OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Data exploitation: multi-task learning of object detection and semantic segmentation on partially annotated data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-task partially annotated data where each data point is annotated for only a single task are potentially helpful for data scarcity if a network can leverage the inter-task relationship. In this paper, we study the joint learning of object detection and semantic segmentation, the two most popular vision problems, from multi-task data with partial annotations. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate each task performance and explore their complementarity when a multi-task network cannot optimize both tasks simultaneously. We propose employing knowledge distillation to leverage joint-task optimization. The experimental results show favorable results for multi-task learning and knowledge distillation over single-task learning and even full supervision scenario. All code and data splits are available at https://github.com/lhoangan/multas
Analyzing Near-Infrared Hyperspectral Imaging for Protein Content Regression and Grain Variety Classification Using Bulk References and Varying Grain-to-Background Ratios
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Based on previous work, we assess the use of NIR-HSI images for calibrating models on two datasets, focusing on protein content regression and grain variety classification. Limited reference data for protein content is expanded by subsampling and associating it with the bulk sample. However, this method introduces significant biases due to skewed leptokurtic prediction distributions, affecting both PLS-R and deep CNN models. We propose adjustments to mitigate these biases, improving mean protein reference predictions. Additionally, we investigate the impact of grain-to-background ratios on both tasks. Higher ratios yield more accurate predictions, but including lower-ratio images in calibration enhances model robustness for such scenarios.
Reinforcement Learning Fine-tuning of Language Models is Biased Towards More Extractable Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Many capable large language models (LLMs) are developed via self-supervised pre-training followed by a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning phase, often based on human or AI feedback. During this stage, models may be guided by their inductive biases to rely on simpler features which may be easier to extract, at a cost to robustness and generalisation. We investigate whether principles governing inductive biases in the supervised fine-tuning of LLMs also apply when the fine-tuning process uses reinforcement learning. Following Lovering et al (2021), we test two hypotheses: that features more $\textit{extractable}$ after pre-training are more likely to be utilised by the final policy, and that the evidence for/against a feature predicts whether it will be utilised. Through controlled experiments on synthetic and natural language tasks, we find statistically significant correlations which constitute strong evidence for these hypotheses.
Can CLIP Help Sound Source Localization?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Large-scale pre-trained image-text models demonstrate remarkable versatility across diverse tasks, benefiting from their robust representational capabilities and effective multimodal alignment. We extend the application of these models, specifically CLIP, to the domain of sound source localization. Unlike conventional approaches, we employ the pre-trained CLIP model without explicit text input, relying solely on the audio-visual correspondence. To this end, we introduce a framework that translates audio signals into tokens compatible with CLIP's text encoder, yielding audio-driven embeddings. By directly using these embeddings, our method generates audio-grounded masks for the provided audio, extracts audio-grounded image features from the highlighted regions, and aligns them with the audio-driven embeddings using the audio-visual correspondence objective. Our findings suggest that utilizing pre-trained image-text models enable our model to generate more complete and compact localization maps for the sounding objects. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin.
A Lightweight and Secure PUF-Based Authentication and Key-exchange Protocol for IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The Internet of Things (IoT) has improved people's lives by seamlessly integrating into many facets of modern life and facilitating information sharing across platforms. Device Authentication and Key exchange are major challenges for the IoT. High computational resource requirements for cryptographic primitives and message transmission during Authentication make the existing methods like PKI and IBE not suitable for these resource constrained devices. PUF appears to offer a practical and economical security mechanism in place of typically sophisticated cryptosystems like PKI and IBE. PUF provides an unclonable and tamper sensitive unique signature based on the PUF chip by using manufacturing process variability. Therefore, in this study, we use lightweight bitwise XOR, hash function, and PUF to Authenticate IoT devices. Despite several studies employing the PUF to authenticate communication between IoT devices, to the authors' knowledge, existing solutions require intermediary gateway and internet capabilities by the IoT device to directly interact with a Server for Authentication and hence, are not scalable when the IoT device works on different technologies like BLE, Zigbee, etc. To address the aforementioned issue, we present a system in which the IoT device does not require a continuous active internet connection to communicate with the server in order to Authenticate itself. The results of a thorough security study are validated against adversarial attacks and PUF modeling attacks. For formal security validation, the AVISPA verification tool is also used. Performance study recommends this protocol's lightweight characteristics. The proposed protocol's acceptability and defenses against adversarial assaults are supported by a prototype developed with ESP32.
