OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EqGAN: Feature Equalization Fusion for Few-shot Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the absence of fine structure and texture information, existing fusion-based few-shot image generation methods suffer from unsatisfactory generation quality and diversity. To address this problem, we propose a novel feature Equalization fusion Generative Adversarial Network (EqGAN) for few-shot image generation. Unlike existing fusion strategies that rely on either deep features or local representations, we design two separate branches to fuse structures and textures by disentangling encoded features into shallow and deep contents. To refine image contents at all feature levels, we equalize the fused structure and texture semantics at different scales and supplement the decoder with richer information by skip connections. Since the fused structures and textures may be inconsistent with each other, we devise a consistent equalization loss between the equalized features and the intermediate output of the decoder to further align the semantics. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that, EqGAN not only significantly improves generation performance with FID score (by up to 32.7%) and LPIPS score (by up to 4.19%), but also outperforms the state-of-the-arts in terms of accuracy (by up to 1.97%) for downstream classification tasks.
Performance of RIS-Assisted Full-Duplex Space Shift Keying With Imperfect Self-Interference Cancellation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we consider a full-duplex (FD) space shift keying (SSK) communication system, where information exchange between two users is assisted only by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). In particular, the impact of loop interference (LI) between the transmit and receive antennas as well as residual self-interference (SI) from the RIS is considered. Based on the maximum likelihood detector, we derive the conditional pairwise error probability and the numerical integration expression for the unconditional pairwise error probability (UPEP). Since it is difficult to find a closed-form solution, we perform accurate estimation by the Gauss-Chebyshev quadrature (GCQ) method. To gain more useful insights, we derive an expression for UPEP in the high signal-to-noise ratio region and further give the average bit error probability (ABEP) expression. Monte Carlo simulations were performed to validate the derived results. It is found that SI and LI have severe impacts on system performance. Fortunately, these two disturbances can be well counteracted by increasing the number of RIS units.
Borinot: an open thrust-torque-controlled robot for research on agile aerial-contact motion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces Borinot, an open-source aerial robotic platform designed to conduct research on hybrid agile locomotion and manipulation using flight and contacts. This platform features an agile and powerful hexarotor that can be outfitted with torque-actuated limbs of diverse architecture, allowing for whole-body dynamic control. As a result, Borinot can perform agile tasks such as aggressive or acrobatic maneuvers with the participation of the whole-body dynamics. The limbs attached to Borinot can be utilized in various ways; during contact, they can be used as legs to create contact-based locomotion, or as arms to manipulate objects. In free flight, they can be used as tails to contribute to dynamics, mimicking the movements of many animals. This allows for any hybridization of these dynamic modes, making Borinot an ideal open-source platform for research on hybrid aerial-contact agile motion. To demonstrate the key capabilities of Borinot in terms of agility with hybrid motion modes, we have fitted a planar 2DoF limb and implemented a whole-body torque-level model-predictive-control. The result is a capable and adaptable platform that, we believe, opens up new avenues of research in the field of agile robotics. Interesting links\footnote{Documentation: \url{www.iri.upc.edu/borinot}}\footnote{Video: \url{https://youtu.be/Ob7IIVB6P_A}}.
GaitMorph: Transforming Gait by Optimally Transporting Discrete Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Gait, the manner of walking, has been proven to be a reliable biometric with uses in surveillance, marketing and security. A promising new direction for the field is training gait recognition systems without explicit human annotations, through self-supervised learning approaches. Such methods are heavily reliant on strong augmentations for the same walking sequence to induce more data variability and to simulate additional walking variations. Current data augmentation schemes are heuristic and cannot provide the necessary data variation as they are only able to provide simple temporal and spatial distortions. In this work, we propose GaitMorph, a novel method to modify the walking variation for an input gait sequence. Our method entails the training of a high-compression model for gait skeleton sequences that leverages unlabelled data to construct a discrete and interpretable latent space, which preserves identity-related features. Furthermore, we propose a method based on optimal transport theory to learn latent transport maps on the discrete codebook that morph gait sequences between variations. We perform extensive experiments and show that our method is suitable to synthesize additional views for an input sequence.
