OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Meta-Reflection: A Feedback-Free Reflection Learning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in natural language understanding and reasoning, they often display undesirable behaviors, such as generating hallucinations and unfaithful reasoning. A prevalent strategy to mitigate these issues is the use of reflection, which refines responses through an iterative process. However, while promising, reflection heavily relies on high-quality external feedback and requires iterative multi-agent inference processes, thus hindering its practical application. In this paper, we propose Meta-Reflection, a novel feedback-free reflection mechanism that necessitates only a single inference pass without external feedback. Motivated by the human ability to remember and retrieve reflections from past experiences when encountering similar problems, Meta-Reflection integrates reflective insights into a codebook, allowing the historical insights to be stored, retrieved, and used to guide LLMs in problem-solving. To thoroughly investigate and evaluate the practicality of Meta-Reflection in real-world scenarios, we introduce an industrial e-commerce benchmark named E-commerce Customer Intent Detection (ECID). Extensive experiments conducted on both public datasets and the ECID benchmark highlight the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.
Differentially Private Substring and Document Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Differential privacy is the gold standard for privacy in data analysis. In many data analysis applications, the data is a database of documents. For databases consisting of many documents, one of the most fundamental problems is that of pattern matching and computing (i) how often a pattern appears as a substring in the database (substring counting) and (ii) how many documents in the collection contain the pattern as a substring (document counting). In this paper, we initiate the theoretical study of substring and document counting under differential privacy. We give an $ε$-differentially private data structure solving this problem for all patterns simultaneously with a maximum additive error of $O(\ell \cdot\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell|Σ|))$, where $\ell$ is the maximum length of a document in the database, $n$ is the number of documents, and $|Σ|$ is the size of the alphabet. We show that this is optimal up to a $O(\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell))$ factor. Further, we show that for $(ε,δ)$-differential privacy, the bound for document counting can be improved to $O(\sqrt{\ell} \cdot\mathrm{polylog}(n\ell|Σ|))$. Additionally, our data structures are efficient. In particular, our data structures use $O(n\ell^2)$ space, $O(n^2\ell^4)$ preprocessing time, and $O(|P|)$ query time where $P$ is the query pattern. Along the way, we develop a new technique for differentially privately computing a general class of counting functions on trees of independent interest. Our data structures immediately lead to improved algorithms for related problems, such as privately mining frequent substrings and $q$-grams. For $q$-grams, we further improve the preprocessing time of the data structure.
MobiFuse: A High-Precision On-device Depth Perception System with Multi-Data Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present MobiFuse, a high-precision depth perception system on mobile devices that combines dual RGB and Time-of-Flight (ToF) cameras. To achieve this, we leverage physical principles from various environmental factors to propose the Depth Error Indication (DEI) modality, characterizing the depth error of ToF and stereo-matching. Furthermore, we employ a progressive fusion strategy, merging geometric features from ToF and stereo depth maps with depth error features from the DEI modality to create precise depth maps. Additionally, we create a new ToF-Stereo depth dataset, RealToF, to train and validate our model. Our experiments demonstrate that MobiFuse excels over baselines by significantly reducing depth measurement errors by up to 77.7%. It also showcases strong generalization across diverse datasets and proves effectiveness in two downstream tasks: 3D reconstruction and 3D segmentation. The demo video of MobiFuse in real-life scenarios is available at the de-identified YouTube link(https://youtu.be/jy-Sp7T1LVs).
A Systematic Analysis of Input Modalities for Fracture Classification of the Paediatric Wrist
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Fractures, particularly in the distal forearm, are among the most common injuries in children and adolescents, with approximately 800 000 cases treated annually in Germany. The AO/OTA system provides a structured fracture type classification, which serves as the foundation for treatment decisions. Although accurately classifying fractures can be challenging, current deep learning models have demonstrated performance comparable to that of experienced radiologists. While most existing approaches rely solely on radiographs, the potential impact of incorporating other additional modalities, such as automatic bone segmentation, fracture location, and radiology reports, remains underexplored. In this work, we systematically analyse the contribution of these three additional information types, finding that combining them with radiographs increases the AUROC from 91.71 to 93.25. Our code is available on GitHub.
