OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Effective throughput of Shadowed Beaulieu-Xie fading channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Given the imperative for advanced wireless networks in the next generation and the rise of real-time applications within wireless communication, there is a notable focus on investigating data rate performance across various fading scenarios. This research delved into analyzing the effective throughput of the shadowed Beaulieu-Xie (SBX) composite fading channel using the PDF-based approach. To get the simplified relationship between the performance parameter and channel parameters, the low-SNR and the high-SNR approximation of the effective rate are also provided. The proposed formulations are evaluated for different values of system parameters to study their impact on the effective throughput. Also, the impact of the delay parameter on the EC is investigated. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to verify the facticity of the deduced equations.
Generalized Category Discovery in Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores a novel setting called Generalized Category Discovery in Semantic Segmentation (GCDSS), aiming to segment unlabeled images given prior knowledge from a labeled set of base classes. The unlabeled images contain pixels of the base class or novel class. In contrast to Novel Category Discovery in Semantic Segmentation (NCDSS), there is no prerequisite for prior knowledge mandating the existence of at least one novel class in each unlabeled image. Besides, we broaden the segmentation scope beyond foreground objects to include the entire image. Existing NCDSS methods rely on the aforementioned priors, making them challenging to truly apply in real-world situations. We propose a straightforward yet effective framework that reinterprets the GCDSS challenge as a task of mask classification. Additionally, we construct a baseline method and introduce the Neighborhood Relations-Guided Mask Clustering Algorithm (NeRG-MaskCA) for mask categorization to address the fragmentation in semantic representation. A benchmark dataset, Cityscapes-GCD, derived from the Cityscapes dataset, is established to evaluate the GCDSS framework. Our method demonstrates the feasibility of the GCDSS problem and the potential for discovering and segmenting novel object classes in unlabeled images. We employ the generated pseudo-labels from our approach as ground truth to supervise the training of other models, thereby enabling them with the ability to segment novel classes. It paves the way for further research in generalized category discovery, broadening the horizons of semantic segmentation and its applications. For details, please visit https://github.com/JethroPeng/GCDSS
ADAPTER-RL: Adaptation of Any Agent using Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents frequently face challenges in adapting to tasks outside their training distribution, including issues with over-fitting, catastrophic forgetting and sample inefficiency. Although the application of adapters has proven effective in supervised learning contexts such as natural language processing and computer vision, their potential within the DRL domain remains largely unexplored. This paper delves into the integration of adapters in reinforcement learning, presenting an innovative adaptation strategy that demonstrates enhanced training efficiency and improvement of the base-agent, experimentally in the nanoRTS environment, a real-time strategy (RTS) game simulation. Our proposed universal approach is not only compatible with pre-trained neural networks but also with rule-based agents, offering a means to integrate human expertise.
Understanding Variation in Subpopulation Susceptibility to Poisoning Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning is susceptible to poisoning attacks, in which an attacker controls a small fraction of the training data and chooses that data with the goal of inducing some behavior unintended by the model developer in the trained model. We consider a realistic setting in which the adversary with the ability to insert a limited number of data points attempts to control the model's behavior on a specific subpopulation. Inspired by previous observations on disparate effectiveness of random label-flipping attacks on different subpopulations, we investigate the properties that can impact the effectiveness of state-of-the-art poisoning attacks against different subpopulations. For a family of 2-dimensional synthetic datasets, we empirically find that dataset separability plays a dominant role in subpopulation vulnerability for less separable datasets. However, well-separated datasets exhibit more dependence on individual subpopulation properties. We further discover that a crucial subpopulation property is captured by the difference in loss on the clean dataset between the clean model and a target model that misclassifies the subpopulation, and a subpopulation is much easier to attack if the loss difference is small. This property also generalizes to high-dimensional benchmark datasets. For the Adult benchmark dataset, we show that we can find semantically-meaningful subpopulation properties that are related to the susceptibilities of a selected group of subpopulations. The results in this paper are accompanied by a fully interactive web-based visualization of subpopulation poisoning attacks found at https://uvasrg.github.io/visualizing-poisoning
A Framework on Complex Matrix Derivatives with Special Structure Constraints for Wireless Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Matrix-variate optimization plays a central role in advanced wireless system designs. In this paper, we aim to explore optimal solutions of matrix variables under two special structure constraints using complex matrix derivatives, including diagonal structure constraints and constant modulus constraints, both of which are closely related to the state-of-the-art wireless applications. Specifically, for diagonal structure constraints mostly considered in the uplink multi-user single-input multiple-output (MU-SIMO) system and the amplitude-adjustable intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, the capacity maximization problem, the mean-squared error (MSE) minimization problem and their variants are rigorously investigated. By leveraging complex matrix derivatives, the optimal solutions of these problems are directly obtained in closed forms. Nevertheless, for constant modulus constraints with the intrinsic nature of element-wise decomposability, which are often seen in the hybrid analog-digital MIMO system and the fully-passive IRS-aided MIMO system, we firstly explore inherent structures of the element-wise phase derivatives associated with different optimization problems. Then, we propose a novel alternating optimization (AO) algorithm with the aid of several arbitrary feasible solutions, which avoids the complicated matrix inversion and matrix factorization involved in conventional element-wise iterative algorithms. Numerical simulations reveal that the proposed algorithm can dramatically reduce the computational complexity without loss of system performance.
