OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Functional variant of Polynomial Analogue of Gandy's Fixed Point Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, a functional variant of the polynomial analogue of the classical Gandy's fixed point theorem is obtained. Sufficient conditions have been found to ensure that the complexity of the recursive function does not go beyond the polynomial. In 2021, we proved a polynomial analogue of the classical Gandy's fixed point theorem. This became an important impetus for the construction of p-complete programming languages. And such a language was first built by us in 2022. The main result of that work was: a solution of the problem P=L. Next are the followers of the works on building a new high-level language and the idea of building a general programming methodology. But there was one gap in our research: classes of recursive functions whose complexity was polynomial were not described. In this work we found sufficient conditions for such functions. In many ways, the main ideas of this work are similar to the ideas that we used in the proof of the polynomial analogue of Gandy's fixed point theorem. But there are also striking differences. Functions, as such, differ quite strongly from predicates precisely in the multitude of their values. If a predicate is either true or false, then a function can generally take on a variety of values. Moreover, even if there are not many values, but there is recursion and simple multiplication, then powers and factorials may arise during the calculations, which, of course, can violate the polynomial computational complexity of this function. Therefore, finding these restrictions on recursive functions that would be soft enough for the class of functions to be large, and at the same time tough enough not to go beyond polynomiality, has been a problem for us for the last 3 years, after the proof of the polynomial analogue Gandy's fixed point theorem in the case of predicate extensions.
Adaptive Autopilot: Constrained DRL for Diverse Driving Behaviors
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In pursuit of autonomous vehicles, achieving human-like driving behavior is vital. This study introduces adaptive autopilot (AA), a unique framework utilizing constrained-deep reinforcement learning (C-DRL). AA aims to safely emulate human driving to reduce the necessity for driver intervention. Focusing on the car-following scenario, the process involves (i) extracting data from the highD natural driving study and categorizing it into three driving styles using a rule-based classifier; (ii) employing deep neural network (DNN) regressors to predict human-like acceleration across styles; and (iii) using C-DRL, specifically the soft actor-critic Lagrangian technique, to learn human-like safe driving policies. Results indicate effectiveness in each step, with the rule-based classifier distinguishing driving styles, the regressor model accurately predicting acceleration, outperforming traditional car-following models, and C-DRL agents learning optimal policies for humanlike driving across styles.
Breach By A Thousand Leaks: Unsafe Information Leakage in `Safe' AI Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Vulnerability of Frontier language models to misuse and jailbreaks has prompted the development of safety measures like filters and alignment training in an effort to ensure safety through robustness to adversarially crafted prompts. We assert that robustness is fundamentally insufficient for ensuring safety goals, and current defenses and evaluation methods fail to account for risks of dual-intent queries and their composition for malicious goals. To quantify these risks, we introduce a new safety evaluation framework based on impermissible information leakage of model outputs and demonstrate how our proposed question-decomposition attack can extract dangerous knowledge from a censored LLM more effectively than traditional jailbreaking. Underlying our proposed evaluation method is a novel information-theoretic threat model of inferential adversaries, distinguished from security adversaries, such as jailbreaks, in that success is measured by inferring impermissible knowledge from victim outputs as opposed to forcing explicitly impermissible outputs from the victim. Through our information-theoretic framework, we show that to ensure safety against inferential adversaries, defense mechanisms must ensure information censorship, bounding the leakage of impermissible information. However, we prove that such defenses inevitably incur a safety-utility trade-off.
RISC-V R-Extension: Advancing Efficiency with Rented-Pipeline for Edge DNN Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of edge devices necessitates efficient computational architectures for lightweight tasks, particularly deep neural network (DNN) inference. Traditional NPUs, though effective for such operations, face challenges in power, cost, and area when integrated into lightweight edge devices. The RISC-V architecture, known for its modularity and open-source nature, offers a viable alternative. This paper introduces the RISC-V R-extension, a novel approach to enhancing DNN process efficiency on edge devices. The extension features rented-pipeline stages and architectural pipeline registers (APR), which optimize critical operation execution, thereby reducing latency and memory access frequency. Furthermore, this extension includes new custom instructions to support these architectural improvements. Through comprehensive analysis, this study demonstrates the boost of R-extension in edge device processing, setting the stage for more responsive and intelligent edge applications.
