OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Label-Free and Non-Monotonic Metric for Evaluating Denoising in Event Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Event cameras are renowned for their high efficiency due to outputting a sparse, asynchronous stream of events. However, they are plagued by noisy events, especially in low light conditions. Denoising is an essential task for event cameras, but evaluating denoising performance is challenging. Label-dependent denoising metrics involve artificially adding noise to clean sequences, complicating evaluations. Moreover, the majority of these metrics are monotonic, which can inflate scores by removing substantial noise and valid events. To overcome these limitations, we propose the first label-free and non-monotonic evaluation metric, the area of the continuous contrast curve (AOCC), which utilizes the area enclosed by event frame contrast curves across different time intervals. This metric is inspired by how events capture the edge contours of scenes or objects with high temporal resolution. An effective denoising method removes noise without eliminating these edge-contour events, thus preserving the contrast of event frames. Consequently, contrast across various time ranges serves as a metric to assess denoising effectiveness. As the time interval lengthens, the curve will initially rise and then fall. The proposed metric is validated through both theoretical and experimental evidence.
Step-by-Step Diffusion: An Elementary Tutorial
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present an accessible first course on diffusion models and flow matching for machine learning, aimed at a technical audience with no diffusion experience. We try to simplify the mathematical details as much as possible (sometimes heuristically), while retaining enough precision to derive correct algorithms.
A PCA based Keypoint Tracking Approach to Automated Facial Expressions Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) for studying facial expressions is manual and requires significant effort and expertise. This paper explores the use of automated techniques to generate Action Units (AUs) for studying facial expressions. We propose an unsupervised approach based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and facial keypoint tracking to generate data-driven AUs called PCA AUs using the publicly available DISFA dataset. The PCA AUs comply with the direction of facial muscle movements and are capable of explaining over 92.83 percent of the variance in other public test datasets (BP4D-Spontaneous and CK+), indicating their capability to generalize facial expressions. The PCA AUs are also comparable to a keypoint-based equivalence of FACS AUs in terms of variance explained on the test datasets. In conclusion, our research demonstrates the potential of automated techniques to be an alternative to manual FACS labeling which could lead to efficient real-time analysis of facial expressions in psychology and related fields. To promote further research, we have made code repository publicly available.
Steganalysis on Digital Watermarking: Is Your Defense Truly Impervious?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Digital watermarking techniques are crucial for copyright protection and source identification of images, especially in the era of generative AI models. However, many existing watermarking methods, particularly content-agnostic approaches that embed fixed patterns regardless of image content, are vulnerable to steganalysis attacks that can extract and remove the watermark with minimal perceptual distortion. In this work, we categorize watermarking algorithms into content-adaptive and content-agnostic ones, and demonstrate how averaging a collection of watermarked images could reveal the underlying watermark pattern. We then leverage this extracted pattern for effective watermark removal under both graybox and blackbox settings, even when the collection contains multiple watermark patterns. For some algorithms like Tree-Ring watermarks, the extracted pattern can also forge convincing watermarks on clean images. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluations across twelve watermarking methods highlight the threat posed by steganalysis to content-agnostic watermarks and the importance of designing watermarking techniques resilient to such analytical attacks. We propose security guidelines calling for using content-adaptive watermarking strategies and performing security evaluation against steganalysis. We also suggest multi-key assignments as potential mitigations against steganalysis vulnerabilities.
CGP++ : A Modern C++ Implementation of Cartesian Genetic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The reference implementation of Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP) was written in the C programming language. C inherently follows a procedural programming paradigm, which entails challenges in providing a reusable and scalable implementation model for complex structures and methods. Moreover, due to the limiting factors of C, the reference implementation of CGP does not provide a generic framework and is therefore restricted to a set of predefined evaluation types. Besides the reference implementation, we also observe that other existing implementations are limited with respect to the features provided. In this work, we therefore propose the first version of a modern C++ implementation of CGP that pursues object-oriented design and generic programming paradigm to provide an efficient implementation model that can facilitate the discovery of new problem domains and the implementation of complex advanced methods that have been proposed for CGP over time. With the proposal of our new implementation, we aim to generally promote interpretability, accessibility and reproducibility in the field of CGP.