Bi-level Network Design for UAM Vertiport Allocation Using Activity-Based Transport Simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

The design or the optimization of transport systems is a difficult task. This is especially true in the case of the introduction of new transport modes in an existing system. The main reason is, that even small additions and changes result in the emergence of new travel patterns, likely resulting in an adaptation of the travel behavior of multiple other agents in the system. Here we consider the optimization of future Urban Air Mobility services under consideration of effects induced by the new mode to an existing system. We tackle this problem through a bi-level network design approach, in which the discrete decisions of the network design planner are optimized based on the evaluated dynamic demand of the user's mode choices. We solve the activity-based network design problem (AB-NDP) using a Genetic Algorithm on a multi-objective optimization problem while evaluating the dynamic demand with the large-scale Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) framework. The proposed bi-level approach is compared against the results of a coverage approach using a static demand method. The bi-level study shows better results for expected UAM demand and total travel time savings across the transportation system. Due to its generic character, the demonstrated utilization of a bi-level method is applicable to other mobility service design questions and to other regions.
Wait-Free Updates and Range Search using Uruv
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

CRUD operations, along with range queries make a highly useful abstract data type (ADT), employed by many dynamic analytics tasks. Despite its wide applications, to our knowledge, no fully wait-free data structure is known to support this ADT. In this paper, we introduce Uruv, a proactive linearizable and practical wait-free concurrent data structure that implements the ADT mentioned above. Structurally, Uruv installs a balanced search index on the nodes of a linked list. Uruv is the first wait-free and proactive solution for concurrent B+tree. Experiments show that Uruv significantly outperforms previously proposed lock-free B+trees for dictionary operations and a recently proposed lock-free method to implement the ADT mentioned above.
Robust Task-Space Quadratic Programming for Kinematic-Controlled Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Task-space quadratic programming (QP) is an elegant approach for controlling robots subject to constraints. Yet, in the case of kinematic-controlled (i.e., high-gains position or velocity) robots, closed-loop QP control scheme can be prone to instability depending on how the gains related to the tasks or the constraints are chosen. In this paper, we address such instability shortcomings. First, we highlight the non-robustness of the closed-loop system against non-modeled dynamics, such as those relative to joint-dynamics, flexibilities, external perturbations, etc. Then, we propose a robust QP control formulation based on high-level integral feedback terms in the task-space including the constraints. The proposed method is formally proved to ensure closed-loop robust stability and is intended to be applied to any kinematic-controlled robots under practical assumptions. We assess our approach through experiments on a fixed-base robot performing stable fast motions, and a floating-base humanoid robot robustly reacting to perturbations to keep its balance.
Likely, Light, and Accurate Context-Free Clusters-based Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous systems in the road transportation network require intelligent mechanisms that cope with uncertainty to foresee the future. In this paper, we propose a multi-stage probabilistic approach for trajectory forecasting: trajectory transformation to displacement space, clustering of displacement time series, trajectory proposals, and ranking proposals. We introduce a new deep feature clustering method, underlying self-conditioned GAN, which copes better with distribution shifts than traditional methods. Additionally, we propose novel distance-based ranking proposals to assign probabilities to the generated trajectories that are more efficient yet accurate than an auxiliary neural network. The overall system surpasses context-free deep generative models in human and road agents trajectory data while performing similarly to point estimators when comparing the most probable trajectory.
On the Suitability of Hugging Face Hub for Empirical Studies
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Background. The development of empirical studies in software engineering mainly relies on the data available on code hosting platforms, being GitHub the most representative. Nevertheless, in the last years, the emergence of Machine Learning (ML) has led to the development of platforms specifically designed for developing ML-based projects, being Hugging Face Hub (HFH) the most popular one. With over 250k repositories, and growing fast, HFH is becoming a promising ecosystem of ML artifacts and therefore a potential source of data for empirical studies. However, so far there have been no studies evaluating the potential of HFH for such studies. Objective. In this proposal for a registered report, we aim at performing an exploratory study of the current state of HFH in order to investigate its suitability to be used as a source platform for empirical studies. Method. We conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of HFH for empirical studies. The former will be performed by comparing the features of HFH with those of other code hosting platforms, such as GitHub and GitLab. The latter will be performed by analyzing the data available in HFH.
