OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An upper bound of the mutation probability in the genetic algorithm for general 0-1 knapsack problem
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

As an important part of genetic algorithms (GAs), mutation operators is widely used in evolutionary algorithms to solve $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problems because it can increase the population diversity of individual. Due to limitations in mathematical tools, the mutation probability of the mutation operator is primarily empirically set in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel reduction method for the 0-1 knapsack problem(0-1 KP) and an improved mutation operator (IMO) based on the assumption $\mathcal{NP}\neq\mathcal{P}$, along with the utilization of linear relaxation techniques and a recent result by Dey et al. (Math. Prog., pp 569-587, 2022). We employ this method to calculate an upper bound of the mutation probability in general instances of the 0-1 KP, and construct an instance where the mutation probability does not tend towards 0 as the problem size increases. Finally, we prove that the probability of the IMO hitting the optimal solution within only a single iteration in large-scale instances is superior to that of the traditional mutation operator.
CantonMT: Cantonese to English NMT Platform with Fine-Tuned Models Using Synthetic Back-Translation Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for low-resource languages is still a challenging task in front of NLP researchers. In this work, we deploy a standard data augmentation methodology by back-translation to a new language translation direction Cantonese-to-English. We present the models we fine-tuned using the limited amount of real data and the synthetic data we generated using back-translation including OpusMT, NLLB, and mBART. We carried out automatic evaluation using a range of different metrics including lexical-based and embedding-based. Furthermore. we create a user-friendly interface for the models we included in this\textsc{ CantonMT} research project and make it available to facilitate Cantonese-to-English MT research. Researchers can add more models into this platform via our open-source\textsc{ CantonMT} toolkit \url{https://github.com/kenrickkung/CantoneseTranslation}.
3DGS-ReLoc: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Map Representation and Visual ReLocalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel system designed for 3D mapping and visual relocalization using 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our proposed method uses LiDAR and camera data to create accurate and visually plausible representations of the environment. By leveraging LiDAR data to initiate the training of the 3D Gaussian Splatting map, our system constructs maps that are both detailed and geometrically accurate. To mitigate excessive GPU memory usage and facilitate rapid spatial queries, we employ a combination of a 2D voxel map and a KD-tree. This preparation makes our method well-suited for visual localization tasks, enabling efficient identification of correspondences between the query image and the rendered image from the Gaussian Splatting map via normalized cross-correlation (NCC). Additionally, we refine the camera pose of the query image using feature-based matching and the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) technique. The effectiveness, adaptability, and precision of our system are demonstrated through extensive evaluation on the KITTI360 dataset.
Reconstruct before Query: Continual Missing Modality Learning with Decomposed Prompt Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Pre-trained large multi-modal models (LMMs) exploit fine-tuning to adapt diverse user applications. Nevertheless, fine-tuning may face challenges due to deactivated sensors (e.g., cameras turned off for privacy or technical issues), yielding modality-incomplete data and leading to inconsistency in training data and the data for inference. Additionally, continuous training leads to catastrophic forgetting, diluting the knowledge in pre-trained LMMs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel task, Continual Missing Modality Learning (CMML), to investigate how models can generalize when data of certain modalities is missing during continual fine-tuning. Our preliminary benchmarks reveal that existing methods suffer from a significant performance drop in CMML, even with the aid of advanced continual learning techniques. Therefore, we devise a framework termed Reconstruct before Query (RebQ). It decomposes prompts into modality-specific ones and breaks them into components stored in pools accessible via a key-query mechanism, which facilitates ParameterEfficient Fine-Tuning and enhances knowledge transferability for subsequent tasks. Meanwhile, our RebQ leverages extensive multi-modal knowledge from pre-trained LMMs to reconstruct the data of missing modality. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that RebQ effectively reconstructs the missing modality information and retains pre-trained knowledge. Specifically, compared with the baseline, RebQ improves average precision from 20.00 to 50.92 and decreases average forgetting from 75.95 to 8.56. Code and datasets are available on https://github.com/Tree-Shu-Zhao/RebQ.pytorch
Path-GPTOmic: A Balanced Multi-modal Learning Framework for Survival Outcome Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

For predicting cancer survival outcomes, standard approaches in clinical research are often based on two main modalities: pathology images for observing cell morphology features, and genomic (e.g., bulk RNA-seq) for quantifying gene expressions. However, existing pathology-genomic multi-modal algorithms face significant challenges: (1) Valuable biological insights regarding genes and gene-gene interactions are frequently overlooked; (2) one modality often dominates the optimization process, causing inadequate training for the other modality. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-modal ``Path-GPTOmic" framework for cancer survival outcome prediction. First, to extract valuable biological insights, we regulate the embedding space of a foundation model, scGPT, initially trained on single-cell RNA-seq data, making it adaptable for bulk RNA-seq data. Second, to address the imbalance-between-modalities problem, we propose a gradient modulation mechanism tailored to the Cox partial likelihood loss for survival prediction. The contributions of the modalities are dynamically monitored and adjusted during the training process, encouraging that both modalities are sufficiently trained. Evaluated on two TCGA(The Cancer Genome Atlas) datasets, our model achieves substantially improved survival prediction accuracy.