DesignGPT: Multi-Agent Collaboration in Design
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Generative AI faces many challenges when entering the product design workflow, such as interface usability and interaction patterns. Therefore, based on design thinking and design process, we developed the DesignGPT multi-agent collaboration framework, which uses artificial intelligence agents to simulate the roles of different positions in the design company and allows human designers to collaborate with them in natural language. Experimental results show that compared with separate AI tools, DesignGPT improves the performance of designers, highlighting the potential of applying multi-agent systems that integrate design domain knowledge to product scheme design.
Predicting urban tree cover from incomplete point labels and limited background information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Trees inside cities are important for the urban microclimate, contributing positively to the physical and mental health of the urban dwellers. Despite their importance, often only limited information about city trees is available. Therefore in this paper, we propose a method for mapping urban trees in high-resolution aerial imagery using limited datasets and deep learning. Deep learning has become best-practice for this task, however, existing approaches rely on large and accurately labelled training datasets, which can be difficult and expensive to obtain. However, often noisy and incomplete data may be available that can be combined and utilized to solve more difficult tasks than those datasets were intended for. This paper studies how to combine accurate point labels of urban trees along streets with crowd-sourced annotations from an open geographic database to delineate city trees in remote sensing images, a task which is challenging even for humans. To that end, we perform semantic segmentation of very high resolution aerial imagery using a fully convolutional neural network. The main challenge is that our segmentation maps are sparsely annotated and incomplete. Small areas around the point labels of the street trees coming from official and crowd-sourced data are marked as foreground class. Crowd-sourced annotations of streets, buildings, etc. define the background class. Since the tree data is incomplete, we introduce a masking to avoid class confusion. Our experiments in Hamburg, Germany, showed that the system is able to produce tree cover maps, not limited to trees along streets, without providing tree delineations. We evaluated the method on manually labelled trees and show that performance drastically deteriorates if the open geographic database is not used.
Machine learning-based malware detection for IoT devices using control-flow data
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Embedded devices are specialised devices designed for one or only a few purposes. They are often part of a larger system, through wired or wireless connection. Those embedded devices that are connected to other computers or embedded systems through the Internet are called Internet of Things (IoT for short) devices. With their widespread usage and their insufficient protection, these devices are increasingly becoming the target of malware attacks. Companies often cut corners to save manufacturing costs or misconfigure when producing these devices. This can be lack of software updates, ports left open or security defects by design. Although these devices may not be as powerful as a regular computer, their large number makes them suitable candidates for botnets. Other types of IoT devices can even cause health problems since there are even pacemakers connected to the Internet. This means, that without sufficient defence, even directed assaults are possible against people. The goal of this thesis project is to provide better security for these devices with the help of machine learning algorithms and reverse engineering tools. Specifically, I study the applicability of control-flow related data of executables for malware detection. I present a malware detection method with two phases. The first phase extracts control-flow related data using static binary analysis. The second phase classifies binary executables as either malicious or benign using a neural network model. I train the model using a dataset of malicious and benign ARM applications.
