OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AI Knows Which Words Will Appear in Next Year's Korean CSAT
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A text-mining-based word class categorization method and LSTM-based vocabulary pattern prediction method are introduced in this paper. A preprocessing method based on simple text appearance frequency analysis is first described. This method was developed as a data screening tool but showed 4.35 ~ 6.21 times higher than previous works. An LSTM deep learning method is also suggested for vocabulary appearance pattern prediction method. AI performs a regression with various size of data window of previous exams to predict the probabilities of word appearance in the next exam. Predicted values of AI over various data windows are processed into a single score as a weighted sum, which we call an "AI-Score", which represents the probability of word appearance in next year's exam. Suggested method showed 100% accuracy at the range 100-score area and showed only 1.7% error of prediction in the section where the scores were over 60 points. All source codes are freely available at the authors' Git Hub repository. (https://github.com/needleworm/bigdata_voca)
$\texttt{Davos}$: a Python "smuggler" for constructing lightweight reproducible notebooks
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2023
Year: 2023

Reproducibility is a core requirement of modern scientific research. For computational research, reproducibility means that code should produce the same results, even when run on different systems. A standard approach to ensuring reproducibility entails packaging a project's dependencies along with its primary code base. Existing solutions vary in how deeply these dependencies are specified, ranging from virtual environments, to containers, to virtual machines. Each of these existing solutions requires installing or setting up a system for running the desired code, increasing the complexity and time cost of sharing or engaging with reproducible science. Here, we propose a lighter-weight solution: the $\texttt{Davos}$ package. When used in combination with a notebook-based Python project, $\texttt{Davos}$ provides a mechanism for specifying the correct versions of the project's dependencies directly within the code that requires them, and automatically installing them in an isolated environment when the code is run. The $\texttt{Davos}$ package further ensures that those packages and specific versions are used every time the notebook's code is executed. This enables researchers to share a complete reproducible copy of their code within a single Jupyter notebook file.
Inapplicable Actions Learning for Knowledge Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in every possible state implies that the agent must understand, while also learning to maximize its reward, to ignore irrelevant actions such as $\textit{inapplicable actions}$ (i.e. actions that have no effect on the environment when performed in a given state). Knowing this information can help reduce the sample complexity of RL algorithms by masking the inapplicable actions from the policy distribution to only explore actions relevant to finding an optimal policy. While this technique has been formalized for quite some time within the Automated Planning community with the concept of precondition in the STRIPS language, RL algorithms have never formally taken advantage of this information to prune the search space to explore. This is typically done in an ad-hoc manner with hand-crafted domain logic added to the RL algorithm. In this paper, we propose a more systematic approach to introduce this knowledge into the algorithm. We (i) standardize the way knowledge can be manually specified to the agent; and (ii) present a new framework to autonomously learn the partial action model encapsulating the precondition of an action jointly with the policy. We show experimentally that learning inapplicable actions greatly improves the sample efficiency of the algorithm by providing a reliable signal to mask out irrelevant actions. Moreover, we demonstrate that thanks to the transferability of the knowledge acquired, it can be reused in other tasks and domains to make the learning process more efficient.
GPT-Neo for commonsense reasoning -- a theoretical and practical lens
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains in pre-training large-language models (LLMs) followed by supervised fine-tuning on the downstream task. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the GPT-neo model using $6$ commonsense reasoning benchmark tasks. We aim to examine the performance of smaller models using the GPT-neo models against several larger model baselines such as GPT-$3$, Llama-$2$, MPT and Falcon. Upon fine-tuning with the appropriate set of hyperparameters, our model achieves competitive accuracy on several tasks. We also investigate and substantiate our results using attention-head visualization to better understand the model performance. Finally, we conduct various robustness tests using various methods to gauge the model performance under numerous settings.
