OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Eery Space: Facilitating Virtual Meetings Through Remote Proxemics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Virtual meetings have become increasingly common with modern video-conference and collaborative software. While they allow obvious savings in time and resources, current technologies add unproductive layers of protocol to the flow of communication between participants, rendering the interactions far from seamless. In this work we introduce Remote Proxemics, an extension of proxemics aimed at bringing the syntax of co-located proximal interactions to virtual meetings. We propose Eery Space, a shared virtual locus that results from merging multiple remote areas, where meeting participants' are located side-by-side as if they shared the same physical location. Eery Space promotes collaborative content creation and seamless mediation of communication channels based on virtual proximity. Results from user evaluation suggest that our approach is effective at enhancing mutual awareness between participants and sufficient to initiate proximal exchanges regardless of their geolocation, while promoting smooth interactions between local and remote people alike. These results happen even in the absence of visual avatars and other social devices such as eye contact, which are largely the focus of previous approaches.
DS@BioMed at ImageCLEFmedical Caption 2024: Enhanced Attention Mechanisms in Medical Caption Generation through Concept Detection Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Purpose: Our study presents an enhanced approach to medical image caption generation by integrating concept detection into attention mechanisms. Method: This method utilizes sophisticated models to identify critical concepts within medical images, which are then refined and incorporated into the caption generation process. Results: Our concept detection task, which employed the Swin-V2 model, achieved an F1 score of 0.58944 on the validation set and 0.61998 on the private test set, securing the third position. For the caption prediction task, our BEiT+BioBart model, enhanced with concept integration and post-processing techniques, attained a BERTScore of 0.60589 on the validation set and 0.5794 on the private test set, placing ninth. Conclusion: These results underscore the efficacy of concept-aware algorithms in generating precise and contextually appropriate medical descriptions. The findings demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the quality of medical image captions, highlighting its potential to enhance medical image interpretation and documentation, thereby contributing to improved healthcare outcomes.
Structural and Algorithmic Results for Stable Cycles and Partitions in the Roommates Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

In the Stable Roommates problem, we seek a stable matching of the agents into pairs, in which no two agents have an incentive to deviate from their assignment. It is well known that a stable matching is unlikely to exist, but a stable partition always does and provides a succinct certificate for the unsolvability of an instance. Furthermore, apart from being a useful structural tool to study the problem, every stable partition corresponds to a stable half-matching, which has applications, for example, in sports scheduling and time-sharing. We establish new structural results for stable partitions and show how to enumerate all stable partitions and the cycles included in such structures efficiently. We also adapt optimality criteria from stable matchings to stable partitions and give complexity and approximability results for the problems of computing such "fair" and "optimal" stable partitions. Through this research, we contribute to a deeper understanding of stable partitions from a combinatorial point of view, as well as the computational complexity of computing "fair" or "optimal" stable half-matchings in practice, closing the gap between integral and fractional stable matchings and paving the way for further applications of stable partitions to unsolvable instances and computationally hard stable matching problems.
Stein Random Feature Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In large-scale regression problems, random Fourier features (RFFs) have significantly enhanced the computational scalability and flexibility of Gaussian processes (GPs) by defining kernels through their spectral density, from which a finite set of Monte Carlo samples can be used to form an approximate low-rank GP. However, the efficacy of RFFs in kernel approximation and Bayesian kernel learning depends on the ability to tractably sample the kernel spectral measure and the quality of the generated samples. We introduce Stein random features (SRF), leveraging Stein variational gradient descent, which can be used to both generate high-quality RFF samples of known spectral densities as well as flexibly and efficiently approximate traditionally non-analytical spectral measure posteriors. SRFs require only the evaluation of log-probability gradients to perform both kernel approximation and Bayesian kernel learning that results in superior performance over traditional approaches. We empirically validate the effectiveness of SRFs by comparing them to baselines on kernel approximation and well-known GP regression problems.