Knowledge Graphs in the Digital Twin: A Systematic Literature Review About the Combination of Semantic Technologies and Simulation in Industrial Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

The ongoing digitization of the industrial sector has reached a pivotal juncture with the emergence of Digital Twins, offering a digital representation of physical assets and processes. One key aspect of those digital representations are simulation models, enabling a deeper insight in the assets current state and its characteristics. This paper asserts that the next evolutionary step in this digitization journey involves the integration of intelligent linkages between diverse simulation models within the Digital Twin framework. Crucially, for the Digital Twin to be a scalable and cost-effective solution, there is a pressing need for automated adaption, (re-)configuration, and generation of simulation models. Recognizing the inherent challenges in achieving such automation, this paper analyses the utilization of knowledge graphs as a potentially very suitable technological solution. Knowledge graphs, acting as interconnected and interrelated databases, provide a means of seamlessly integrating different data sources, facilitating the efficient integration and automated adaption of data and (simulation) models in the Digital Twin. We conducted a comprehensive literature review to analyze the current landscape of knowledge graphs in the context of Digital Twins with focus on simulation models. By addressing the challenges associated with scalability and maintenance, this research contributes to the effective adaption of Digital Twins in the industrial sector, paving the way for enhanced efficiency, adaptability, and resilience in the face of evolving technological landscapes.
DeepJEB: 3D Deep Learning-based Synthetic Jet Engine Bracket Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have impacted various fields, including mechanical engineering. However, the development of diverse, high-quality datasets for structural analysis remains a challenge. Traditional datasets, like the jet engine bracket dataset, are limited by small sample sizes, hindering the creation of robust surrogate models. This study introduces the DeepJEB dataset, generated through deep generative models and automated simulation pipelines, to address these limitations. DeepJEB offers comprehensive 3D geometries and corresponding structural analysis data. Key experiments validated its effectiveness, showing significant improvements in surrogate model performance. Models trained on DeepJEB achieved up to a 23% increase in the coefficient of determination and over a 70% reduction in mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) compared to those trained on traditional datasets. These results underscore the superior generalization capabilities of DeepJEB. By supporting advanced modeling techniques, such as graph neural networks (GNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), DeepJEB enables more accurate predictions in structural performance. The DeepJEB dataset is publicly accessible at: https://www.narnia.ai/dataset.
Data-Free Generative Replay for Class-Incremental Learning on Imbalanced Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Continual learning is a challenging problem in machine learning, especially for image classification tasks with imbalanced datasets. It becomes even more challenging when it involves learning new classes incrementally. One method for incremental class learning, addressing dataset imbalance, is rehearsal using previously stored data. In rehearsal-based methods, access to previous data is required for either training the classifier or the generator, but it may not be feasible due to storage, legal, or data access constraints. Although there are many rehearsal-free alternatives for class incremental learning, such as parameter or loss regularization, knowledge distillation, and dynamic architectures, they do not consistently achieve good results, especially on imbalanced data. This paper proposes a new approach called Data-Free Generative Replay (DFGR) for class incremental learning, where the generator is trained without access to real data. In addition, DFGR also addresses dataset imbalance in continual learning of an image classifier. Instead of using training data, DFGR trains a generator using mean and variance statistics of batch-norm and feature maps derived from a pre-trained classification model. The results of our experiments demonstrate that DFGR performs significantly better than other data-free methods and reveal the performance impact of specific parameter settings. DFGR achieves up to 88.5% and 46.6% accuracy on MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/2younis/DFGR
Towards Reliable Detection of LLM-Generated Texts: A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework with CUDRT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced text generation, but the human-like quality of LLM outputs presents major challenges in reliably distinguishing between human-authored and LLM-generated texts. Existing detection benchmarks are constrained by their reliance on static datasets, scenario-specific tasks (e.g., question answering and text refinement), and a primary focus on English, overlooking the diverse linguistic and operational subtleties of LLMs. To address these gaps, we propose CUDRT, a comprehensive evaluation framework and bilingual benchmark in Chinese and English, categorizing LLM activities into five key operations: Create, Update, Delete, Rewrite, and Translate. CUDRT provides extensive datasets tailored to each operation, featuring outputs from state-of-the-art LLMs to assess the reliability of LLM-generated text detectors. This framework supports scalable, reproducible experiments and enables in-depth analysis of how operational diversity, multilingual training sets, and LLM architectures influence detection performance. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the framework's capacity to optimize detection systems, providing critical insights to enhance reliability, cross-linguistic adaptability, and detection accuracy. By advancing robust methodologies for identifying LLM-generated texts, this work contributes to the development of intelligent systems capable of meeting real-world multilingual detection challenges. Source code and dataset are available at GitHub.