NeuralLift-360: Lifting An In-the-wild 2D Photo to A 3D Object with 360° Views
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Virtual reality and augmented reality (XR) bring increasing demand for 3D content. However, creating high-quality 3D content requires tedious work that a human expert must do. In this work, we study the challenging task of lifting a single image to a 3D object and, for the first time, demonstrate the ability to generate a plausible 3D object with 360° views that correspond well with the given reference image. By conditioning on the reference image, our model can fulfill the everlasting curiosity for synthesizing novel views of objects from images. Our technique sheds light on a promising direction of easing the workflows for 3D artists and XR designers. We propose a novel framework, dubbed NeuralLift-360, that utilizes a depth-aware neural radiance representation (NeRF) and learns to craft the scene guided by denoising diffusion models. By introducing a ranking loss, our NeuralLift-360 can be guided with rough depth estimation in the wild. We also adopt a CLIP-guided sampling strategy for the diffusion prior to provide coherent guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our NeuralLift-360 significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. Project page: https://vita-group.github.io/NeuralLift-360/
Retweets Amplify the Echo Chamber Effect
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

The growing prominence of social media in public discourse has led to a greater scrutiny of the quality of online information and the role it plays in amplifying political polarization. However, studies of polarization on social media platforms like Twitter have been hampered by the difficulty of collecting data about the social graph, specifically follow links that shape the echo chambers users join as well as what they see in their timelines. As a proxy of the follower graph, researchers use retweets, although it is not clear how this choice affects analysis. Using a sample of the Twitter follower graph and the tweets posted by users within it, we reconstruct the retweet graph and quantify its impact on the measures of echo chambers and exposure. While we find that echo chambers exist in both graphs, they are more pronounced in the retweet graph. We compare the information users see via their follower and retweet networks to show that retweeted accounts share systematically more polarized content. This bias cannot be explained by the activity or polarization within users' own follower graph neighborhoods but by the increased attention they pay to accounts that are ideologically aligned with their own views. Our results suggest that studies relying on the retweet graphs overestimate the echo chamber effects and exposure to polarized information.
Top-Down Synthesis for Library Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces corpus-guided top-down synthesis as a mechanism for synthesizing library functions that capture common functionality from a corpus of programs in a domain specific language (DSL). The algorithm builds abstractions directly from initial DSL primitives, using syntactic pattern matching of intermediate abstractions to intelligently prune the search space and guide the algorithm towards abstractions that maximally capture shared structures in the corpus. We present an implementation of the approach in a tool called Stitch and evaluate it against the state-of-the-art deductive library learning algorithm from DreamCoder. Our evaluation shows that Stitch is 3-4 orders of magnitude faster and uses 2 orders of magnitude less memory while maintaining comparable or better library quality (as measured by compressivity). We also demonstrate Stitch's scalability on corpora containing hundreds of complex programs that are intractable with prior deductive approaches and show empirically that it is robust to terminating the search procedure early -- further allowing it to scale to challenging datasets by means of early stopping.
Gradient Domain Weighted Guided Image Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Guided image filter is a well-known local filter in image processing. However, the presence of halo artifacts is a common issue associated with this type of filter. This paper proposes an algorithm that utilizes gradient information to accurately identify the edges of an image. Furthermore, the algorithm uses weighted information to distinguish flat areas from edge areas, resulting in sharper edges and reduced blur in flat areas. This approach mitigates the excessive blurring near edges that often leads to halo artifacts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly suppresses halo artifacts at the edges, making it highly effective for both image denoising and detail enhancement.
Rendezvous in Time: An Attention-based Temporal Fusion approach for Surgical Triplet Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

One of the recent advances in surgical AI is the recognition of surgical activities as triplets of (instrument, verb, target). Albeit providing detailed information for computer-assisted intervention, current triplet recognition approaches rely only on single frame features. Exploiting the temporal cues from earlier frames would improve the recognition of surgical action triplets from videos. In this paper, we propose Rendezvous in Time (RiT) - a deep learning model that extends the state-of-the-art model, Rendezvous, with temporal modeling. Focusing more on the verbs, our RiT explores the connectedness of current and past frames to learn temporal attention-based features for enhanced triplet recognition. We validate our proposal on the challenging surgical triplet dataset, CholecT45, demonstrating an improved recognition of the verb and triplet along with other interactions involving the verb such as (instrument, verb). Qualitative results show that the RiT produces smoother predictions for most triplet instances than the state-of-the-arts. We present a novel attention-based approach that leverages the temporal fusion of video frames to model the evolution of surgical actions and exploit their benefits for surgical triplet recognition.