Towards a Unified Framework of Clustering-based Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) plays a crucial role in identifying abnormal patterns within data without labeled examples, holding significant practical implications across various domains. Although the individual contributions of representation learning and clustering to anomaly detection are well-established, their interdependencies remain under-explored due to the absence of a unified theoretical framework. Consequently, their collective potential to enhance anomaly detection performance remains largely untapped. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic mixture model for anomaly detection to establish a theoretical connection among representation learning, clustering, and anomaly detection. By maximizing a novel anomaly-aware data likelihood, representation learning and clustering can effectively reduce the adverse impact of anomalous data and collaboratively benefit anomaly detection. Meanwhile, a theoretically substantiated anomaly score is naturally derived from this framework. Lastly, drawing inspiration from gravitational analysis in physics, we have devised an improved anomaly score that more effectively harnesses the combined power of representation learning and clustering. Extensive experiments, involving 17 baseline methods across 30 diverse datasets, validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of the proposed method, surpassing state-of-the-art methods.
Conformal Transformation of Kernels: A Geometric Perspective on Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this article we investigate the effects of conformal transformations on kernel functions used in Support Vector Machines. Our focus lies in the task of text document categorization, which involves assigning each document to a particular category. We introduce a new Gaussian Cosine kernel alongside two conformal transformations. Building upon previous studies that demonstrated the efficacy of conformal transformations in increasing class separability on synthetic and low-dimensional datasets, we extend this analysis to the high-dimensional domain of text data. Our experiments, conducted on the Reuters dataset on two types of binary classification tasks, compare the performance of Linear, Gaussian, and Gaussian Cosine kernels against their conformally transformed counterparts. The findings indicate that conformal transformations can significantly improve kernel performance, particularly for sub-optimal kernels. Specifically, improvements were observed in 60% of the tested scenarios for the Linear kernel, 84% for the Gaussian kernel, and 80% for the Gaussian Cosine kernel. In light of these findings, it becomes clear that conformal transformations play a pivotal role in enhancing kernel performance, offering substantial benefits.
Empirical influence functions to understand the logic of fine-tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding the process of learning in neural networks is crucial for improving their performance and interpreting their behavior. This can be approximately understood by asking how a model's output is influenced when we fine-tune on a new training sample. There are desiderata for such influences, such as decreasing influence with semantic distance, sparseness, noise invariance, transitive causality, and logical consistency. Here we use the empirical influence measured using fine-tuning to demonstrate how individual training samples affect outputs. We show that these desiderata are violated for both for simple convolutional networks and for a modern LLM. We also illustrate how prompting can partially rescue this failure. Our paper presents an efficient and practical way of quantifying how well neural networks learn from fine-tuning stimuli. Our results suggest that popular models cannot generalize or perform logic in the way they appear to.
SPAGHETTI: Open-Domain Question Answering from Heterogeneous Data Sources with Retrieval and Semantic Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce SPAGHETTI: Semantic Parsing Augmented Generation for Hybrid English information from Text Tables and Infoboxes, a hybrid question-answering (QA) pipeline that utilizes information from heterogeneous knowledge sources, including knowledge base, text, tables, and infoboxes. Our LLM-augmented approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Compmix dataset, the most comprehensive heterogeneous open-domain QA dataset, with 56.5% exact match (EM) rate. More importantly, manual analysis on a sample of the dataset suggests that SPAGHETTI is more than 90% accurate, indicating that EM is no longer suitable for assessing the capabilities of QA systems today.
CMDBench: A Benchmark for Coarse-to-fine Multimodal Data Discovery in Compound AI Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Compound AI systems (CASs) that employ LLMs as agents to accomplish knowledge-intensive tasks via interactions with tools and data retrievers have garnered significant interest within database and AI communities. While these systems have the potential to supplement typical analysis workflows of data analysts in enterprise data platforms, unfortunately, CASs are subject to the same data discovery challenges that analysts have encountered over the years -- silos of multimodal data sources, created across teams and departments within an organization, make it difficult to identify appropriate data sources for accomplishing the task at hand. Existing data discovery benchmarks do not model such multimodality and multiplicity of data sources. Moreover, benchmarks of CASs prioritize only evaluating end-to-end task performance. To catalyze research on evaluating the data discovery performance of multimodal data retrievers in CASs within a real-world setting, we propose CMDBench, a benchmark modeling the complexity of enterprise data platforms. We adapt existing datasets and benchmarks in open-domain -- from question answering and complex reasoning tasks to natural language querying over structured data -- to evaluate coarse- and fine-grained data discovery and task execution performance. Our experiments reveal the impact of data retriever design on downstream task performance -- a 46% drop in task accuracy on average -- across various modalities, data sources, and task difficulty. The results indicate the need to develop optimization strategies to identify appropriate LLM agents and retrievers for efficient execution of CASs over enterprise data.