Impermanent Identifiers: Enhanced Source Code Comprehension and Refactoring
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In response to the prevailing challenges in contemporary software development, this article introduces an innovative approach to code augmentation centered around Impermanent Identifiers. The primary goal is to enhance the software development experience by introducing dynamic identifiers that adapt to changing contexts, facilitating more efficient interactions between developers and source code, ultimately advancing comprehension, maintenance, and collaboration in software development. Additionally, this study rigorously evaluates the adoption and acceptance of Impermanent Identifiers within the software development landscape. Through a comprehensive empirical examination, we investigate how developers perceive and integrate this approach into their daily programming practices, exploring perceived benefits, potential barriers, and factors influencing its adoption. In summary, this article charts a new course for code augmentation, proposing Impermanent Identifiers as its cornerstone while assessing their feasibility and acceptance among developers. This interdisciplinary research seeks to contribute to the continuous improvement of software development practices and the progress of code augmentation technology.
Dyadic obligations: proofs and countermodels via hypersequents
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The basic system E of dyadic deontic logic proposed by Åqvist offers a simple solution to contrary-to-duty paradoxes and allows to represent norms with exceptions. We investigate E from a proof-theoretical viewpoint. We propose a hypersequent calculus with good properties, the most important of which is cut-elimination, and the consequent subformula property. The calculus is refined to obtain a decision procedure for E and an effective countermodel computation in case of failure of proof search. Using the refined calculus, we prove that validity in E is Co-NP and countermodels have polynomial size.
Modeling Comparative Logical Relation with Contrastive Learning for Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Data-to-Text Generation (D2T), a classic natural language generation problem, aims at producing fluent descriptions for structured input data, such as a table. Existing D2T works mainly focus on describing the superficial associative relations among entities, while ignoring the deep comparative logical relations, such as A is better than B in a certain aspect with a corresponding opinion, which is quite common in our daily life. In this paper, we introduce a new D2T task named comparative logical relation generation (CLRG). Additionally, we propose a Comparative Logic (CoLo) based text generation method, which generates texts following specific comparative logical relations with contrastive learning. Specifically, we first construct various positive and negative samples by fine-grained perturbations in entities, aspects and opinions. Then, we perform contrastive learning in the encoder layer to have a better understanding of the comparative logical relations, and integrate it in the decoder layer to guide the model to correctly generate the relations. Noting the data scarcity problem, we construct a Chinese Comparative Logical Relation Dataset (CLRD), which is a high-quality human-annotated dataset and challenging for text generation with descriptions of multiple entities and annotations on their comparative logical relations. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves impressive performance in both automatic and human evaluations.
Large-Scale Evaluation of Open-Set Image Classification Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The goal for classification is to correctly assign labels to unseen samples. However, most methods misclassify samples with unseen labels and assign them to one of the known classes. Open-Set Classification (OSC) algorithms aim to maximize both closed and open-set recognition capabilities. Recent studies showed the utility of such algorithms on small-scale data sets, but limited experimentation makes it difficult to assess their performances in real-world problems. Here, we provide a comprehensive comparison of various OSC algorithms, including training-based (SoftMax, Garbage, EOS) and post-processing methods (Maximum SoftMax Scores, Maximum Logit Scores, OpenMax, EVM, PROSER), the latter are applied on features from the former. We perform our evaluation on three large-scale protocols that mimic real-world challenges, where we train on known and negative open-set samples, and test on known and unknown instances. Our results show that EOS helps to improve performance of almost all post-processing algorithms. Particularly, OpenMax and PROSER are able to exploit better-trained networks, demonstrating the utility of hybrid models. However, while most algorithms work well on negative test samples -- samples of open-set classes seen during training -- they tend to perform poorly when tested on samples of previously unseen unknown classes, especially in challenging conditions.