Secure Software Development Methodologies: A Multivocal Literature Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the number of cyber attacks has grown rapidly. An effective way to reduce the attack surface and protect software is adoption of methodologies that apply security at each step of the software development lifecycle. While different methodologies have been proposed to address software security, recent research shows an increase in the number of vulnerabilities in software and data breaches. Therefore, the security practices incorporated in secure software development methodologies require investigation. This paper provides an overview of security practices involved in 28 secure software development methodologies from industry, government, and academia. To achieve this goal, we distributed the security practices among the software development lifecycle stages. We also investigated auxiliary (non-technical) practices, such as organizational, behavioral, legal, policy, and governance aspects that are incorporated in the secure software development methodologies. Furthermore, we explored methods used to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the methodologies. Finally, we present the gaps that require attention in the scientific community. The results of our survey may assist researchers and organizations to better understand the existing security practices integrated into the secure software development methodologies. In addition, our bridge between "technical" and "non-technical" worlds may be useful for non-technical specialists who investigate software security. Moreover, exploring the gaps that we found in current research may help improve security in software development and produce software with fewer number of vulnerabilities.
ConvLab-3: A Flexible Dialogue System Toolkit Based on a Unified Data Format
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems function as digital assistants, guiding users through various tasks such as booking flights or finding restaurants. Existing toolkits for building TOD systems often fall short of in delivering comprehensive arrays of data, models, and experimental environments with a user-friendly experience. We introduce ConvLab-3: a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit crafted to bridge this gap. Our unified data format simplifies the integration of diverse datasets and models, significantly reducing complexity and cost for studying generalization and transfer. Enhanced with robust reinforcement learning (RL) tools, featuring a streamlined training process, in-depth evaluation tools, and a selection of user simulators, ConvLab-3 supports the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. Through an extensive study, we demonstrate the efficacy of transfer learning and RL and showcase that ConvLab-3 is not only a powerful tool for seasoned researchers but also an accessible platform for newcomers.
Optimizing Explanations by Network Canonization and Hyperparameter Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Explainable AI (XAI) is slowly becoming a key component for many AI applications. Rule-based and modified backpropagation XAI approaches however often face challenges when being applied to modern model architectures including innovative layer building blocks, which is caused by two reasons. Firstly, the high flexibility of rule-based XAI methods leads to numerous potential parameterizations. Secondly, many XAI methods break the implementation-invariance axiom because they struggle with certain model components, e.g., BatchNorm layers. The latter can be addressed with model canonization, which is the process of re-structuring the model to disregard problematic components without changing the underlying function. While model canonization is straightforward for simple architectures (e.g., VGG, ResNet), it can be challenging for more complex and highly interconnected models (e.g., DenseNet). Moreover, there is only little quantifiable evidence that model canonization is beneficial for XAI. In this work, we propose canonizations for currently relevant model blocks applicable to popular deep neural network architectures,including VGG, ResNet, EfficientNet, DenseNets, as well as Relation Networks. We further suggest a XAI evaluation framework with which we quantify and compare the effect sof model canonization for various XAI methods in image classification tasks on the Pascal-VOC and ILSVRC2017 datasets, as well as for Visual Question Answering using CLEVR-XAI. Moreover, addressing the former issue outlined above, we demonstrate how our evaluation framework can be applied to perform hyperparameter search for XAI methods to optimize the quality of explanations.
Genetic Programming with Local Scoring
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

We present new techniques for synthesizing programs through sequences of mutations. Among these are (1) a method of local scoring assigning a score to each expression in a program, allowing us to more precisely identify buggy code, (2) suppose-expressions which act as an intermediate step to evolving if-conditionals, and (3) cyclic evolution in which we evolve programs through phases of expansion and reduction. To demonstrate their merits, we provide a basic proof-of-concept implementation which we show evolves correct code for several functions manipulating integers and lists, including some that are intractable by means of existing Genetic Programming techniques.
Pex: Memory-efficient Microcontroller Deep Learning through Partial Execution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Embedded and IoT devices, largely powered by microcontroller units (MCUs), could be made more intelligent by leveraging on-device deep learning. One of the main challenges of neural network inference on an MCU is the extremely limited amount of read-write on-chip memory (SRAM, < 512 kB). SRAM is consumed by the neural network layer (operator) input and output buffers, which, traditionally, must be in memory (materialised) for an operator to execute. We discuss a novel execution paradigm for microcontroller deep learning, which modifies the execution of neural networks to avoid materialising full buffers in memory, drastically reducing SRAM usage with no computation overhead. This is achieved by exploiting the properties of operators, which can consume/produce a fraction of their input/output at a time. We describe a partial execution compiler, Pex, which produces memory-efficient execution schedules automatically by identifying subgraphs of operators whose execution can be split along the feature ("channel") dimension. Memory usage is reduced further by targeting memory bottlenecks with structured pruning, leading to the co-design of the network architecture and its execution schedule. Our evaluation of image and audio classification models: (a) establishes state-of-the-art performance in low SRAM usage regimes for considered tasks with up to +2.9% accuracy increase; (b) finds that a 4x memory reduction is possible by applying partial execution alone, or up to 10.5x when using the compiler-pruning co-design, while maintaining the classification accuracy compared to prior work; (c) uses the recovered SRAM to process higher resolution inputs instead, increasing accuracy by up to +3.9% on Visual Wake Words.