Towards an identity management solution on Arweave
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional identity management systems, often centralized, face challenges around privacy, data security, and user control, leaving users vulnerable to data breaches and misuse. This paper explores the potential of using the Arweave network to develop an identity management solution. By harnessing Arweave's permanent storage, our solution offers the users a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) framework, that uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) to allow individuals and other entities to create, own, and manage their digital identities. Further, the solution integrates privacy-preserving technologies, including zero-knowledge proofs and the BBS(+) signature scheme, enabling selective disclosure. This approach ultimately enhances user privacy and supports compliance with European Union legislation and regulatory standards like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by design.
SHAP scores fail pervasively even when Lipschitz succeeds
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The ubiquitous use of Shapley values in eXplainable AI (XAI) has been triggered by the tool SHAP, and as a result are commonly referred to as SHAP scores. Recent work devised examples of machine learning (ML) classifiers for which the computed SHAP scores are thoroughly unsatisfactory, by allowing human decision-makers to be misled. Nevertheless, such examples could be perceived as somewhat artificial, since the selected classes must be interpreted as numeric. Furthermore, it was unclear how general were the issues identified with SHAP scores. This paper answers these criticisms. First, the paper shows that for Boolean classifiers there are arbitrarily many examples for which the SHAP scores must be deemed unsatisfactory. Second, the paper shows that the issues with SHAP scores are also observed in the case of regression models. In addition, the paper studies the class of regression models that respect Lipschitz continuity, a measure of a function's rate of change that finds important recent uses in ML, including model robustness. Concretely, the paper shows that the issues with SHAP scores occur even for regression models that respect Lipschitz continuity. Finally, the paper shows that the same issues are guaranteed to exist for arbitrarily differentiable regression models.
UA-MPC: Uncertainty-Aware Model Predictive Control for Motorized LiDAR Odometry
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate and comprehensive 3D sensing using LiDAR systems is crucial for various applications in photogrammetry and robotics, including facility inspection, Building Information Modeling (BIM), and robot navigation. Motorized LiDAR systems can expand the Field of View (FoV) without adding multiple scanners, but existing motorized LiDAR systems often rely on constant-speed motor control, leading to suboptimal performance in complex environments. To address this, we propose UA-MPC, an uncertainty-aware motor control strategy that balances scanning accuracy and efficiency. By predicting discrete observabilities of LiDAR Odometry (LO) through ray tracing and modeling their distribution with a surrogate function, UA-MPC efficiently optimizes motor speed control according to different scenes. Additionally, we develop a ROS-based realistic simulation environment for motorized LiDAR systems, enabling the evaluation of control strategies across diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments, conducted on both simulated and real-world scenarios, demonstrate that our method significantly improves odometry accuracy while preserving the scanning efficiency of motorized LiDAR systems. Specifically, it achieves over a 60\% reduction in positioning error with less than a 2\% decrease in efficiency compared to constant-speed control, offering a smarter and more effective solution for active 3D sensing tasks. The simulation environment for control motorized LiDAR is open-sourced at: \url{https://github.com/kafeiyin00/UA-MPC.git}.
Strategyproof Matching of Roommates and Rooms
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We initiate the study of matching roommates and rooms wherein the preferences of agents over other agents and rooms are complementary and represented by Leontief utilities. In this setting, 2n agents must be paired up and assigned to n rooms. Each agent has cardinal valuations over the rooms as well as compatibility values over all other agents. Under Leontief preferences, an agents utility for a matching is the minimum of the two values. We focus on the tradeoff between maximizing utilitarian social welfare and strategyproofness. Our main result shows that, in a stark contrast to the additive case, under binary Leontief utilities, there exist strategyproof mechanisms that maximize the social welfare. We further devise a strategyproof mechanism that implements such a welfare maximizing algorithm and is parameterized by the number of agents. Along the way, we highlight several possibility and impossibility results, and give upper bounds and lower bounds for welfare with or without strategyproofness.
Resilience of Networks to Spreading Computer Viruses: Optimal Anti-Virus Deployment (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Deployment of anti-virus software is a common strategy for preventing and controlling the propagation of computer viruses and worms over a computer network. As the deployment of such programs is often limited due to monetary or operational costs, devising optimal strategies for their allocation and deployment can be of high value to the operation, performance, and resilience of the target networks. We study the effects of anti-virus deployment (i.e., "vaccination") strategies on the ability of a network to block the spread of a virus. Such ability is obtained when the network reaches "herd immunity", achieved when a large fraction of the network entities is immune to the infection, which provides protection even for entities which are not immune. We use a model that explicitly accounts for the inherent heterogeneity of network nodes activity and derive optimal strategies for anti-virus deployment. Numerical evaluations demonstrate that the system performance is very sensitive to the chosen strategy, and thus strategies which disregard the heterogeneous spread nature may perform significantly worse relatively to those derived in this work.
