OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Structured Code Representations Enable Data-Efficient Adaptation of Code Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Current language models tailored for code tasks often adopt the pre-training-then-fine-tuning paradigm from natural language processing, modeling source code as plain text. This approach, however, overlooks the unambiguous structures inherent in programming languages. In this work, we explore data-efficient adaptation of pre-trained code models by further pre-training and fine-tuning them with program structures. Specifically, we represent programs as parse trees -- also known as concrete syntax trees (CSTs) -- and adapt pre-trained models on serialized CSTs. Although the models that we adapt have been pre-trained only on the surface form of programs, we find that a small amount of continual pre-training and fine-tuning on CSTs without changing the model architecture yields improvements over the baseline approach across various code tasks. The improvements are found to be particularly significant when there are limited training examples, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating program structures with plain-text representation even when working with backbone models that have not been pre-trained with structures.
A Low-Frequency-Stable Higher-Order Isogeometric Discretization of the Augmented Electric Field Integral Equation
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This contribution investigates the connection between isogeometric analysis and integral equation methods for full-wave electromagnetic problems up to the low-frequency limit. The proposed spline-based integral equation method allows for an exact representation of the model geometry described in terms of non-uniform rational B-splines without meshing. This is particularly useful when high accuracy is required or when meshing is cumbersome for instance during optimization of electric components. The augmented electric field integral equation is adopted and the deflation method is applied, so the low-frequency breakdown is avoided. The extension to higher-order basis functions is analyzed and the convergence rate is discussed. Numerical experiments on academic and realistic test cases demonstrate the high accuracy of the proposed approach.
Warehouse Problem with Multiple Vendors and Generalized Complementarity Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the warehouse problem, arising in the area of inventory management and production planning. Here, a merchant wants to decide an optimal trading policy that computes quantities of a single commodity to purchase, store and sell during each time period of a finite discrete time horizon. Motivated by recent applications in energy markets, we extend the models by Wolsey and Yaman (2018) and Bansal and Günlük (2023) and consider markets with multiple vendors and a more general form of the complementarity constraints. We show that these extensions can capture various practical conditions such as surge pricing and discounted sales, ramp-up and ramp-down constraints and batch pricing. We analyze the extreme points of the underlying non-linear integer program and provide an algorithm that exactly solves the problem. Our algorithm runs in polynomial time under reasonable practical conditions. We also show that the absence of such conditions renders the problem NP-Hard.
Optimisation in Neurosymbolic Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Neurosymbolic AI aims to integrate deep learning with symbolic AI. This integration has many promises, such as decreasing the amount of data required to train a neural network, improving the explainability and interpretability of answers given by models and verifying the correctness of trained systems. We study neurosymbolic learning, where we have both data and background knowledge expressed using symbolic languages. How do we connect the symbolic and neural components to communicate this knowledge? One option is fuzzy reasoning, which studies degrees of truth. For example, being tall is not a binary concept. Instead, probabilistic reasoning studies the probability that something is true or will happen. Our first research question studies how different forms of fuzzy reasoning combine with learning. We find surprising results like a connection to the Raven paradox stating we confirm "ravens are black" when we observe a green apple. In this study, we did not use the background knowledge when we deployed our models after training. In our second research question, we studied how to use background knowledge in deployed models. We developed a new neural network layer based on fuzzy reasoning. Probabilistic reasoning is a natural fit for neural networks, which we usually train to be probabilistic. However, they are expensive to compute and do not scale well to large tasks. In our third research question, we study how to connect probabilistic reasoning with neural networks by sampling to estimate averages, while in the final research question, we study scaling probabilistic neurosymbolic learning to much larger problems than before. Our insight is to train a neural network with synthetic data to predict the result of probabilistic reasoning.
Aerial Field Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Aerial field robotics research represents the domain of study that aims to equip unmanned aerial vehicles - and as it pertains to this chapter, specifically Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs)- with the ability to operate in real-life environments that present challenges to safe navigation. We present the key elements of autonomy for MAVs that are resilient to collisions and sensing degradation, while operating under constrained computational resources. We overview aspects of the state of the art, outline bottlenecks to resilient navigation autonomy, and overview the field-readiness of MAVs. We conclude with notable contributions and discuss considerations for future research that are essential for resilience in aerial robotics.