Multi-Task Imitation Learning for Linear Dynamical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study representation learning for efficient imitation learning over linear systems. In particular, we consider a setting where learning is split into two phases: (a) a pre-training step where a shared $k$-dimensional representation is learned from $H$ source policies, and (b) a target policy fine-tuning step where the learned representation is used to parameterize the policy class. We find that the imitation gap over trajectories generated by the learned target policy is bounded by $\tilde{O}\left( \frac{k n_x}{HN_{\mathrm{shared}}} + \frac{k n_u}{N_{\mathrm{target}}}\right)$, where $n_x > k$ is the state dimension, $n_u$ is the input dimension, $N_{\mathrm{shared}}$ denotes the total amount of data collected for each policy during representation learning, and $N_{\mathrm{target}}$ is the amount of target task data. This result formalizes the intuition that aggregating data across related tasks to learn a representation can significantly improve the sample efficiency of learning a target task. The trends suggested by this bound are corroborated in simulation.
IRRGN: An Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Multi-turn Response Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The task of response selection in multi-turn dialogue is to find the best option from all candidates. In order to improve the reasoning ability of the model, previous studies pay more attention to using explicit algorithms to model the dependencies between utterances, which are deterministic, limited and inflexible. In addition, few studies consider differences between the options before and after reasoning. In this paper, we propose an Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network to address these issues, which consists of the Utterance Relational Reasoner (URR) and the Option Dual Comparator (ODC). URR aims to implicitly extract dependencies between utterances, as well as utterances and options, and make reasoning with relational graph convolutional networks. ODC focuses on perceiving the difference between the options through dual comparison, which can eliminate the interference of the noise options. Experimental results on two multi-turn dialogue reasoning benchmark datasets MuTual and MuTual+ show that our method significantly improves the baseline of four pretrained language models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The model surpasses human performance for the first time on the MuTual dataset.
Fine-Grained Selective Similarity Integration for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The discovery of drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a pivotal process in pharmaceutical development. Computational approaches are a promising and efficient alternative to tedious and costly wet-lab experiments for predicting novel DTIs from numerous candidates. Recently, with the availability of abundant heterogeneous biological information from diverse data sources, computational methods have been able to leverage multiple drug and target similarities to boost the performance of DTI prediction. Similarity integration is an effective and flexible strategy to extract crucial information across complementary similarity views, providing a compressed input for any similarity-based DTI prediction model. However, existing similarity integration methods filter and fuse similarities from a global perspective, neglecting the utility of similarity views for each drug and target. In this study, we propose a Fine-Grained Selective similarity integration approach, called FGS, which employs a local interaction consistency-based weight matrix to capture and exploit the importance of similarities at a finer granularity in both similarity selection and combination steps. We evaluate FGS on five DTI prediction datasets under various prediction settings. Experimental results show that our method not only outperforms similarity integration competitors with comparable computational costs, but also achieves better prediction performance than state-of-the-art DTI prediction approaches by collaborating with conventional base models. Furthermore, case studies on the analysis of similarity weights and on the verification of novel predictions confirm the practical ability of FGS.
Soft Labels for Rapid Satellite Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Soft labels in image classification are vector representations of an image's true classification. In this paper, we investigate soft labels in the context of satellite object detection. We propose using detections as the basis for a new dataset of soft labels. Much of the effort in creating a high-quality model is gathering and annotating the training data. If we could use a model to generate a dataset for us, we could not only rapidly create datasets, but also supplement existing open-source datasets. Using a subset of the xView dataset, we train a YOLOv5 model to detect cars, planes, and ships. We then use that model to generate soft labels for the second training set which we then train and compare to the original model. We show that soft labels can be used to train a model that is almost as accurate as a model trained on the original data.