RH-SQL: Refined Schema and Hardness Prompt for Text-to-SQL
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Text-to-SQL is a technology that converts natural language queries into the structured query language SQL. A novel research approach that has recently gained attention focuses on methods based on the complexity of SQL queries, achieving notable performance improvements. However, existing methods entail significant storage and training costs, which hampers their practical application. To address this issue, this paper introduces a method for Text-to-SQL based on Refined Schema and Hardness Prompt. By filtering out low-relevance schema information with a refined schema and identifying query hardness through a Language Model (LM) to form prompts, this method reduces storage and training costs while maintaining performance. It's worth mentioning that this method is applicable to any sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) LM. Our experiments on the Spider dataset, specifically with large-scale LMs, achieved an exceptional Execution accuracy (EX) of 82.6%, demonstrating the effectiveness and greater suitability of our method for real-world applications.
Investigating the translation capabilities of Large Language Models trained on parallel data only
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency across a broad spectrum of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including Machine Translation. However, previous methods predominantly relied on iterative processes such as instruction fine-tuning or continual pre-training, leaving unexplored the challenges of training LLMs solely on parallel data. In this work, we introduce PLUME (Parallel Language Model), a collection of three 2B LLMs featuring varying vocabulary sizes (32k, 128k, and 256k) trained exclusively on Catalan-centric parallel examples. These models perform comparably to previous encoder-decoder architectures on 16 supervised translation directions and 56 zero-shot ones. Utilizing this set of models, we conduct a thorough investigation into the translation capabilities of LLMs, probing their performance, the impact of the different elements of the prompt, and their cross-lingual representation space.
Reducing the Space Used by the Sieve of Eratosthenes When Factoring
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We present a version of the sieve of Eratosthenes that can factor all integers $\le x$ in $O(x \log\log x)$ arithmetic operations using at most $O(\sqrt{x}/\log\log x)$ bits of space. This is an improved space bound under the condition that the algorithm takes at most $O(x\log\log x)$ time. We also show our algorithm performs well in practice.
EncCluster: Scalable Functional Encryption in Federated Learning through Weight Clustering and Probabilistic Filters
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) enables model training across decentralized devices by communicating solely local model updates to an aggregation server. Although such limited data sharing makes FL more secure than centralized approached, FL remains vulnerable to inference attacks during model update transmissions. Existing secure aggregation approaches rely on differential privacy or cryptographic schemes like Functional Encryption (FE) to safeguard individual client data. However, such strategies can reduce performance or introduce unacceptable computational and communication overheads on clients running on edge devices with limited resources. In this work, we present EncCluster, a novel method that integrates model compression through weight clustering with recent decentralized FE and privacy-enhancing data encoding using probabilistic filters to deliver strong privacy guarantees in FL without affecting model performance or adding unnecessary burdens to clients. We performed a comprehensive evaluation, spanning various datasets and architectures, to demonstrate EncCluster's scalability across encryption levels. Our findings reveal that EncCluster significantly reduces communication costs - below even conventional FedAvg - and accelerates encryption by more than four times over all baselines; at the same time, it maintains high model accuracy and enhanced privacy assurances.
Enhanced Object Detection: A Study on Vast Vocabulary Object Detection Track for V3Det Challenge 2024
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this technical report, we present our findings from the research conducted on the Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection (V3Det) dataset for Supervised Vast Vocabulary Visual Detection task. How to deal with complex categories and detection boxes has become a difficulty in this track. The original supervised detector is not suitable for this task. We have designed a series of improvements, including adjustments to the network structure, changes to the loss function, and design of training strategies. Our model has shown improvement over the baseline and achieved excellent rankings on the Leaderboard for both the Vast Vocabulary Object Detection (Supervised) track and the Open Vocabulary Object Detection (OVD) track of the V3Det Challenge 2024.
EHAZOP: A Proof of Concept Ethical Hazard Analysis of an Assistive Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The use of assistive robots in domestic environments can raise significant ethical concerns, from the risk of individual ethical harm to wider societal ethical impacts including culture flattening and compromise of human dignity. It is therefore essential to ensure that technological development of these robots is informed by robust and inclusive techniques for mitigating ethical concerns. This paper presents EHAZOP, a method for conducting an ethical hazard analysis on an assistive robot. EHAZOP draws upon collaborative, creative and structured processes originating within safety engineering, using these to identify ethical concerns associated with the operation of a given assistive robot. We present the results of a proof of concept study of EHAZOP, demonstrating the potential for this process to identify diverse ethical hazards in these systems.