Don't Shoot the Messenger: Localization Prevention of Satellite Internet Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Satellite Internet plays an increasingly important role in geopolitical conflicts. This notion was affirmed in the Ukrainian conflict escalating at the beginning of 2022, with the large-scale deployment of the Starlink satellite Internet service which consequently demonstrated the strategic importance of a free flow of information. Aside from military use, many citizens publish sensitive information on social media platforms to influence the public narrative. However, the use of satellite communication has proven to be dangerous, as the signals can be monitored by other satellites and used to triangulate the source on the ground. Unfortunately, the targeted killings of journalists have shown this threat to be effective. While the increasing deployment of satellite Internet systems gives citizens an unprecedented mouthpiece in conflicts, protecting them against localization is an unaddressed problem. To address this threat, we present AnonSat, a novel scheme to protect satellite Internet users from triangulation. AnonSat works with cheap off-the-shelf devices, leveraging long-range wireless communication to span a local network among satellite base stations. This allows rerouting users' communication to other satellite base stations, some distance away from each user, thus, preventing their localization. AnonSat is designed for easy deployment and usability, which we demonstrate with a prototype implementation. Our large-scale network simulations using real-world data sets show the effectiveness of AnonSat in various practical settings.
Base-based Model Checking for Multi-Agent Only Believing (long version)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We present a novel semantics for the language of multi-agent only believing exploiting belief bases, and show how to use it for automatically checking formulas of this language and of its dynamic extension with private belief expansion operators. We provide a PSPACE algorithm for model checking relying on a reduction to QBF and alternative dedicated algorithm relying on the exploration of the state space. We present an implementation of the QBF-based algorithm and some experimental results on computation time in a concrete example.
ARC-NLP at PAN 2023: Transition-Focused Natural Language Inference for Writing Style Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The task of multi-author writing style detection aims at finding any positions of writing style change in a given text document. We formulate the task as a natural language inference problem where two consecutive paragraphs are paired. Our approach focuses on transitions between paragraphs while truncating input tokens for the task. As backbone models, we employ different Transformer-based encoders with warmup phase during training. We submit the model version that outperforms baselines and other proposed model versions in our experiments. For the easy and medium setups, we submit transition-focused natural language inference based on DeBERTa with warmup training, and the same model without transition for the hard setup.
Time-domain Channel Property Feedback in 5G-Advanced and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The availability of time-variability information of a channel between a network node and a user equipment at the network side allows a 5G network to optimally configure its parameters to maximize both user and system performance. In the Release 18 enhancements of 5G-Advanced, a time-domain channel property (TDCP) feedback that indicates the degree of time-variability of the channel is being standardized. In this article, we describe the standardized TDCP feedback and its applications. The benefit of the feedback is further illustrated through numerical evaluations.
EyeO: Autocalibrating Gaze Output with Gaze Input
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Gaze tracking devices have the potential to greatly expand interactivity, yet miscalibration remains a significant barrier to use. As devices miscalibrate, people tend to compensate by intentionally offsetting their gaze, which makes detecting miscalibration from eye signals difficult. To help address this problem, we propose a novel approach to seamless calibration based on the insight that the system's model of eye gaze can be updated during reading (user does not compensate) to improve calibration for typing (user might compensate). To explore this approach, we built an auto-calibrating gaze typing prototype called EyeO, ran a user study with 20 participants, and conducted a semi-structured interview with 6 ALS community stakeholders. Our user study results suggest that seamless autocalibration can significantly improve typing efficiency and user experience. Findings from the semi-structured interview validate the need for autocalibration, and shed light on the prototype's potential usefulness, desired algorithmic and design improvements for users.
R-LPIPS: An Adversarially Robust Perceptual Similarity Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Similarity metrics have played a significant role in computer vision to capture the underlying semantics of images. In recent years, advanced similarity metrics, such as the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS), have emerged. These metrics leverage deep features extracted from trained neural networks and have demonstrated a remarkable ability to closely align with human perception when evaluating relative image similarity. However, it is now well-known that neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, i.e., small perturbations invisible to humans crafted to deliberately mislead the model. Consequently, the LPIPS metric is also sensitive to such adversarial examples. This susceptibility introduces significant security concerns, especially considering the widespread adoption of LPIPS in large-scale applications. In this paper, we propose the Robust Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (R-LPIPS) metric, a new metric that leverages adversarially trained deep features. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of R-LPIPS compared to the classical LPIPS metric. The code is available at https://github.com/SaraGhazanfari/R-LPIPS.