Semi-supervised Video Semantic Segmentation Using Unreliable Pseudo Labels for PVUW2024
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Pixel-level Scene Understanding is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision, which aims at recognizing object classes, masks and semantics of each pixel in the given image. Compared with image scene parsing, video scene parsing introduces temporal information, which can effectively improve the consistency and accuracy of prediction,because the real-world is actually video-based rather than a static state. In this paper, we adopt semi-supervised video semantic segmentation method based on unreliable pseudo labels. Then, We ensemble the teacher network model with the student network model to generate pseudo labels and retrain the student network. Our method achieves the mIoU scores of 63.71% and 67.83% on development test and final test respectively. Finally, we obtain the 1st place in the Video Scene Parsing in the Wild Challenge at CVPR 2024.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for the oil and gas industry: a review
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is set to profoundly impact the oil and gas industry by introducing unprecedented efficiencies and innovations. This paper explores AGI's foundational principles and its transformative applications, particularly focusing on the advancements brought about by large language models (LLMs) and extensive computer vision systems in the upstream sectors of the industry. The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already begun reshaping the oil and gas landscape, offering enhancements in production optimization, downtime reduction, safety improvements, and advancements in exploration and drilling techniques. These technologies streamline logistics, minimize maintenance costs, automate monotonous tasks, refine decision-making processes, foster team collaboration, and amplify profitability through error reduction and actionable insights extraction. Despite these advancements, the deployment of AI technologies faces challenges, including the necessity for skilled professionals for implementation and the limitations of model training on constrained datasets, which affects the models' adaptability across different contexts. The advent of generative AI, exemplified by innovations like ChatGPT and the Segment Anything Model (SAM), heralds a new era of high-density innovation. These developments highlight a shift towards natural language interfaces and domain-knowledge-driven AI, promising more accessible and tailored solutions for the oil and gas industry. This review articulates the vast potential AGI holds for tackling complex operational challenges within the upstream oil and gas industry, requiring near-human levels of intelligence. We discussed the promising applications, the hurdles of large-scale AGI model deployment, and the necessity for domain-specific knowledge in maximizing the benefits of these technologies.
Making Recommender Systems More Knowledgeable: A Framework to Incorporate Side Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Session-based recommender systems typically focus on using only the triplet (user_id, timestamp, item_id) to make predictions of users' next actions. In this paper, we aim to utilize side information to help recommender systems catch patterns and signals otherwise undetectable. Specifically, we propose a general framework for incorporating item-specific side information into the recommender system to enhance its performance without much modification on the original model architecture. Experimental results on several models and datasets prove that with side information, our recommender system outperforms state-of-the-art models by a considerable margin and converges much faster. Additionally, we propose a new type of loss to regularize the attention mechanism used by recommender systems and evaluate its influence on model performance. Furthermore, through analysis, we put forward a few insights on potential further improvements.
Model-Driven Security Analysis of Self-Sovereign Identity Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Best practices of self-sovereign identity (SSI) are being intensively explored in academia and industry. Reusable solutions obtained from best practices are generalized as architectural patterns for systematic analysis and design reference, which significantly boosts productivity and increases the dependability of future implementations. For security-sensitive projects, architects make architectural decisions with careful consideration of security issues and solutions based on formal analysis and experiment results. In this paper, we propose a model-driven security analysis framework for analyzing architectural patterns of SSI systems with respect to a threat model built on our investigation of real-world security concerns. Our framework mechanizes a modeling language to formalize patterns and threats with security properties in temporal logic and automatically generates programs for verification via model checking. Besides, we present typical vulnerable patterns verified by SecureSSI, a standalone integrated development environment, integrating commonly used pattern and attacker models to practicalize our framework.
Ultrasound Report Generation with Cross-Modality Feature Alignment via Unsupervised Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic report generation has arisen as a significant research area in computer-aided diagnosis, aiming to alleviate the burden on clinicians by generating reports automatically based on medical images. In this work, we propose a novel framework for automatic ultrasound report generation, leveraging a combination of unsupervised and supervised learning methods to aid the report generation process. Our framework incorporates unsupervised learning methods to extract potential knowledge from ultrasound text reports, serving as the prior information to guide the model in aligning visual and textual features, thereby addressing the challenge of feature discrepancy. Additionally, we design a global semantic comparison mechanism to enhance the performance of generating more comprehensive and accurate medical reports. To enable the implementation of ultrasound report generation, we constructed three large-scale ultrasound image-text datasets from different organs for training and validation purposes. Extensive evaluations with other state-of-the-art approaches exhibit its superior performance across all three datasets. Code and dataset are valuable at this link.