STRIDE: An Open-Source, Low-Cost, and Versatile Bipedal Robot Platform for Research and Education
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present STRIDE, a Simple, Terrestrial, Reconfigurable, Intelligent, Dynamic, and Educational bipedal platform. STRIDE aims to propel bipedal robotics research and education by providing a cost-effective implementation with step-by-step instructions for building a bipedal robotic platform while providing flexible customizations via a modular and durable design. Moreover, a versatile terrain setup and a quantitative disturbance injection system are augmented to the robot platform to replicate natural terrains and push forces that can be used to evaluate legged locomotion in practical and adversarial scenarios. We demonstrate the functionalities of this platform by realizing an adaptive step-to-step dynamics based walking controller to achieve dynamic walking. Our work with the open-soured implementation shows that STRIDE is a highly versatile and durable platform that can be used in research and education to evaluate locomotion algorithms, mechanical designs, and robust and adaptative controls.
MomentsNeRF: Leveraging Orthogonal Moments for Few-Shot Neural Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We propose MomentsNeRF, a novel framework for one- and few-shot neural rendering that predicts a neural representation of a 3D scene using Orthogonal Moments. Our architecture offers a new transfer learning method to train on multi-scenes and incorporate a per-scene optimization using one or a few images at test time. Our approach is the first to successfully harness features extracted from Gabor and Zernike moments, seamlessly integrating them into the NeRF architecture. We show that MomentsNeRF performs better in synthesizing images with complex textures and shapes, achieving a significant noise reduction, artifact elimination, and completing the missing parts compared to the recent one- and few-shot neural rendering frameworks. Extensive experiments on the DTU and Shapenet datasets show that MomentsNeRF improves the state-of-the-art by {3.39\;dB\;PSNR}, 11.1% SSIM, 17.9% LPIPS, and 8.3% DISTS metrics. Moreover, it outperforms state-of-the-art performance for both novel view synthesis and single-image 3D view reconstruction. The source code is accessible at: https://amughrabi.github.io/momentsnerf/.
Generalized Event Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Event cameras capture the world at high time resolution and with minimal bandwidth requirements. However, event streams, which only encode changes in brightness, do not contain sufficient scene information to support a wide variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we design generalized event cameras that inherently preserve scene intensity in a bandwidth-efficient manner. We generalize event cameras in terms of when an event is generated and what information is transmitted. To implement our designs, we turn to single-photon sensors that provide digital access to individual photon detections; this modality gives us the flexibility to realize a rich space of generalized event cameras. Our single-photon event cameras are capable of high-speed, high-fidelity imaging at low readout rates. Consequently, these event cameras can support plug-and-play downstream inference, without capturing new event datasets or designing specialized event-vision models. As a practical implication, our designs, which involve lightweight and near-sensor-compatible computations, provide a way to use single-photon sensors without exorbitant bandwidth costs.
Motion Comparator: Visual Comparison of Robot Motions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Roboticists compare robot motions for tasks such as parameter tuning, troubleshooting, and deciding between possible motions. However, most existing visualization tools are designed for individual motions and lack the features necessary to facilitate robot motion comparison. In this paper, we utilize a rigorous design framework to develop Motion Comparator, a web-based tool that facilitates the comprehension, comparison, and communication of robot motions. Our design process identified roboticists' needs, articulated design challenges, and provided corresponding strategies. Motion Comparator includes several key features such as multi-view coordination, quaternion visualization, time warping, and comparative designs. To demonstrate the applications of Motion Comparator, we discuss four case studies in which our tool is used for motion selection, troubleshooting, parameter tuning, and motion review.
Emotion and Intent Joint Understanding in Multimodal Conversation: A Benchmarking Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Emotion and Intent Joint Understanding in Multimodal Conversation (MC-EIU) aims to decode the semantic information manifested in a multimodal conversational history, while inferring the emotions and intents simultaneously for the current utterance. MC-EIU is enabling technology for many human-computer interfaces. However, there is a lack of available datasets in terms of annotation, modality, language diversity, and accessibility. In this work, we propose an MC-EIU dataset, which features 7 emotion categories, 9 intent categories, 3 modalities, i.e., textual, acoustic, and visual content, and two languages, i.e., English and Mandarin. Furthermore, it is completely open-source for free access. To our knowledge, MC-EIU is the first comprehensive and rich emotion and intent joint understanding dataset for multimodal conversation. Together with the release of the dataset, we also develop an Emotion and Intent Interaction (EI$^2$) network as a reference system by modeling the deep correlation between emotion and intent in the multimodal conversation. With comparative experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EI$^2$ method on the MC-EIU dataset. The dataset and codes will be made available at: https://github.com/MC-EIU/MC-EIU.