Simulating Wearable Urban Augmented Reality Experiences in VR: Lessons Learnt from Designing Two Future Urban Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally change how people engage with increasingly interactive urban environments. However, many challenges exist in designing and evaluating these new urban AR experiences, such as technical constraints and safety concerns associated with outdoor AR. We contribute to this domain by assessing the use of virtual reality (VR) for simulating wearable urban AR experiences, allowing participants to interact with future AR interfaces in a realistic, safe and controlled setting. This paper describes two wearable urban AR applications (pedestrian navigation and autonomous mobility) simulated in VR. Based on a thematic analysis of interview data collected across the two studies, we found that the VR simulation successfully elicited feedback on the functional benefits of AR concepts and the potential impact of urban contextual factors, such as safety concerns, attentional capacity, and social considerations. At the same time, we highlighted the limitations of this approach in terms of assessing the AR interface's visual quality and providing exhaustive contextual information. The paper concludes with recommendations for simulating wearable urban AR experiences in VR.
Holistic HMI Design for Automated Vehicles: Bridging In-Vehicle and External Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

As the field of automated vehicles (AVs) advances, it has become increasingly critical to develop human-machine interfaces (HMI) for both internal and external communication. Critical dialogue is emerging around the potential necessity for a holistic approach to HMI designs, which promotes the integration of both in-vehicle user and external road user perspectives. This approach aims to create a unified and coherent experience for different stakeholders interacting with AVs. This workshop seeks to bring together designers, engineers, researchers, and other stakeholders to delve into relevant use cases, exploring the potential advantages and challenges of this approach. The insights generated from this workshop aim to inform further design and research in the development of coherent HMIs for AVs, ultimately for more seamless integration of AVs into existing traffic.
Laconic: Streamlined Load Balancers for SmartNICs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Load balancers are pervasively used inside today's clouds to scalably distribute network requests across data center servers. Given the extensive use of load balancers and their associated operating costs, several efforts have focused on improving their efficiency by implementing Layer-4 load-balancing logic within the kernel or using hardware acceleration. This work explores whether the more complex and connection-oriented Layer-7 load-balancing capability can also benefit from hardware acceleration. In particular, we target the offloading of load-balancing capability onto programmable SmartNICs. We fully leverage the cost and energy efficiency of SmartNICs using three key ideas. First, we argue that a full and complex TCP/IP stack is not required for Layer-7 load balancers and instead propose a lightweight forwarding agent on the SmartNIC. Second, we develop connection management data structures with a high degree of concurrency with minimal synchronization when executed on multi-core SmartNICs. Finally, we describe how the load-balancing logic could be accelerated using custom packet-processing accelerators on SmartNICs. We prototype Laconic on two types of SmartNIC hardware, achieving over 150 Gbps throughput using all cores on BlueField-2, while a single SmartNIC core achieves 8.7x higher throughput and comparable latency to Nginx on a single x86 core.
Word Order's Impacts: Insights from Reordering and Generation Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Existing works have studied the impacts of the order of words within natural text. They usually analyze it by destroying the original order of words to create a scrambled sequence, and then comparing the models' performance between the original and scrambled sequences. The experimental results demonstrate marginal drops. Considering this findings, different hypothesis about word order is proposed, including ``the order of words is redundant with lexical semantics'', and ``models do not rely on word order''. In this paper, we revisit the aforementioned hypotheses by adding a order reconstruction perspective, and selecting datasets of different spectrum. Specifically, we first select four different datasets, and then design order reconstruction and continuing generation tasks. Empirical findings support that ChatGPT relies on word order to infer, but cannot support or negate the redundancy relations between word order lexical semantics.