Presence or Absence: Are Unknown Word Usages in Dictionaries?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

There has been a surge of interest in computational modeling of semantic change. The foci of previous works are on detecting and interpreting word senses gained over time; however, it remains unclear whether the gained senses are covered by dictionaries. In this work, we aim to fill this research gap by comparing detected word senses with dictionary sense inventories in order to bridge between the communities of lexical semantic change detection and lexicography. We evaluate our system in the AXOLOTL-24 shared task for Finnish, Russian and German languages \cite{fedorova-etal-2024-axolotl}. Our system is fully unsupervised. It leverages a graph-based clustering approach to predict mappings between unknown word usages and dictionary entries for Subtask 1, and generates dictionary-like definitions for those novel word usages through the state-of-the-art Large Language Models such as GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 for Subtask 2. In Subtask 1, our system outperforms the baseline system by a large margin, and it offers interpretability for the mapping results by distinguishing between matched and unmatched (novel) word usages through our graph-based clustering approach. Our system ranks first in Finnish and German, and ranks second in Russian on the Subtask 2 test-phase leaderboard. These results show the potential of our system in managing dictionary entries, particularly for updating dictionaries to include novel sense entries. Our code and data are made publicly available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/xiaohemaikoo/axolotl24-ABDN-NLP}}.
Lay-A-Scene: Personalized 3D Object Arrangement Using Text-to-Image Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generating 3D visual scenes is at the forefront of visual generative AI, but current 3D generation techniques struggle with generating scenes with multiple high-resolution objects. Here we introduce Lay-A-Scene, which solves the task of Open-set 3D Object Arrangement, effectively arranging unseen objects. Given a set of 3D objects, the task is to find a plausible arrangement of these objects in a scene. We address this task by leveraging pre-trained text-to-image models. We personalize the model and explain how to generate images of a scene that contains multiple predefined objects without neglecting any of them. Then, we describe how to infer the 3D poses and arrangement of objects from a 2D generated image by finding a consistent projection of objects onto the 2D scene. We evaluate the quality of Lay-A-Scene using 3D objects from Objaverse and human raters and find that it often generates coherent and feasible 3D object arrangements.
Maximum-Entropy Regularized Decision Transformer with Reward Relabelling for Dynamic Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning-based recommender systems have recently gained popularity. However, due to the typical limitations of simulation environments (e.g., data inefficiency), most of the work cannot be broadly applied in all domains. To counter these challenges, recent advancements have leveraged offline reinforcement learning methods, notable for their data-driven approach utilizing offline datasets. A prominent example of this is the Decision Transformer. Despite its popularity, the Decision Transformer approach has inherent drawbacks, particularly evident in recommendation methods based on it. This paper identifies two key shortcomings in existing Decision Transformer-based methods: a lack of stitching capability and limited effectiveness in online adoption. In response, we introduce a novel methodology named Max-Entropy enhanced Decision Transformer with Reward Relabeling for Offline RLRS (EDT4Rec). Our approach begins with a max entropy perspective, leading to the development of a max entropy enhanced exploration strategy. This strategy is designed to facilitate more effective exploration in online environments. Additionally, to augment the model's capability to stitch sub-optimal trajectories, we incorporate a unique reward relabeling technique. To validate the effectiveness and superiority of EDT4Rec, we have conducted comprehensive experiments across six real-world offline datasets and in an online simulator.
Evaluating Distributed Representations for Multi-Level Lexical Semantics: A Research Proposal
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Modern neural networks (NNs), trained on extensive raw sentence data, construct distributed representations by compressing individual words into dense, continuous, high-dimensional vectors. These representations are expected to capture multi-level lexical meaning. In this thesis, our objective is to examine the efficacy of distributed representations from NNs in encoding lexical meaning. Initially, we identify and formalize three levels of lexical semantics: \textit{local}, \textit{global}, and \textit{mixed} levels. Then, for each level, we evaluate language models by collecting or constructing multilingual datasets, leveraging various language models, and employing linguistic analysis theories. This thesis builds a bridge between computational models and lexical semantics, aiming to complement each other.