OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Nearly Minimax Optimal Regret for Learning Linear Mixture Stochastic Shortest Path
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We study the Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problem with a linear mixture transition kernel, where an agent repeatedly interacts with a stochastic environment and seeks to reach certain goal state while minimizing the cumulative cost. Existing works often assume a strictly positive lower bound of the cost function or an upper bound of the expected length for the optimal policy. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to eliminate these restrictive assumptions. Our algorithm is based on extended value iteration with a fine-grained variance-aware confidence set, where the variance is estimated recursively from high-order moments. Our algorithm achieves an $\tilde{\mathcal O}(dB_*\sqrt{K})$ regret bound, where $d$ is the dimension of the feature mapping in the linear transition kernel, $B_*$ is the upper bound of the total cumulative cost for the optimal policy, and $K$ is the number of episodes. Our regret upper bound matches the $Ω(dB_*\sqrt{K})$ lower bound of linear mixture SSPs in Min et al. (2022), which suggests that our algorithm is nearly minimax optimal.
Exploring Federated Deep Learning for Standardising Naming Conventions in Radiotherapy Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Standardising structure volume names in radiotherapy (RT) data is necessary to enable data mining and analyses, especially across multi-institutional centres. This process is time and resource intensive, which highlights the need for new automated and efficient approaches to handle the task. Several machine learning-based methods have been proposed and evaluated to standardise nomenclature. However, no studies have considered that RT patient records are distributed across multiple data centres. This paper introduces a method that emulates real-world environments to establish standardised nomenclature. This is achieved by integrating decentralised real-time data and federated learning (FL). A multimodal deep artificial neural network was proposed to standardise RT data in federated settings. Three types of possible attributes were extracted from the structures to train the deep learning models: tabular, visual, and volumetric. Simulated experiments were carried out to train the models across several scenarios including multiple data centres, input modalities, and aggregation strategies. The models were compared against models developed with single modalities in federated settings, in addition to models trained in centralised settings. Categorical classification accuracy was calculated on hold-out samples to inform the models performance. Our results highlight the need for fusing multiple modalities when training such models, with better performance reported with tabular-volumetric models. In addition, we report comparable accuracy compared to models built in centralised settings. This demonstrates the suitability of FL for handling the standardization task. Additional ablation analyses showed that the total number of samples in the data centres and the number of data centres highly affects the training process and should be carefully considered when building standardisation models.
Unified Opinion Dynamic Modeling as Concurrent Set Relations in Rewriting Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Social media platforms have played a key role in weaponizing the polarization of social, political, and democratic processes. This is, mainly, because they are a medium for opinion formation. Opinion dynamic models are a tool for understanding the role of specific social factors on the acceptance/rejection of opinions because they can be used to analyze certain assumptions on human behaviors. This work presents a framework that uses concurrent set relations as the formal basis to specify, simulate, and analyze social interaction systems with dynamic opinion models. Standard models for social learning are obtained as particular instances of the proposed framework. It has been implemented in the Maude system as a fully executable rewrite theory that can be used to better understand how opinions of a system of agents can be shaped. This paper also reports an initial exploration in Maude on the use of reachability analysis, probabilistic simulation, and statistical model checking of important properties related to opinion dynamic models.
Review-Incorporated Model-Agnostic Profile Injection Attacks on Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies have shown that recommender systems (RSs) are highly vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. Understanding attack tactics helps improve the robustness of RSs. We intend to develop efficient attack methods that use limited resources to generate high-quality fake user profiles to achieve 1) transferability among black-box RSs 2) and imperceptibility among detectors. In order to achieve these goals, we introduce textual reviews of products to enhance the generation quality of the profiles. Specifically, we propose a novel attack framework named R-Trojan, which formulates the attack objectives as an optimization problem and adopts a tailored transformer-based generative adversarial network (GAN) to solve it so that high-quality attack profiles can be produced. Comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that R-Trojan greatly outperforms state-of-the-art attack methods on various victim RSs under black-box settings and show its good imperceptibility.