Energy-Efficient SLAM via Joint Design of Sensing, Communication, and Exploration Speed
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

To support future spatial machine intelligence applications, lifelong simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) has drawn significant attentions. SLAM is usually realized based on various types of mobile robots performing simultaneous and continuous sensing and communication. This paper focuses on analyzing the energy efficiency of robot operation for lifelong SLAM by jointly considering sensing, communication and mechanical factors. The system model is built based on a robot equipped with a 2D light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and an odometry. The cloud point raw data as well as the odometry data are wirelessly transmitted to data center where real-time map reconstruction is realized based on an unsupervised deep learning based method. The sensing duration, transmit power, transmit duration and exploration speed are jointly optimized to minimize the energy consumption. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the performance of our proposed method.
Pipeline Analysis for Developing Instruct LLMs in Low-Resource Languages: A Case Study on Basque
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are typically optimized for resource-rich languages like English, exacerbating the gap between high-resource and underrepresented languages. This work presents a detailed analysis of strategies for developing a model capable of following instructions in a low-resource language, specifically Basque, by focusing on three key stages: pre-training, instruction tuning, and alignment with human preferences. Our findings demonstrate that continual pre-training with a high-quality Basque corpus of around 600 million words improves natural language understanding (NLU) of the foundational model by over 12 points. Moreover, instruction tuning and human preference alignment using automatically translated datasets proved highly effective, resulting in a 24-point improvement in instruction-following performance. The resulting models, Llama-eus-8B and Llama-eus-8B-instruct, establish a new state-of-the-art for Basque in the sub-10B parameter category.
Language verY Rare for All
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the quest to overcome language barriers, encoder-decoder models like NLLB have expanded machine translation to rare languages, with some models (e.g., NLLB 1.3B) even trainable on a single GPU. While general-purpose LLMs perform well in translation, open LLMs prove highly competitive when fine-tuned for specific tasks involving unknown corpora. We introduce LYRA (Language verY Rare for All), a novel approach that combines open LLM fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and transfer learning from related high-resource languages. This study is exclusively focused on single-GPU training to facilitate ease of adoption. Our study focuses on two-way translation between French and Monégasque, a rare language unsupported by existing translation tools due to limited corpus availability. Our results demonstrate LYRA's effectiveness, frequently surpassing and consistently matching state-of-the-art encoder-decoder models in rare language translation.
Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning-Based Imputation Techniques for Air Quality Datasets with High Missing Data Rates
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Urban pollution poses serious health risks, particularly in relation to traffic-related air pollution, which remains a major concern in many cities. Vehicle emissions contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular issues, especially for vulnerable and exposed road users like pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore, accurate air quality monitoring with high spatial resolution is vital for good urban environmental management. This study aims to provide insights for processing spatiotemporal datasets with high missing data rates. In this study, the challenge of high missing data rates is a result of the limited data available and the fine granularity required for precise classification of PM2.5 levels. The data used for analysis and imputation were collected from both mobile sensors and fixed stations by Dynamic Parcel Distribution, the Environmental Protection Agency, and Google in Dublin, Ireland, where the missing data rate was approximately 82.42%, making accurate Particulate Matter 2.5 level predictions particularly difficult. Various imputation and prediction approaches were evaluated and compared, including ensemble methods, deep learning models, and diffusion models. External features such as traffic flow, weather conditions, and data from the nearest stations were incorporated to enhance model performance. The results indicate that diffusion methods with external features achieved the highest F1 score, reaching 0.9486 (Accuracy: 94.26%, Precision: 94.42%, Recall: 94.82%), with ensemble models achieving the highest accuracy of 94.82%, illustrating that good performance can be obtained despite a high missing data rate.