Using LLMs to discover emerging coded antisemitic hate-speech in extremist social media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Online hate speech proliferation has created a difficult problem for social media platforms. A particular challenge relates to the use of coded language by groups interested in both creating a sense of belonging for its users and evading detection. Coded language evolves quickly and its use varies over time. This paper proposes a methodology for detecting emerging coded hate-laden terminology. The methodology is tested in the context of online antisemitic discourse. The approach considers posts scraped from social media platforms, often used by extremist users. The posts are scraped using seed expressions related to previously known discourse of hatred towards Jews. The method begins by identifying the expressions most representative of each post and calculating their frequency in the whole corpus. It filters out grammatically incoherent expressions as well as previously encountered ones so as to focus on emergent well-formed terminology. This is followed by an assessment of semantic similarity to known antisemitic terminology using a fine-tuned large language model, and subsequent filtering out of the expressions that are too distant from known expressions of hatred. Emergent antisemitic expressions containing terms clearly relating to Jewish topics are then removed to return only coded expressions of hatred.
Neural Population Decoding and Imbalanced Multi-Omic Datasets For Cancer Subtype Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Recent strides in the field of neural computation has seen the adoption of Winner Take All (WTA) circuits to facilitate the unification of hierarchical Bayesian inference and spiking neural networks as a neurobiologically plausible model of information processing. Current research commonly validates the performance of these networks via classification tasks, particularly of the MNIST dataset. However, researchers have not yet reached consensus about how best to translate the stochastic responses from these networks into discrete decisions, a process known as population decoding. Despite being an often underexamined part of SNNs, in this work we show that population decoding has a significanct impact on the classification performance of WTA networks. For this purpose, we apply a WTA network to the problem of cancer subtype diagnosis from multi omic data, using datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In doing so we utilise a novel implementation of gene similarity networks, a feature encoding technique based on Kohoens self organising map algorithm. We further show that the impact of selecting certain population decoding methods is amplified when facing imbalanced datasets.
Distributed Genetic Algorithm for Feature Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

We empirically show that process-based Parallelism speeds up the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for Feature Selection (FS) 2x to 25x, while additionally increasing the Machine Learning (ML) model performance on metrics such as F1-score, Accuracy, and Receiver Operating Characteristic Area Under the Curve (ROC-AUC).
Exploring the role of structure in a time constrained decision task
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The structure of the basal ganglia is remarkably similar across a number of species (often described in terms of direct, indirect and hyperdirect pathways) and is deeply involved in decision making and action selection. In this article, we are interested in exploring the role of structure when solving a decision task while avoiding to make any strong assumption regarding the actual structure. To do so, we exploit the echo state network paradigm that allows to solve complex task based on a random architecture. Considering a temporal decision task, the question is whether a specific structure allows for better performance and if so, whether this structure shares some similarity with the basal ganglia. Our results highlight the advantage of having a slow (direct) and a fast (hyperdirect) pathway that allows to deal with late information during a decision making task.
Advancements in eHealth Data Analytics through Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The healthcare environment is commonly referred to as "information-rich" but also "knowledge poor". Healthcare systems collect huge amounts of data from various sources: lab reports, medical letters, logs of medical tools or programs, medical prescriptions, etc. These massive sets of data can provide great knowledge and information that can improve the medical services, and overall the healthcare domain, such as disease prediction by analyzing the patient's symptoms or disease prevention, by facilitating the discovery of behavioral factors for diseases. Unfortunately, only a relatively small volume of the textual eHealth data is processed and interpreted, an important factor being the difficulty in efficiently performing Big Data operations. In the medical field, detecting domain-specific multi-word terms is a crucial task as they can define an entire concept with a few words. A term can be defined as a linguistic structure or a concept, and it is composed of one or more words with a specific meaning to a domain. All the terms of a domain create its terminology. This chapter offers a critical study of the current, most performant solutions for analyzing unstructured (image and textual) eHealth data. This study also provides a comparison of the current Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning techniques in the eHealth context. Finally, we examine and discuss some of the current issues, and we define a set of research directions in this area.