Awareness in robotics: An early perspective from the viewpoint of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge "Awareness Inside''
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Consciousness has been historically a heavily debated topic in engineering, science, and philosophy. On the contrary, awareness had less success in raising the interest of scholars in the past. However, things are changing as more and more researchers are getting interested in answering questions concerning what awareness is and how it can be artificially generated. The landscape is rapidly evolving, with multiple voices and interpretations of the concept being conceived and techniques being developed. The goal of this paper is to summarize and discuss the ones among these voices connected with projects funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge called ``Awareness Inside'', a nonrecurring call for proposals within Horizon Europe designed specifically for fostering research on natural and synthetic awareness. In this perspective, we dedicate special attention to challenges and promises of applying synthetic awareness in robotics, as the development of mature techniques in this new field is expected to have a special impact on generating more capable and trustworthy embodied systems.
Blind Deep-Learning-Based Image Watermarking Robust Against Geometric Transformations
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

Digital watermarking enables protection against copyright infringement of images. Although existing methods embed watermarks imperceptibly and demonstrate robustness against attacks, they typically lack resilience against geometric transformations. Therefore, this paper proposes a new watermarking method that is robust against geometric attacks. The proposed method is based on the existing HiDDeN architecture that uses deep learning for watermark encoding and decoding. We add new noise layers to this architecture, namely for a differentiable JPEG estimation, rotation, rescaling, translation, shearing and mirroring. We demonstrate that our method outperforms the state of the art when it comes to geometric robustness. In conclusion, the proposed method can be used to protect images when viewed on consumers' devices.
Play Guessing Game with LLM: Indirect Jailbreak Attack with Implicit Clues
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

With the development of LLMs, the security threats of LLMs are getting more and more attention. Numerous jailbreak attacks have been proposed to assess the security defense of LLMs. Current jailbreak attacks primarily utilize scenario camouflage techniques. However their explicitly mention of malicious intent will be easily recognized and defended by LLMs. In this paper, we propose an indirect jailbreak attack approach, Puzzler, which can bypass the LLM's defense strategy and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. In addition, inspired by the wisdom of "When unable to attack, defend" from Sun Tzu's Art of War, we adopt a defensive stance to gather clues about the original malicious query through LLMs. Extensive experimental results show that Puzzler achieves a query success rate of 96.6% on closed-source LLMs, which is 57.9%-82.7% higher than baselines. Furthermore, when tested against the state-of-the-art jailbreak detection approaches, Puzzler proves to be more effective at evading detection compared to baselines.
Integrated Topology and Traffic Engineering for Reconfigurable Datacenter Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The state-of-the-art topologies of datacenter networks are fixed, based on electrical switching technology, and by now, we understand their throughput and cost well. For the past years, researchers have been developing novel optical switching technologies that enable the emergence of reconfigurable datacenter networks (RDCNs) that support dynamic psychical topologies. The art of network design of dynamic topologies, i.e., 'Topology Engineering,' is still in its infancy. Different designs offer distinct advantages, such as faster switch reconfiguration times or demand-aware topologies, and to date, it is yet unclear what design maximizes the throughput. This paper aims to improve our analytical understanding and formally studies the throughput of reconfigurable networks by presenting a general and unifying model for dynamic networks and their topology and traffic engineering. We use our model to study demand-oblivious and demand-aware systems and prove new upper bounds for the throughput of a system as a function of its topology and traffic schedules. Next, we offer a novel system design that combines both demand-oblivious and demand-aware schedules, and we prove its throughput supremacy under a large family of demand matrices. We evaluate our design numerically for sparse and dense traffic and show that our approach can outperform other designs by up to 25% using common network parameters.
Better Decremental and Fully Dynamic Sensitivity Oracles for Subgraph Connectivity
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the \emph{sensitivity oracles problem for subgraph connectivity} in the \emph{decremental} and \emph{fully dynamic} settings. In the fully dynamic setting, we preprocess an $n$-vertices $m$-edges undirected graph $G$ with $n_{\rm off}$ deactivated vertices initially and the others are activated. Then we receive a single update $D\subseteq V(G)$ of size $|D| = d \leq d_{\star}$, representing vertices whose states will be switched. Finally, we get a sequence of queries, each of which asks the connectivity of two given vertices $u$ and $v$ in the activated subgraph. The decremental setting is a special case when there is no deactivated vertex initially, and it is also known as the \emph{vertex-failure connectivity oracles} problem. We present a better deterministic vertex-failure connectivity oracle with $\widehat{O}(d_{\star}m)$ preprocessing time, $\widetilde{O}(m)$ space, $\widetilde{O}(d^{2})$ update time and $O(d)$ query time, which improves the update time of the previous almost-optimal oracle [Long-Saranurak, FOCS 2022] from $\widehat{O}(d^{2})$ to $\widetilde{O}(d^{2})$. We also present a better deterministic fully dynamic sensitivity oracle for subgraph connectivity with $\widehat{O}(\min\{m(n_{\rm off} + d_{\star}),n^ω\})$ preprocessing time, $\widetilde{O}(\min\{m(n_{\rm off} + d_{\star}),n^{2}\})$ space, $\widetilde{O}(d^{2})$ update time and $O(d)$ query time, which significantly improves the update time of the state of the art [Hu-Kosinas-Polak, 2023] from $\widetilde{O}(d^{4})$ to $\widetilde{O}(d^{2})$. Furthermore, our solution is even almost-optimal assuming popular fine-grained complexity conjectures.