Time-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Stateful Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for training stateful policies is Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT), which comes with significant drawbacks, such as slow training due to sequential gradient propagation and the occurrence of vanishing or exploding gradients. The gradient is often truncated to address these issues, resulting in a biased policy update. We present a novel approach for training stateful policies by decomposing the latter into a stochastic internal state kernel and a stateless policy, jointly optimized by following the stateful policy gradient. We introduce different versions of the stateful policy gradient theorem, enabling us to easily instantiate stateful variants of popular reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis of our new gradient estimator and compare it with BPTT. We evaluate our approach on complex continuous control tasks, e.g., humanoid locomotion, and demonstrate that our gradient estimator scales effectively with task complexity while offering a faster and simpler alternative to BPTT.
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS) is a workshop that tries to connect researchers who develop systems for reading music, such as in the field of Optical Music Recognition, with other researchers and practitioners that could benefit from such systems, like librarians or musicologists. The relevant topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to: Music reading systems; Optical music recognition; Datasets and performance evaluation; Image processing on music scores; Writer identification; Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for music scores; Multi-modal systems; Novel input-methods for music to produce written music; Web-based Music Information Retrieval services; Applications and projects; Use-cases related to written music. These are the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems, held in Milan, Italy on Nov. 4th 2023.
Unveiling Safety Vulnerabilities of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

As large language models become more prevalent, their possible harmful or inappropriate responses are a cause for concern. This paper introduces a unique dataset containing adversarial examples in the form of questions, which we call AttaQ, designed to provoke such harmful or inappropriate responses. We assess the efficacy of our dataset by analyzing the vulnerabilities of various models when subjected to it. Additionally, we introduce a novel automatic approach for identifying and naming vulnerable semantic regions - input semantic areas for which the model is likely to produce harmful outputs. This is achieved through the application of specialized clustering techniques that consider both the semantic similarity of the input attacks and the harmfulness of the model's responses. Automatically identifying vulnerable semantic regions enhances the evaluation of model weaknesses, facilitating targeted improvements to its safety mechanisms and overall reliability.
Generative learning for nonlinear dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Modern generative machine learning models demonstrate surprising ability to create realistic outputs far beyond their training data, such as photorealistic artwork, accurate protein structures, or conversational text. These successes suggest that generative models learn to effectively parametrize and sample arbitrarily complex distributions. Beginning half a century ago, foundational works in nonlinear dynamics used tools from information theory to infer properties of chaotic attractors from time series, motivating the development of algorithms for parametrizing chaos in real datasets. In this perspective, we aim to connect these classical works to emerging themes in large-scale generative statistical learning. We first consider classical attractor reconstruction, which mirrors constraints on latent representations learned by state space models of time series. We next revisit early efforts to use symbolic approximations to compare minimal discrete generators underlying complex processes, a problem relevant to modern efforts to distill and interpret black-box statistical models. Emerging interdisciplinary works bridge nonlinear dynamics and learning theory, such as operator-theoretic methods for complex fluid flows, or detection of broken detailed balance in biological datasets. We anticipate that future machine learning techniques may revisit other classical concepts from nonlinear dynamics, such as transinformation decay and complexity-entropy tradeoffs.