Enabling Mobility-Oriented JCAS in 6G Networks: An Architecture Proposal
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Sensing plays a crucial role in autonomous and assisted vehicular driving, as well as in the operation of autonomous drones. The traditional segregation of communication and onboard sensing systems in mobility applications is due to be merged using Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS) in the development of the 6G mobile radio standard. The integration of JCAS functions into the future road traffic landscape introduces novel challenges for the design of the 6G system architecture. Special emphasis will be placed on facilitating direct communication between road users and aerial drones. In various mobility scenarios, diverse levels of integration will be explored, ranging from leveraging communication capabilities to coordinate different radars to achieving deep integration through a unified waveform. In this paper, we have identified use cases and derive five higher-level Tech Cases (TCs). Technical and functional requirements for the 6G system architecture for a device-oriented JCAS approach will be extracted from the TCs and used to conceptualize the architectural views.
A novel transformer-based approach for soil temperature prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Soil temperature is one of the most significant parameters that plays a crucial role in glacier energy, dynamics of mass balance, processes of surface hydrological, coaction of glacier-atmosphere, nutrient cycling, ecological stability, the management of soil, water, and field crop. In this work, we introduce a novel approach using transformer models for the purpose of forecasting soil temperature prediction. To the best of our knowledge, the usage of transformer models in this work is the very first attempt to predict soil temperature. Experiments are carried out using six different FLUXNET stations by modeling them with five different transformer models, namely, Vanilla Transformer, Informer, Autoformer, Reformer, and ETSformer. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, experiment results are compared with both deep learning approaches and literature studies. Experiment results show that the utilization of transformer models ensures a significant contribution to the literature, thence determining the new state-of-the-art.
Self-orthogonal codes from $p$-divisible codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Self-orthogonal codes are an important subclass of linear codes which have nice applications in quantum codes and lattices. It is known that a binary linear code is self-orthogonal if its every codeword has weight divisible by four, and a ternary linear code is self-orthogonal if and only if its every codeword has weight divisible by three. It remains open for a long time to establish the relationship between the self-orthogonality of a general $q$-ary linear code and the divisibility of its weights, where $q=p^m$ for a prime $p$. In this paper, we mainly prove that any $p$-divisible code containing the all-1 vector over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ is self-orthogonal for odd prime $p$, which solves this open problem under certain conditions. Thanks to this result, we characterize that any projective two-weight code containing the all-1 codeword over $\mathbb{F}_q$ is self-orthogonal. Furthermore, by the extending and augmentation techniques, we construct six new families of self-orthogonal divisible codes from known cyclic codes. Finally, we construct two more families of self-orthogonal divisible codes with locality 2 which have nice application in distributed storage systems.
Web News Timeline Generation with Extended Task Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The creation of news timeline is essential for a comprehensive and contextual understanding of events as they unfold over time. This approach aids in discerning patterns and trends that might be obscured when news is viewed in isolation. By organizing news in a chronological sequence, it becomes easier to track the development of stories, understand the interrelation of events, and grasp the broader implications of news items. This is particularly helpful in sectors like finance and insurance, where timely understanding of the event development-ranging from extreme weather to political upheavals and health crises-is indispensable for effective risk management. While traditional natural language processing (NLP) techniques have had some success, they often fail to capture the news with nuanced relevance that are readily apparent to domain experts, hindering broader industry integration. The advance of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a renewed opportunity to tackle this challenge. However, direct prompting LLMs for this task is often ineffective. Our study investigates the application of an extended task prompting technique to assess past news relevance. We demonstrate that enhancing conventional prompts with additional tasks boosts their effectiveness on various news dataset, rendering news timeline generation practical for professional use. This work has been deployed as a publicly accessible browser extension which is adopted within our network.