Motion Consistency Loss for Monocular Visual Odometry with Attention-Based Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning algorithms have driven expressive progress in many complex tasks. The loss function is a core component of deep learning techniques, guiding the learning process of neural networks. This paper contributes by introducing a consistency loss for visual odometry with deep learning-based approaches. The motion consistency loss explores repeated motions that appear in consecutive overlapped video clips. Experimental results show that our approach increased the performance of a model on the KITTI odometry benchmark.
Ensembler: Protect Collaborative Inference Privacy from Model Inversion Attack via Selective Ensemble
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

For collaborative inference through a cloud computing platform, it is sometimes essential for the client to shield its sensitive information from the cloud provider. In this paper, we introduce Ensembler, an extensible framework designed to substantially increase the difficulty of conducting model inversion attacks by adversarial parties. Ensembler leverages selective model ensemble on the adversarial server to obfuscate the reconstruction of the client's private information. Our experiments demonstrate that Ensembler can effectively shield input images from reconstruction attacks, even when the client only retains one layer of the network locally. Ensembler significantly outperforms baseline methods by up to 43.5% in structural similarity while only incurring 4.8% time overhead during inference.
Synthesizing Moving People with 3D Control
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present a diffusion model-based framework for animating people from a single image for a given target 3D motion sequence. Our approach has two core components: a) learning priors about invisible parts of the human body and clothing, and b) rendering novel body poses with proper clothing and texture. For the first part, we learn an in-filling diffusion model to hallucinate unseen parts of a person given a single image. We train this model on texture map space, which makes it more sample-efficient since it is invariant to pose and viewpoint. Second, we develop a diffusion-based rendering pipeline, which is controlled by 3D human poses. This produces realistic renderings of novel poses of the person, including clothing, hair, and plausible in-filling of unseen regions. This disentangled approach allows our method to generate a sequence of images that are faithful to the target motion in the 3D pose and, to the input image in terms of visual similarity. In addition to that, the 3D control allows various synthetic camera trajectories to render a person. Our experiments show that our method is resilient in generating prolonged motions and varied challenging and complex poses compared to prior methods. Please check our website for more details: https://boyiliee.github.io/3DHM.github.io/.
A VR Serious Game to Increase Empathy towards Students with Phonological Dyslexia
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is estimated to affect about 5-10% of the population. In particular, phonological dyslexia causes problems in connecting the sounds of words with their written forms. This results in difficulties such as slow reading speed, inaccurate reading, and difficulty decoding unfamiliar words. Moreover, dyslexia can also be a challenging and frustrating experience for students as they may feel misunderstood or stigmatized by their peers or educators. For these reasons, the use of compensatory tools and strategies is of crucial importance for dyslexic students to have the same opportunities as non-dyslexic ones. However, generally, people underestimate the problem and are not aware of the importance of support methodologies. In the light of this, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a virtual reality (VR) serious game through which teachers, students and, in general, non-dyslexic people could understand which are some of the issues of student with dyslexia and the fundamental utility of offering support to them. In the game, players must create a potion by following a recipe written in an alphabet that is specifically designed to replicate the reading difficulties experienced by individuals with dyslexia. The task must be solved first without any help and then by receiving supporting tools and strategies with the idea that the player can put himself in the place of the dyslexic person and understand the real need for support methodologies.
Even-if Explanations: Formal Foundations, Priorities and Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

EXplainable AI has received significant attention in recent years. Machine learning models often operate as black boxes, lacking explainability and transparency while supporting decision-making processes. Local post-hoc explainability queries attempt to answer why individual inputs are classified in a certain way by a given model. While there has been important work on counterfactual explanations, less attention has been devoted to semifactual ones. In this paper, we focus on local post-hoc explainability queries within the semifactual `even-if' thinking and their computational complexity among different classes of models, and show that both linear and tree-based models are strictly more interpretable than neural networks. After this, we introduce a preference-based framework that enables users to personalize explanations based on their preferences, both in the case of semifactuals and counterfactuals, enhancing interpretability and user-centricity. Finally, we explore the complexity of several interpretability problems in the proposed preference-based framework and provide algorithms for polynomial cases.