Small, but important: Traffic light proposals for detecting small traffic lights and beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Traffic light detection is a challenging problem in the context of self-driving cars and driver assistance systems. While most existing systems produce good results on large traffic lights, detecting small and tiny ones is often overlooked. A key problem here is the inherent downsampling in CNNs, leading to low-resolution features for detection. To mitigate this problem, we propose a new traffic light detection system, comprising a novel traffic light proposal generator that utilizes findings from general object proposal generation, fine-grained multi-scale features, and attention for efficient processing. Moreover, we design a new detection head for classifying and refining our proposals. We evaluate our system on three challenging, publicly available datasets and compare it against six methods. The results show substantial improvements of at least $12.6\%$ on small and tiny traffic lights, as well as strong results across all sizes of traffic lights.
AI in Software Engineering: A Survey on Project Management Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to the intelligence demonstrated by machines, and within the realm of AI, Machine Learning (ML) stands as a notable subset. ML employs algorithms that undergo training on data sets, enabling them to carry out specific tasks autonomously. Notably, AI holds immense potential in the field of software engineering, particularly in project management and planning. In this literature survey, we explore the use of AI in Software Engineering and summarize previous works in this area. We first review eleven different publications related to this subject, then compare the surveyed works. We then comment on the possible challenges present in the utilization of AI in software engineering and suggest possible further research avenues and the ways in which AI could evolve with software engineering in the future.
Multilingual Lexical Simplification via Paraphrase Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Lexical simplification (LS) methods based on pretrained language models have made remarkable progress, generating potential substitutes for a complex word through analysis of its contextual surroundings. However, these methods require separate pretrained models for different languages and disregard the preservation of sentence meaning. In this paper, we propose a novel multilingual LS method via paraphrase generation, as paraphrases provide diversity in word selection while preserving the sentence's meaning. We regard paraphrasing as a zero-shot translation task within multilingual neural machine translation that supports hundreds of languages. After feeding the input sentence into the encoder of paraphrase modeling, we generate the substitutes based on a novel decoding strategy that concentrates solely on the lexical variations of the complex word. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpasses BERT-based methods and zero-shot GPT3-based method significantly on English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
WC-SBERT: Zero-Shot Text Classification via SBERT with Self-Training for Wikipedia Categories
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Our research focuses on solving the zero-shot text classification problem in NLP, with a particular emphasis on innovative self-training strategies. To achieve this objective, we propose a novel self-training strategy that uses labels rather than text for training, significantly reducing the model's training time. Specifically, we use categories from Wikipedia as our training set and leverage the SBERT pre-trained model to establish positive correlations between pairs of categories within the same text, facilitating associative training. For new test datasets, we have improved the original self-training approach, eliminating the need for prior training and testing data from each target dataset. Instead, we adopt Wikipedia as a unified training dataset to better approximate the zero-shot scenario. This modification allows for rapid fine-tuning and inference across different datasets, greatly reducing the time required for self-training. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method can adapt the model to the target dataset within minutes. Compared to other BERT-based transformer models, our approach significantly reduces the amount of training data by training only on labels, not the actual text, and greatly improves training efficiency by utilizing a unified training set. Additionally, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the Yahoo Topic and AG News datasets.
Prompt Guided Transformer for Multi-Task Dense Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Task-conditional architecture offers advantage in parameter efficiency but falls short in performance compared to state-of-the-art multi-decoder methods. How to trade off performance and model parameters is an important and difficult problem. In this paper, we introduce a simple and lightweight task-conditional model called Prompt Guided Transformer (PGT) to optimize this challenge. Our approach designs a Prompt-conditioned Transformer block, which incorporates task-specific prompts in the self-attention mechanism to achieve global dependency modeling and parameter-efficient feature adaptation across multiple tasks. This block is integrated into both the shared encoder and decoder, enhancing the capture of intra- and inter-task features. Moreover, we design a lightweight decoder to further reduce parameter usage, which accounts for only 2.7% of the total model parameters. Extensive experiments on two multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, PASCAL-Context and NYUD-v2, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results among task-conditional methods while using fewer parameters, and maintains a significant balance between performance and parameter size.