DEE: Dual-stage Explainable Evaluation Method for Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic methods for evaluating machine-generated texts hold significant importance due to the expanding applications of generative systems. Conventional methods tend to grapple with a lack of explainability, issuing a solitary numerical score to signify the assessment outcome. Recent advancements have sought to mitigate this limitation by incorporating large language models (LLMs) to offer more detailed error analyses, yet their applicability remains constrained, particularly in industrial contexts where comprehensive error coverage and swift detection are paramount. To alleviate these challenges, we introduce DEE, a Dual-stage Explainable Evaluation method for estimating the quality of text generation. Built upon Llama 2, DEE follows a dual-stage principle guided by stage-specific instructions to perform efficient identification of errors in generated texts in the initial stage and subsequently delves into providing comprehensive diagnostic reports in the second stage. DEE is fine-tuned on our elaborately assembled dataset AntEval, which encompasses 15K examples from 4 real-world applications of Alipay that employ generative systems. The dataset concerns newly emerged issues like hallucination and toxicity, thereby broadening the scope of DEE's evaluation criteria. Experimental results affirm that DEE's superiority over existing evaluation methods, achieving significant improvements in both human correlation as well as efficiency.
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

To meet the requirements of real-world applications, it is essential to control generations of large language models (LLMs). Prior research has tried to introduce reinforcement learning (RL) into controllable text generation while most existing methods suffer from overfitting issues (finetuning-based methods) or semantic collapse (post-processing methods). However, current RL methods are generally guided by coarse-grained (sentence/paragraph-level) feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. To tackle that, we propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm named TOLE which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation, and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise" paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm.Furthermore, TOLE can be flexibly extended to multiple constraints with little computational expense. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve superior performance on both single-attribute and multi-attribute control tasks. We have released our codes at https://github.com/WindyLee0822/CTG
Advancing Neuromorphic Computing: Mixed-Signal Design Techniques Leveraging Brain Code Units and Fundamental Code Units
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a groundbreaking digital neuromorphic architecture that innovatively integrates Brain Code Unit (BCU) and Fundamental Code Unit (FCU) using mixedsignal design methodologies. Leveraging open-source datasets and the latest advances in materials science, our research focuses on enhancing the computational efficiency, accuracy, and adaptability of neuromorphic systems. The core of our approach lies in harmonizing the precision and scalability of digital systems with the robustness and energy efficiency of analog processing. Through experimentation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our system across various metrics. The BCU achieved an accuracy of 88.0% and a power efficiency of 20.0 GOP/s/W, while the FCU recorded an accuracy of 86.5% and a power efficiency of 18.5 GOP/s/W. Our mixed-signal design approach significantly improved latency and throughput, achieving a latency as low as 0.75 ms and throughput up to 213 TOP/s. These results firmly establish the potential of our architecture in neuromorphic computing, providing a solid foundation for future developments in this domain. Our study underscores the feasibility of mixedsignal neuromorphic systems and their promise in advancing the field, particularly in applications requiring high efficiency and adaptability
LogicalDefender: Discovering, Extracting, and Utilizing Common-Sense Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large text-to-image models have achieved astonishing performance in synthesizing diverse and high-quality images guided by texts. With detail-oriented conditioning control, even finer-grained spatial control can be achieved. However, some generated images still appear unreasonable, even with plentiful object features and a harmonious style. In this paper, we delve into the underlying causes and find that deep-level logical information, serving as common-sense knowledge, plays a significant role in understanding and processing images. Nonetheless, almost all models have neglected the importance of logical relations in images, resulting in poor performance in this aspect. Following this observation, we propose LogicalDefender, which combines images with the logical knowledge already summarized by humans in text. This encourages models to learn logical knowledge faster and better, and concurrently, extracts the widely applicable logical knowledge from both images and human knowledge. Experiments show that our model has achieved better logical performance, and the extracted logical knowledge can be effectively applied to other scenarios.
Augment Before Copy-Paste: Data and Memory Efficiency-Oriented Instance Segmentation Framework for Sport-scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Instance segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision with broad applications across various industries. In recent years, with the proliferation of deep learning and artificial intelligence applications, how to train effective models with limited data has become a pressing issue for both academia and industry. In the Visual Inductive Priors challenge (VIPriors2023), participants must train a model capable of precisely locating individuals on a basketball court, all while working with limited data and without the use of transfer learning or pre-trained models. We propose Memory effIciency inStance Segmentation framework based on visual inductive prior flow propagation that effectively incorporates inherent prior information from the dataset into both the data preprocessing and data augmentation stages, as well as the inference phase. Our team (ACVLAB) experiments demonstrate that our model achieves promising performance (0.509 AP@0.50:0.95) even under limited data and memory constraints.