Evolving Restricted Boltzmann Machine-Kohonen Network for Online Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A novel online clustering algorithm is presented where an Evolving Restricted Boltzmann Machine (ERBM) is embedded with a Kohonen Network called ERBM-KNet. The proposed ERBM-KNet efficiently handles streaming data in a single-pass mode using the ERBM, employing a bias-variance strategy for neuron growing and pruning, as well as online clustering based on a cluster update strategy for cluster prediction and cluster center update using KNet. Initially, ERBM evolves its architecture while processing unlabeled image data, effectively disentangling the data distribution in the latent space. Subsequently, the KNet utilizes the feature extracted from ERBM to predict the number of clusters and updates the cluster centers. By overcoming the common challenges associated with clustering algorithms, such as prior initialization of the number of clusters and subpar clustering accuracy, the proposed ERBM-KNet offers significant improvements. Extensive experimental evaluations on four benchmarks and one industry dataset demonstrate the superiority of ERBM-KNet compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Robust Training of Temporal GNNs using Nearest Neighbours based Hard Negatives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Temporal graph neural networks Tgnn have exhibited state-of-art performance in future-link prediction tasks. Training of these TGNNs is enumerated by uniform random sampling based unsupervised loss. During training, in the context of a positive example, the loss is computed over uninformative negatives, which introduces redundancy and sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose modified unsupervised learning of Tgnn, by replacing the uniform negative sampling with importance-based negative sampling. We theoretically motivate and define the dynamically computed distribution for a sampling of negative examples. Finally, using empirical evaluations over three real-world datasets, we show that Tgnn trained using loss based on proposed negative sampling provides consistent superior performance.
Exploring the Relationship: Transformative Adaptive Activation Functions in Comparison to Other Activation Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural networks are the state-of-the-art approach for many tasks and the activation function is one of the main building blocks that allow such performance. Recently, a novel transformative adaptive activation function (TAAF) allowing for any vertical and horizontal translation and scaling was proposed. This work sets the TAAF into the context of other activation functions. It shows that the TAAFs generalize over 50 existing activation functions and utilize similar concepts as over 70 other activation functions, underscoring the versatility of TAAFs. This comprehensive exploration positions TAAFs as a promising and adaptable addition to neural networks.
Leveraging Pre-Trained Autoencoders for Interpretable Prototype Learning of Music Audio
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

We present PECMAE, an interpretable model for music audio classification based on prototype learning. Our model is based on a previous method, APNet, which jointly learns an autoencoder and a prototypical network. Instead, we propose to decouple both training processes. This enables us to leverage existing self-supervised autoencoders pre-trained on much larger data (EnCodecMAE), providing representations with better generalization. APNet allows prototypes' reconstruction to waveforms for interpretability relying on the nearest training data samples. In contrast, we explore using a diffusion decoder that allows reconstruction without such dependency. We evaluate our method on datasets for music instrument classification (Medley-Solos-DB) and genre recognition (GTZAN and a larger in-house dataset), the latter being a more challenging task not addressed with prototypical networks before. We find that the prototype-based models preserve most of the performance achieved with the autoencoder embeddings, while the sonification of prototypes benefits understanding the behavior of the classifier.