Analysis and Detection of Multilingual Hate Speech Using Transformer Based Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Hate speech is harmful content that directly attacks or promotes hatred against members of groups or individuals based on actual or perceived aspects of identity, such as racism, religion, or sexual orientation. This can affect social life on social media platforms as hateful content shared through social media can harm both individuals and communities. As the prevalence of hate speech increases online, the demand for automated detection as an NLP task is increasing. In this work, the proposed method is using transformer-based model to detect hate speech in social media, like twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. The proposed model is independent of languages and has been tested on Italian, English, German, Bengali. The Gold standard datasets were collected from renowned researcher Zeerak Talat, Sara Tonelli, Melanie Siegel, and Rezaul Karim. The success rate of the proposed model for hate speech detection is higher than the existing baseline and state-of-the-art models with accuracy in Bengali dataset is 89%, in English: 91%, in German dataset 91% and in Italian dataset it is 77%. The proposed algorithm shows substantial improvement to the benchmark method.
Formulating or Fixating: Effects of Examples on Problem Solving Vary as a Function of Example Presentation Interface Design
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Interactive systems that facilitate exposure to examples can augment problem solving performance. However designers of such systems are often faced with many practical design decisions about how users will interact with examples, with little clear theoretical guidance. To understand how example interaction design choices affect whether/how people benefit from examples, we conducted an experiment where 182 participants worked on a controlled analog to an exploratory creativity task, with access to examples of varying diversity and presentation interfaces. Task performance was worse when examples were presented in a list, compared to contextualized in the exploration space or shown in a dropdown list. Example lists were associated with more fixation, whereas contextualized examples were associated with using examples to formulate a model of the problem space to guide exploration. We discuss implications of these results for a theoretical framework that maps design choices to fundamental psychological mechanisms of creative inspiration from examples.
Optimization of the Context-Free Language Reachability Matrix-Based Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Various static analysis problems are reformulated as instances of the Context-Free Language Reachability (CFL-r) problem. One promising way to make solving CFL-r more practical for large-scale interprocedural graphs is to reduce CFL-r to linear algebra operations on sparse matrices, as they are efficiently executed on modern hardware. In this work, we present five optimizations for a matrix-based CFL-r algorithm that utilize the specific properties of both the underlying semiring and the widely-used linear algebra library SuiteSparse:GraphBlas. Our experimental results show that these optimizations result in orders of magnitude speedup, with the optimized matrix-based CFL-r algorithm consistently outperforming state-of-the-art CFL-r solvers across four considered static analyses.
PressProtect: Helping Journalists Navigate Social Media in the Face of Online Harassment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Social media has become a critical tool for journalists to disseminate their work, engage with their audience, and connect with sources. Unfortunately, journalists also regularly endure significant online harassment on social media platforms, ranging from personal attacks to doxxing to threats of physical harm. In this paper, we seek to understand how to make social media usable for journalists who face constant digital harassment. To begin, we conduct a set of need-finding interviews with Asian American and Pacific Islander journalists to understand where existing platform tools and newsroom resources fall short in adequately protecting journalists, especially those of marginalized identities. We map journalists' unmet needs to concrete design goals, which we use to build PressProtect, an interface that provides journalists greater agency when engaging with readers on Twitter/X. Through user testing with eight journalists, we evaluate PressProtect and find that participants felt it effectively protected them against harassment and could also generalize to serve other visible and vulnerable groups. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and recommendations for social platforms hoping to build defensive defaults for journalists facing online harassment.
PubTator 3.0: an AI-powered Literature Resource for Unlocking Biomedical Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

PubTator 3.0 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/pubtator3/) is a biomedical literature resource using state-of-the-art AI techniques to offer semantic and relation searches for key concepts like proteins, genetic variants, diseases, and chemicals. It currently provides over one billion entity and relation annotations across approximately 36 million PubMed abstracts and 6 million full-text articles from the PMC open access subset, updated weekly. PubTator 3.0's online interface and API utilize these precomputed entity relations and synonyms to provide advanced search capabilities and enable large-scale analyses, streamlining many complex information needs. We showcase the retrieval quality of PubTator 3.0 using a series of entity pair queries, demonstrating that PubTator 3.0 retrieves a greater number of articles than either PubMed or Google Scholar, with higher precision in the top 20 results. We further show that integrating ChatGPT (GPT-4) with PubTator APIs dramatically improves the factuality and verifiability of its responses. In summary, PubTator 3.0 offers a comprehensive set of features and tools that allow researchers to navigate the ever-expanding wealth of biomedical literature, expediting research and unlocking valuable insights for scientific discovery.