InstructSeg: Unifying Instructed Visual Segmentation with Multi-modal Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Boosted by Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), text-guided universal segmentation models for the image and video domains have made rapid progress recently. However, these methods are often developed separately for specific domains, overlooking the similarities in task settings and solutions across these two areas. In this paper, we define the union of referring segmentation and reasoning segmentation at both the image and video levels as Instructed Visual Segmentation (IVS). Correspondingly, we propose InstructSeg, an end-to-end segmentation pipeline equipped with MLLMs for IVS. Specifically, we employ an object-aware video perceiver to extract temporal and object information from reference frames, facilitating comprehensive video understanding. Additionally, we introduce vision-guided multi-granularity text fusion to better integrate global and detailed text information with fine-grained visual guidance. By leveraging multi-task and end-to-end training, InstructSeg demonstrates superior performance across diverse image and video segmentation tasks, surpassing both segmentation specialists and MLLM-based methods with a single model. Our code is available at https://github.com/congvvc/InstructSeg.
Turbo product decoding of cubic tensor codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Long, powerful soft detection forward error correction codes are typically constructed by concatenation of shorter component codes that are decoded through iterative Soft-Input Soft-Output (SISO) procedures. The current gold-standard is Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes, which are built from weak single parity check component codes that are capable of producing accurate SO. Due to the recent development of SISO decoders that produce highly accurate SO with codes that have multiple redundant bits, square product code constructions that can avail of more powerful component codes have been shown to be competitive with the LDPC codes in the 5G New Radio standard in terms of decoding performance while requiring fewer iterations to converge. Motivated by applications that require more powerful low-rate codes, in the present paper we explore the possibility of extending this design space by considering the construction and decoding of cubic tensor codes.
Fast Leaderless Byzantine Total Order Broadcast
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocols Flutter and Blink. Both algorithms are deterministic, leaderless and signature-free; both assume partial synchrony and at least $(5f + 1)$ servers, where $f$ bounds the number of faults. The main contribution, Flutter, is a Total-Order Broadcast implementation that achieves faster broadcast-to-delivery latency by removing the extra message delay associated with serializing messages through a leader. In the "good case" where all processes are correct, the network is synchronous, and local clocks are well-synchronized, Flutter delivers client requests in $(2Δ+ ε)$ time units, $Δ$ being the message delay and $ε$ an arbitrarily small constant. Under the same conditions, state-of-the-art protocols require $3Δ$ time units. Flutter's good-case latency is quasi-optimal, meaning it cannot be improved upon by any finite amount. Under the hood, Flutter builds upon Blink, a (Representative) Binary Consensus implementation whose fast path enables decisions in $Δ$ time units when all correct servers propose the same value. Blink generalizes the existing Binary Consensus solution Bosco from the $(7f + 1)$ to the $(5f + 1)$ setting.
Understanding and Evaluating Trust in Generative AI and Large Language Models for Spreadsheets
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise for automating spreadsheet formula creation. However, due to hallucinations, bias and variable user skill, outputs obtained from generative AI cannot be assumed to be accurate or trustworthy. To address these challenges, a trustworthiness framework is proposed based on evaluating the transparency and dependability of the formula. The transparency of the formula is explored through explainability (understanding the formula's reasoning) and visibility (inspecting the underlying algorithms). The dependability of the generated formula is evaluated in terms of reliability (consistency and accuracy) and ethical considerations (bias and fairness). The paper also examines the drivers to these metrics in the form of hallucinations, training data bias and poorly constructed prompts. Finally, examples of mistrust in technology are considered and the consequences explored.
On the Robustness of Distributed Machine Learning against Transfer Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Although distributed machine learning (distributed ML) is gaining considerable attention in the community, prior works have independently looked at instances of distributed ML in either the training or the inference phase. No prior work has examined the combined robustness stemming from distributing both the learning and the inference process. In this work, we explore, for the first time, the robustness of distributed ML models that are fully heterogeneous in training data, architecture, scheduler, optimizer, and other model parameters. Supported by theory and extensive experimental validation using CIFAR10 and FashionMNIST, we show that such properly distributed ML instantiations achieve across-the-board improvements in accuracy-robustness tradeoffs against state-of-the-art transfer-based attacks that could otherwise not be realized by current ensemble or federated learning instantiations. For instance, our experiments on CIFAR10 show that for the Common Weakness attack, one of the most powerful state-of-the-art transfer-based attacks, our method improves robust accuracy by up to 40%, with a minimal impact on clean task accuracy.