"Tell me about that church": Exploring the Design and User Experience of In-Vehicle Multi-modal Intuitive Interface in the Context of Driving Scenario
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Intuitive interaction has long been seen as a highly user-friendly method. There are attempts to implement intuitive interfaces in vehicles in both research and industrial, such as voice commands. However, there is a lack of exploration in the in-vehicle multi-modal intuitive interaction, especially under a dynamic driving scenario. In this research, we conducted a design workshop (N=6) to understand user's needs and designers' considerations on the in-vehicle multi-modal intuitive interface, based on which we implemented our design on both a simulator and a real autonomous vehicle using Wizard-of-Oz. We conducted a user experiment (N=12) on the simulator to explore determinants of users' acceptance, experience, and behavior. We figured that acceptance was significantly influenced by six determinants. Drivers' behavior has an obvious pattern of change. Drivers have been proven to have less workload but distractions were also reported. Our findings offered empirical evidence which could give insights into future vehicle design.
Outliers with Opposing Signals Have an Outsized Effect on Neural Network Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We identify a new phenomenon in neural network optimization which arises from the interaction of depth and a particular heavy-tailed structure in natural data. Our result offers intuitive explanations for several previously reported observations about network training dynamics. In particular, it implies a conceptually new cause for progressive sharpening and the edge of stability; we also highlight connections to other concepts in optimization and generalization including grokking, simplicity bias, and Sharpness-Aware Minimization. Experimentally, we demonstrate the significant influence of paired groups of outliers in the training data with strong opposing signals: consistent, large magnitude features which dominate the network output throughout training and provide gradients which point in opposite directions. Due to these outliers, early optimization enters a narrow valley which carefully balances the opposing groups; subsequent sharpening causes their loss to rise rapidly, oscillating between high on one group and then the other, until the overall loss spikes. We describe how to identify these groups, explore what sets them apart, and carefully study their effect on the network's optimization and behavior. We complement these experiments with a mechanistic explanation on a toy example of opposing signals and a theoretical analysis of a two-layer linear network on a simple model. Our finding enables new qualitative predictions of training behavior which we confirm experimentally. It also provides a new lens through which to study and improve modern training practices for stochastic optimization, which we highlight via a case study of Adam versus SGD.
Towards Garment Sewing Pattern Reconstruction from a Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Garment sewing pattern represents the intrinsic rest shape of a garment, and is the core for many applications like fashion design, virtual try-on, and digital avatars. In this work, we explore the challenging problem of recovering garment sewing patterns from daily photos for augmenting these applications. To solve the problem, we first synthesize a versatile dataset, named SewFactory, which consists of around 1M images and ground-truth sewing patterns for model training and quantitative evaluation. SewFactory covers a wide range of human poses, body shapes, and sewing patterns, and possesses realistic appearances thanks to the proposed human texture synthesis network. Then, we propose a two-level Transformer network called Sewformer, which significantly improves the sewing pattern prediction performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective in recovering sewing patterns and well generalizes to casually-taken human photos. Code, dataset, and pre-trained models are available at: https://sewformer.github.io.
Toward Planet-Wide Traffic Camera Calibration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the widespread deployment of outdoor cameras, their potential for automated analysis remains largely untapped due, in part, to calibration challenges. The absence of precise camera calibration data, including intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, hinders accurate real-world distance measurements from captured videos. To address this, we present a scalable framework that utilizes street-level imagery to reconstruct a metric 3D model, facilitating precise calibration of in-the-wild traffic cameras. Notably, our framework achieves 3D scene reconstruction and accurate localization of over 100 global traffic cameras and is scalable to any camera with sufficient street-level imagery. For evaluation, we introduce a dataset of 20 fully calibrated traffic cameras, demonstrating our method's significant enhancements over existing automatic calibration techniques. Furthermore, we highlight our approach's utility in traffic analysis by extracting insights via 3D vehicle reconstruction and speed measurement, thereby opening up the potential of using outdoor cameras for automated analysis.