LiDAR-Inertial Odometry Based on Extended Kalman Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

LiDAR-Inertial Odometry (LIO) is typically implemented using an optimization-based approach, with the factor graph often being employed due to its capability to seamlessly integrate residuals from both LiDAR and IMU measurements. Conversely, a recent study has demonstrated that accurate LIO can also be achieved using a loosely-coupled method. Inspired by this advancements, we present a LIO method that leverages the recursive Bayes filter, solved via the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) - herein referred to as KLIO. Within KLIO, prior and likelihood distributions are computed using IMU preintegration and scan matching between LiDAR and local map point clouds, and the pose, velocity, and IMU biases are updated through the EKF process. Through experiments with the Newer College dataset, we demonstrate that KLIO achieves precise trajectory tracking and mapping. Its accuracy is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art methods in both tightly- and loosely-coupled methods.
Representation learning with CGAN for casual inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets (CGAN) is often used to improve conditional image generation performance. However, there is little research on Representation learning with CGAN for causal inference. This paper proposes a new method for finding representation learning functions by adopting the adversarial idea. We apply the pattern of CGAN and theoretically emonstrate the feasibility of finding a suitable representation function in the context of two distributions being balanced. The theoretical result shows that when two distributions are balanced, the ideal representation function can be found and thus can be used to further research.
Style Alignment based Dynamic Observation Method for UAV-View Geo-localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The task of UAV-view geo-localization is to estimate the localization of a query satellite/drone image by matching it against a reference dataset consisting of drone/satellite images. Though tremendous strides have been made in feature alignment between satellite and drone views, vast differences in both inter and intra-class due to changes in viewpoint, altitude, and lighting remain a huge challenge. In this paper, a style alignment based dynamic observation method for UAV-view geo-localization is proposed to meet the above challenges from two perspectives: visual style transformation and surrounding noise control. Specifically, we introduce a style alignment strategy to transfrom the diverse visual style of drone-view images into a unified satellite images visual style. Then a dynamic observation module is designed to evaluate the spatial distribution of images by mimicking human observation habits. It is featured by the hierarchical attention block (HAB) with a dual-square-ring stream structure, to reduce surrounding noise and geographical deformation. In addition, we propose a deconstruction loss to push away features of different geo-tags and squeeze knowledge from unmatched images by correlation calculation. The experimental results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our model on benchmarked datasets. In particular, when compared to the prior art on University-1652, our results surpass the best of them (FSRA), while only requiring 2x fewer parameters. Code will be released at https://github.com/Xcco1/SA\_DOM
LANE: Logic Alignment of Non-tuning Large Language Models and Online Recommendation Systems for Explainable Reason Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The explainability of recommendation systems is crucial for enhancing user trust and satisfaction. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) offers new opportunities for comprehensive recommendation logic generation. However, in existing related studies, fine-tuning LLM models for recommendation tasks incurs high computational costs and alignment issues with existing systems, limiting the application potential of proven proprietary/closed-source LLM models, such as GPT-4. In this work, our proposed effective strategy LANE aligns LLMs with online recommendation systems without additional LLMs tuning, reducing costs and improving explainability. This innovative approach addresses key challenges in integrating language models with recommendation systems while fully utilizing the capabilities of powerful proprietary models. Specifically, our strategy operates through several key components: semantic embedding, user multi-preference extraction using zero-shot prompting, semantic alignment, and explainable recommendation generation using Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting. By embedding item titles instead of IDs and utilizing multi-head attention mechanisms, our approach aligns the semantic features of user preferences with those of candidate items, ensuring coherent and user-aligned recommendations. Sufficient experimental results including performance comparison, questionnaire voting, and visualization cases prove that our method can not only ensure recommendation performance, but also provide easy-to-understand and reasonable recommendation logic.
CRUISE on Quantum Computing for Feature Selection in Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Using Quantum Computers to solve problems in Recommender Systems that classical computers cannot address is a worthwhile research topic. In this paper, we use Quantum Annealers to address the feature selection problem in recommendation algorithms. This feature selection problem is a Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization(QUBO) problem. By incorporating Counterfactual Analysis, we significantly improve the performance of the item-based KNN recommendation algorithm compared to using pure Mutual Information. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that the use of Counterfactual Analysis holds great promise for addressing such problems.