Just Add $100 More: Augmenting NeRF-based Pseudo-LiDAR Point Cloud for Resolving Class-imbalance Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Typical LiDAR-based 3D object detection models are trained in a supervised manner with real-world data collection, which is often imbalanced over classes (or long-tailed). To deal with it, augmenting minority-class examples by sampling ground truth (GT) LiDAR points from a database and pasting them into a scene of interest is often used, but challenges still remain: inflexibility in locating GT samples and limited sample diversity. In this work, we propose to leverage pseudo-LiDAR point clouds generated (at a low cost) from videos capturing a surround view of miniatures or real-world objects of minor classes. Our method, called Pseudo Ground Truth Augmentation (PGT-Aug), consists of three main steps: (i) volumetric 3D instance reconstruction using a 2D-to-3D view synthesis model, (ii) object-level domain alignment with LiDAR intensity estimation and (iii) a hybrid context-aware placement method from ground and map information. We demonstrate the superiority and generality of our method through performance improvements in extensive experiments conducted on three popular benchmarks, i.e., nuScenes, KITTI, and Lyft, especially for the datasets with large domain gaps captured by different LiDAR configurations. Our code and data will be publicly available upon publication.
QEAN: Quaternion-Enhanced Attention Network for Visual Dance Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

The study of music-generated dance is a novel and challenging Image generation task. It aims to input a piece of music and seed motions, then generate natural dance movements for the subsequent music. Transformer-based methods face challenges in time series prediction tasks related to human movements and music due to their struggle in capturing the nonlinear relationship and temporal aspects. This can lead to issues like joint deformation, role deviation, floating, and inconsistencies in dance movements generated in response to the music. In this paper, we propose a Quaternion-Enhanced Attention Network (QEAN) for visual dance synthesis from a quaternion perspective, which consists of a Spin Position Embedding (SPE) module and a Quaternion Rotary Attention (QRA) module. First, SPE embeds position information into self-attention in a rotational manner, leading to better learning of features of movement sequences and audio sequences, and improved understanding of the connection between music and dance. Second, QRA represents and fuses 3D motion features and audio features in the form of a series of quaternions, enabling the model to better learn the temporal coordination of music and dance under the complex temporal cycle conditions of dance generation. Finally, we conducted experiments on the dataset AIST++, and the results show that our approach achieves better and more robust performance in generating accurate, high-quality dance movements. Our source code and dataset can be available from https://github.com/MarasyZZ/QEAN and https://google.github.io/aistplusplus_dataset respectively.
Personalized 3D Human Pose and Shape Refinement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, regression-based methods have dominated the field of 3D human pose and shape estimation. Despite their promising results, a common issue is the misalignment between predictions and image observations, often caused by minor joint rotation errors that accumulate along the kinematic chain. To address this issue, we propose to construct dense correspondences between initial human model estimates and the corresponding images that can be used to refine the initial predictions. To this end, we utilize renderings of the 3D models to predict per-pixel 2D displacements between the synthetic renderings and the RGB images. This allows us to effectively integrate and exploit appearance information of the persons. Our per-pixel displacements can be efficiently transformed to per-visible-vertex displacements and then used for 3D model refinement by minimizing a reprojection loss. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we refine the initial 3D human mesh predictions of multiple models using different refinement procedures on 3DPW and RICH. We show that our approach not only consistently leads to better image-model alignment, but also to improved 3D accuracy.
Gridless 2D Recovery of Lines using the Sliding Frank-Wolfe Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present a new approach leveraging the Sliding Frank--Wolfe algorithm to address the challenge of line recovery in degraded images. Building upon advances in conditional gradient methods for sparse inverse problems with differentiable measurement models, we propose two distinct models tailored for line detection tasks within the realm of blurred line deconvolution and ridge detection of linear chirps in spectrogram images.
Normalized Validity Scores for DNNs in Regression based Eye Feature Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We propose an improvement to the landmark validity loss. Landmark detection is widely used in head pose estimation, eyelid shape extraction, as well as pupil and iris segmentation. There are numerous additional applications where landmark detection is used to estimate the shape of complex objects. One part of this process is the accurate and fine-grained detection of the shape. The other part is the validity or inaccuracy per landmark, which can be used to detect unreliable areas, where the shape possibly does not fit, and to improve the accuracy of the entire shape extraction by excluding inaccurate landmarks. We propose a normalization in the loss formulation, which improves the accuracy of the entire approach due to the numerical balance of the normalized inaccuracy. In addition, we propose a margin for the inaccuracy to reduce the impact of gradients, which are produced by negligible errors close to the ground truth.