MixtureGrowth: Growing Neural Networks by Recombining Learned Parameters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Most deep neural networks are trained under fixed network architectures and require retraining when the architecture changes. If expanding the network's size is needed, it is necessary to retrain from scratch, which is expensive. To avoid this, one can grow from a small network by adding random weights over time to gradually achieve the target network size. However, this naive approach falls short in practice as it brings too much noise to the growing process. Prior work tackled this issue by leveraging the already learned weights and training data for generating new weights through conducting a computationally expensive analysis step. In this paper, we introduce MixtureGrowth, a new approach to growing networks that circumvents the initialization overhead in prior work. Before growing, each layer in our model is generated with a linear combination of parameter templates. Newly grown layer weights are generated by using a new linear combination of existing templates for a layer. On one hand, these templates are already trained for the task, providing a strong initialization. On the other, the new coefficients provide flexibility for the added layer weights to learn something new. We show that our approach boosts top-1 accuracy over the state-of-the-art by 2-2.5% on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets, while achieving comparable performance with fewer FLOPs to a larger network trained from scratch. Code is available at https://github.com/chaudatascience/mixturegrowth.
Aspect-based Meeting Transcript Summarization: A Two-Stage Approach with Weak Supervision on Sentence Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Aspect-based meeting transcript summarization aims to produce multiple summaries, each focusing on one aspect of content in a meeting transcript. It is challenging as sentences related to different aspects can mingle together, and those relevant to a specific aspect can be scattered throughout the long transcript of a meeting. The traditional summarization methods produce one summary mixing information of all aspects, which cannot deal with the above challenges of aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. To select the input content related to specific aspects, we train a sentence classifier on a dataset constructed from the AMI corpus with pseudo-labeling. Then we merge the sentences selected for a specific aspect as the input for the summarizer to produce the aspect-based summary. Experimental results on the AMI corpus outperform many strong baselines, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Improved Child Text-to-Speech Synthesis through Fastpitch-based Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Speech synthesis technology has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, enabling the creation of natural and expressive synthetic speech. One area of particular interest is the generation of synthetic child speech, which presents unique challenges due to children's distinct vocal characteristics and developmental stages. This paper presents a novel approach that leverages the Fastpitch text-to-speech (TTS) model for generating high-quality synthetic child speech. This study uses the transfer learning training pipeline. The approach involved finetuning a multi-speaker TTS model to work with child speech. We use the cleaned version of the publicly available MyST dataset (55 hours) for our finetuning experiments. We also release a prototype dataset of synthetic speech samples generated from this research together with model code to support further research. By using a pretrained MOSNet, we conducted an objective assessment that showed a significant correlation between real and synthetic child voices. Additionally, to validate the intelligibility of the generated speech, we employed an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model to compare the word error rates (WER) of real and synthetic child voices. The speaker similarity between the real and generated speech is also measured using a pretrained speaker encoder.
On-The-Fly Static Analysis via Dynamic Bidirected Dyck Reachability
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Dyck reachability is a principled, graph-based formulation of a plethora of static analyses. Bidirected graphs are used for capturing dataflow through mutable heap data, and are usual formalisms of demand-driven points-to and alias analyses. The best (offline) algorithm runs in $O(m+n\cdot α(n))$ time, where $n$ is the number of nodes and $m$ is the number of edges in the flow graph, which becomes $O(n^2)$ in the worst case. In the everyday practice of program analysis, the analyzed code is subject to continuous change, with source code being added and removed. On-the-fly static analysis under such continuous updates gives rise to dynamic Dyck reachability, where reachability queries run on a dynamically changing graph, following program updates. Naturally, executing the offline algorithm in this online setting is inadequate, as the time required to process a single update is prohibitively large. In this work we develop a novel dynamic algorithm for bidirected Dyck reachability that has $O(n\cdot α(n))$ worst-case performance per update, thus beating the $O(n^2)$ bound, and is also optimal in certain settings. We also implement our algorithm and evaluate its performance on on-the-fly data-dependence and alias analyses, and compare it with two best known alternatives, namely (i) the optimal offline algorithm, and (ii) a fully dynamic Datalog solver. Our experiments show that our dynamic algorithm is consistently, and by far, the top performing algorithm, exhibiting speedups in the order of 1000X. The running time of each update is almost always unnoticeable to the human eye, making it ideal for the on-the-fly analysis setting.