A Self-Supervised Task for Fault Detection in Satellite Multivariate Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the space sector, due to environmental conditions and restricted accessibility, robust fault detection methods are imperative for ensuring mission success and safeguarding valuable assets. This work proposes a novel approach leveraging Physics-Informed Real NVP neural networks, renowned for their ability to model complex and high-dimensional distributions, augmented with a self-supervised task based on sensors' data permutation. It focuses on enhancing fault detection within the satellite multivariate time series. The experiments involve various configurations, including pre-training with self-supervision, multi-task learning, and standalone self-supervised training. Results indicate significant performance improvements across all settings. In particular, employing only the self-supervised loss yields the best overall results, suggesting its efficacy in guiding the network to extract relevant features for fault detection. This study presents a promising direction for improving fault detection in space systems and warrants further exploration in other datasets and applications.
CogErgLLM: Exploring Large Language Model Systems Design Perspective Using Cognitive Ergonomics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Integrating cognitive ergonomics with LLMs is crucial for improving safety, reliability, and user satisfaction in human-AI interactions. Current LLM designs often lack this integration, resulting in systems that may not fully align with human cognitive capabilities and limitations. This oversight exacerbates biases in LLM outputs and leads to suboptimal user experiences due to inconsistent application of user-centered design principles. Researchers are increasingly leveraging NLP, particularly LLMs, to model and understand human behavior across social sciences, psychology, psychiatry, health, and neuroscience. Our position paper explores the need to integrate cognitive ergonomics into LLM design, providing a comprehensive framework and practical guidelines for ethical development. By addressing these challenges, we aim to advance safer, more reliable, and ethically sound human-AI interactions.
An Uncertainty-guided Tiered Self-training Framework for Active Source-free Domain Adaptation in Prostate Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning models have exhibited remarkable efficacy in accurately delineating the prostate for diagnosis and treatment of prostate diseases, but challenges persist in achieving robust generalization across different medical centers. Source-free Domain Adaptation (SFDA) is a promising technique to adapt deep segmentation models to address privacy and security concerns while reducing domain shifts between source and target domains. However, recent literature indicates that the performance of SFDA remains far from satisfactory due to unpredictable domain gaps. Annotating a few target domain samples is acceptable, as it can lead to significant performance improvement with a low annotation cost. Nevertheless, due to extremely limited annotation budgets, careful consideration is needed in selecting samples for annotation. Inspired by this, our goal is to develop Active Source-free Domain Adaptation (ASFDA) for medical image segmentation. Specifically, we propose a novel Uncertainty-guided Tiered Self-training (UGTST) framework, consisting of efficient active sample selection via entropy-based primary local peak filtering to aggregate global uncertainty and diversity-aware redundancy filter, coupled with a tiered self-learning strategy, achieves stable domain adaptation. Experimental results on cross-center prostate MRI segmentation datasets revealed that our method yielded marked advancements, with a mere 5% annotation, exhibiting an average Dice score enhancement of 9.78% and 7.58% in two target domains compared with state-of-the-art methods, on par with fully supervised learning. Code is available at:https://github.com/HiLab-git/UGTST
The More the Merrier? Navigating Accuracy vs. Energy Efficiency Design Trade-Offs in Ensemble Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Background: Machine learning (ML) model composition is a popular technique to mitigate shortcomings of a single ML model and to design more effective ML-enabled systems. While ensemble learning, i.e., forwarding the same request to several models and fusing their predictions, has been studied extensively for accuracy, we have insufficient knowledge about how to design energy-efficient ensembles. Objective: We therefore analyzed three types of design decisions for ensemble learning regarding a potential trade-off between accuracy and energy consumption: a) ensemble size, i.e., the number of models in the ensemble, b) fusion methods (majority voting vs. a meta-model), and c) partitioning methods (whole-dataset vs. subset-based training). Methods: By combining four popular ML algorithms for classification in different ensembles, we conducted a full factorial experiment with 11 ensembles x 4 datasets x 2 fusion methods x 2 partitioning methods (176 combinations). For each combination, we measured accuracy (F1-score) and energy consumption in J (for both training and inference). Results: While a larger ensemble size significantly increased energy consumption (size 2 ensembles consumed 37.49% less energy than size 3 ensembles, which in turn consumed 26.96% less energy than the size 4 ensembles), it did not significantly increase accuracy. Furthermore, majority voting outperformed meta-model fusion both in terms of accuracy (Cohen's d of 0.38) and energy consumption (Cohen's d of 0.92). Lastly, subset-based training led to significantly lower energy consumption (Cohen's d of 0.91), while training on the whole dataset did not increase accuracy significantly. Conclusions: From a Green AI perspective, we recommend designing ensembles of small size (2 or maximum 3 models), using subset-based training, majority voting, and energy-efficient ML algorithms like decision trees, Naive Bayes, or KNN.