MGCT: Mutual-Guided Cross-Modality Transformer for Survival Outcome Prediction using Integrative Histopathology-Genomic Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The rapidly emerging field of deep learning-based computational pathology has shown promising results in utilizing whole slide images (WSIs) to objectively prognosticate cancer patients. However, most prognostic methods are currently limited to either histopathology or genomics alone, which inevitably reduces their potential to accurately predict patient prognosis. Whereas integrating WSIs and genomic features presents three main challenges: (1) the enormous heterogeneity of gigapixel WSIs which can reach sizes as large as 150,000x150,000 pixels; (2) the absence of a spatially corresponding relationship between histopathology images and genomic molecular data; and (3) the existing early, late, and intermediate multimodal feature fusion strategies struggle to capture the explicit interactions between WSIs and genomics. To ameliorate these issues, we propose the Mutual-Guided Cross-Modality Transformer (MGCT), a weakly-supervised, attention-based multimodal learning framework that can combine histology features and genomic features to model the genotype-phenotype interactions within the tumor microenvironment. To validate the effectiveness of MGCT, we conduct experiments using nearly 3,600 gigapixel WSIs across five different cancer types sourced from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Extensive experimental results consistently emphasize that MGCT outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
Towards Robust Text Retrieval with Progressive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Retrieval augmentation has become an effective solution to empower large language models (LLMs) with external and verified knowledge sources from the database, which overcomes the limitations and hallucinations of LLMs in handling up-to-date and domain-specific information. However, existing embedding models for text retrieval usually have three non-negligible limitations. First, the number and diversity of samples in a batch are too restricted to supervise the modeling of textual nuances at scale. Second, the high proportional noise are detrimental to the semantic correctness and consistency of embeddings. Third, the equal treatment to easy and difficult samples would cause sub-optimum convergence of embeddings with poorer generalization. In this paper, we propose the PEG, a progressively learned embeddings for robust text retrieval. Specifically, we increase the training in-batch negative samples to 80,000, and for each query, we extracted five hard negatives. Concurrently, we incorporated a progressive learning mechanism, enabling the model to dynamically modulate its attention to the samples throughout the entire training process. Additionally, PEG is trained on more than 100 million data, encompassing a wide range of domains (e.g., finance, medicine, and tourism) and covering various tasks (e.g., question-answering, machine reading comprehension, and similarity matching). Extensive experiments conducted on C-MTEB and DuReader demonstrate that PEG surpasses state-of-the-art embeddings in retrieving true positives, highlighting its significant potential for applications in LLMs. Our model is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/TownsWu/PEG.
Unveiling the Power of Self-Attention for Shipping Cost Prediction: The Rate Card Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Amazon ships billions of packages to its customers annually within the United States. Shipping cost of these packages are used on the day of shipping (day 0) to estimate profitability of sales. Downstream systems utilize these days 0 profitability estimates to make financial decisions, such as pricing strategies and delisting loss-making products. However, obtaining accurate shipping cost estimates on day 0 is complex for reasons like delay in carrier invoicing or fixed cost components getting recorded at monthly cadence. Inaccurate shipping cost estimates can lead to bad decision, such as pricing items too low or high, or promoting the wrong product to the customers. Current solutions for estimating shipping costs on day 0 rely on tree-based models that require extensive manual engineering efforts. In this study, we propose a novel architecture called the Rate Card Transformer (RCT) that uses self-attention to encode all package shipping information such as package attributes, carrier information and route plan. Unlike other transformer-based tabular models, RCT has the ability to encode a variable list of one-to-many relations of a shipment, allowing it to capture more information about a shipment. For example, RCT can encode properties of all products in a package. Our results demonstrate that cost predictions made by the RCT have 28.82% less error compared to tree-based GBDT model. Moreover, the RCT outperforms the state-of-the-art transformer-based tabular model, FTTransformer, by 6.08%. We also illustrate that the RCT learns a generalized manifold of the rate card that can improve the performance of tree-based models.
Clarity ChatGPT: An Interactive and Adaptive Processing System for Image Restoration and Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The generalization capability of existing image restoration and enhancement (IRE) methods is constrained by the limited pre-trained datasets, making it difficult to handle agnostic inputs such as different degradation levels and scenarios beyond their design scopes. Moreover, they are not equipped with interactive mechanisms to consider user preferences or feedback, and their end-to-end settings cannot provide users with more choices. Faced with the above-mentioned IRE method's limited performance and insufficient interactivity, we try to solve it from the engineering and system framework levels. Specifically, we propose Clarity ChatGPT-a transformative system that combines the conversational intelligence of ChatGPT with multiple IRE methods. Clarity ChatGPT can automatically detect image degradation types and select appropriate IRE methods to restore images, or iteratively generate satisfactory results based on user feedback. Its innovative features include a CLIP-powered detector for accurate degradation classification, no-reference image quality evaluation for performance evaluation, region-specific processing for precise enhancements, and advanced fusion techniques for optimal restoration results. Clarity ChatGPT marks a significant advancement in integrating language and vision, enhancing image-text interactions, and providing a robust, high-performance IRE solution. Our case studies demonstrate that Clarity ChatGPT effectively improves the generalization and interaction capabilities in the IRE, and also fills the gap in the low-level domain of the existing vision-language model.