A Modern Approach to Electoral Delimitation using the Quadtree Data Structure
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The boundaries of electoral constituencies for assembly and parliamentary seats are drafted using a process referred to as delimitation, which ensures fair and equal representation of all citizens. The current delimitation exercise suffers from a number of drawbacks viz. inefficiency, gerrymandering and an uneven seat-to-population ratio, owing to existing legal and constitutional dictates. The existing methods allocate seats to every state but remain silent about their actual shape and location within the state. The main purpose of this research is to study and analyse the performance of existing delimitation algorithms and further propose a potential solution, along with its merits, that involves using a computational model based on the quadtree data structure to automate the districting process by optimizing objective population criteria. The paper presents an approach to electoral delimitation using the quadtree data structure, which is used to partition a two-dimensional geographical space by recursively subdividing it into four quadrants or regions on the basis of population as a parameter value associated with the node. The quadtree makes use of a quadrant schema of the geographical space for representing constituencies, which not only keeps count of the allocated constituencies but also holds their location-specific information. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analysed and evaluated against existing techniques and proves to be an efficient solution in terms of algorithmic complexity and boundary visualisation to the process of political districting.
HiRE: High Recall Approximate Top-$k$ Estimation for Efficient LLM Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Autoregressive decoding with generative Large Language Models (LLMs) on accelerators (GPUs/TPUs) is often memory-bound where most of the time is spent on transferring model parameters from high bandwidth memory (HBM) to cache. On the other hand, recent works show that LLMs can maintain quality with significant sparsity/redundancy in the feedforward (FFN) layers by appropriately training the model to operate on a top-$k$ fraction of rows/columns (where $k \approx 0.05$), there by suggesting a way to reduce the transfer of model parameters, and hence latency. However, exploiting this sparsity for improving latency is hindered by the fact that identifying top rows/columns is data-dependent and is usually performed using full matrix operations, severely limiting potential gains. To address these issues, we introduce HiRE (High Recall Approximate Top-k Estimation). HiRE comprises of two novel components: (i) a compression scheme to cheaply predict top-$k$ rows/columns with high recall, followed by full computation restricted to the predicted subset, and (ii) DA-TOP-$k$: an efficient multi-device approximate top-$k$ operator. We demonstrate that on a one billion parameter model, HiRE applied to both the softmax as well as feedforward layers, achieves almost matching pretraining and downstream accuracy, and speeds up inference latency by $1.47\times$ on a single TPUv5e device.
Evaluation of Activated Sludge Settling Characteristics from Microscopy Images with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Microbial communities play a key role in biological wastewater treatment processes. Activated sludge settling characteristics, for example, are affected by microbial community composition, varying by changes in operating conditions and influent characteristics of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Timely assessment and prediction of changes in microbial composition leading to settling problems, such as filamentous bulking (FB), can prevent operational challenges, reductions in treatment efficiency, and adverse environmental impacts. This study presents an innovative computer vision-based approach to assess activated sludge-settling characteristics based on the morphological properties of flocs and filaments in microscopy images. Implementing the transfer learning of deep convolutional neural network (CNN) models, this approach aims to overcome the limitations of existing quantitative image analysis techniques. The offline microscopy image dataset was collected over two years, with weekly sampling at a full-scale industrial WWTP in Belgium. Multiple data augmentation techniques were employed to enhance the generalizability of the CNN models. Various CNN architectures, including Inception v3, ResNet18, ResNet152, ConvNeXt-nano, and ConvNeXt-S, were tested to evaluate their performance in predicting sludge settling characteristics. The sludge volume index was used as the final prediction variable, but the method can easily be adjusted to predict any other settling metric of choice. The results showed that the suggested CNN-based approach provides less labour-intensive, objective, and consistent assessments, while transfer learning notably minimises the training phase, resulting in a generalizable system that can be employed in real-time applications.
Fixed-sparsity matrix approximation from matrix-vector products
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study the problem of approximating a matrix $\mathbf{A}$ with a matrix that has a fixed sparsity pattern (e.g., diagonal, banded, etc.), when $\mathbf{A}$ is accessed only by matrix-vector products. We describe a simple randomized algorithm that returns an approximation with the given sparsity pattern with Frobenius-norm error at most $(1+\varepsilon)$ times the best possible error. When each row of the desired sparsity pattern has at most $s$ nonzero entries, this algorithm requires $O(s/\varepsilon)$ non-adaptive matrix-vector products with $\mathbf{A}$. We also prove a matching lower-bound, showing that, for any sparsity pattern with $Θ(s)$ nonzeros per row and column, any algorithm achieving $(1+ε)$ approximation requires $Ω(s/\varepsilon)$ matrix-vector products in the worst case. We thus resolve the matrix-vector product query complexity of the problem up to constant factors, even for the well-studied case of diagonal approximation, for which no previous lower bounds were known.