\%$). These conclusions are typically based on the results of one or more Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions, raising the question: given a dataset, can we certify the robustness of an OLS fit on this dataset to the removal of a given number of samples? Brute-force techniques quickly break down even on small datasets. Existing approaches which go beyond brute force either can only find candidate small subsets to remove (but cannot certify their non-existence) [BGM20, KZC21], are computationally intractable beyond low dimensional settings [MR22], or require very strong assumptions on the data distribution and too many samples to give reasonable bounds in practice [BP21, FH23]. We present an efficient algorithm for certifying the robustness of linear regressions to removals of samples. We implement our algorithm and run it on several landmark econometrics datasets with hundreds of dimensions and tens of thousands of samples, giving the first non-trivial certificates of robustness to sample removal for datasets of dimension $4$ or greater. We prove that under distributional assumptions on a dataset, the bounds produced by our algorithm are tight up to a $1 + o(1)$ multiplicative factor.
Exploring the core-periphery and community structure in the financial networks through random matrix theory
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

In finance, Random Matrix Theory (RMT) is an important tool for filtering out noise from large datasets, revealing true correlations among stocks, enhancing risk management and portfolio optimization. In this study, we use RMT to filter out noise from the full cross-correlation matrix of stock price returns for the NIFTY 200 and NIFTY 500 indices on the National Stock Exchange of India. In addition, we applied network theory tools to analyze market and sector modes as filtered correlation structures to study local interactions within financial networks. This allows us to study the very fundamental properties of networks, such as the core-periphery and the community structure of constructed networks over these filtered modes, and compare the results with the network constructed over the full cross-correlation matrix. The results suggest that the core-periphery structure is contained in the market mode, while the community structure is in the sector mode. Thus, both modes outperform the full cross-correlation in terms of capturing the essential respective structure of the network. Furthermore, we used these insights to build portfolios based on communities of the networks corresponding to the sector mode and the network corresponding to the full cross-correlation matrix. The results suggest that the portfolio constructed on the complete cross-correlation-based matrix performs better than the sector mode. These insights provide a greater understanding of RMT application in the financial market.
Disease Entity Recognition and Normalization is Improved with Large Language Model Derived Synthetic Normalized Mentions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Background: Machine learning methods for clinical named entity recognition and entity normalization systems can utilize both labeled corpora and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for learning. However, infrequently occurring concepts may have few mentions in training corpora and lack detailed descriptions or synonyms, even in large KGs. For Disease Entity Recognition (DER) and Disease Entity Normalization (DEN), this can result in fewer high quality training examples relative to the number of known diseases. Large Language Model (LLM) generation of synthetic training examples could improve performance in these information extraction tasks. Methods: We fine-tuned a LLaMa-2 13B Chat LLM to generate a synthetic corpus containing normalized mentions of concepts from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Disease Semantic Group. We measured overall and Out of Distribution (OOD) performance for DER and DEN, with and without synthetic data augmentation. We evaluated performance on 3 different disease corpora using 4 different data augmentation strategies, assessed using BioBERT for DER and SapBERT and KrissBERT for DEN. Results: Our synthetic data yielded a substantial improvement for DEN, in all 3 training corpora the top 1 accuracy of both SapBERT and KrissBERT improved by 3-9 points in overall performance and by 20-55 points in OOD data. A small improvement (1-2 points) was also seen for DER in overall performance, but only one dataset showed OOD improvement. Conclusion: LLM generation of normalized disease mentions can improve DEN relative to normalization approaches that do not utilize LLMs to augment data with synthetic mentions. Ablation studies indicate that performance gains for DEN were only partially attributable to improvements in OOD performance. The same approach has only a limited ability to improve DER. We make our software and dataset publicly available.
Iterative Optimization Annotation Pipeline and ALSS-YOLO-Seg for Efficient Banana Plantation Segmentation in UAV Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Precise segmentation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-captured images plays a vital role in tasks such as crop yield estimation and plant health assessment in banana plantations. By identifying and classifying planted areas, crop area can be calculated, which is indispensable for accurate yield predictions. However, segmenting banana plantation scenes requires a substantial amount of annotated data, and manual labeling of these images is both time-consuming and labor-intensive, limiting the development of large-scale datasets. Furthermore, challenges such as changing target sizes, complex ground backgrounds, limited computational resources, and correct identification of crop categories make segmentation even more difficult. To address these issues, we proposed a comprehensive solution. Firstly, we designed an iterative optimization annotation pipeline leveraging SAM2's zero-shot capabilities to generate high-quality segmentation annotations, thereby reducing the cost and time associated with data annotation significantly. Secondly, we developed ALSS-YOLO-Seg, an efficient lightweight segmentation model optimized for UAV imagery. The model's backbone includes an Adaptive Lightweight Channel Splitting and Shuffling (ALSS) module to improve information exchange between channels and optimize feature extraction, aiding accurate crop identification. Additionally, a Multi-Scale Channel Attention (MSCA) module combines multi-scale feature extraction with channel attention to tackle challenges of varying target sizes and complex ground backgrounds.
A transition towards virtual representations of visual scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual scene understanding is a fundamental task in computer vision that aims to extract meaningful information from visual data. It traditionally involves disjoint and specialized algorithms for different tasks that are tailored for specific application scenarios. This can be cumbersome when designing complex systems that include processing of visual and semantic data extracted from visual scenes, which is even more noticeable nowadays with the influx of applications for virtual or augmented reality. When designing a system that employs automatic visual scene understanding to enable a precise and semantically coherent description of the underlying scene, which can be used to fuel a visualization component with 3D virtual synthesis, the lack of flexibility and unified frameworks become more prominent. To alleviate this issue and its inherent problems, we propose an architecture that addresses the challenges of visual scene understanding and description towards a 3D virtual synthesis that enables an adaptable, unified and coherent solution. Furthermore, we expose how our proposition can be of use into multiple application areas. Additionally, we also present a proof of concept system that employs our architecture to further prove its usability in practice.