OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Leaf Cultivar Identification via Prototype-enhanced Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Plant leaf identification is crucial for biodiversity protection and conservation and has gradually attracted the attention of academia in recent years. Due to the high similarity among different varieties, leaf cultivar recognition is also considered to be an ultra-fine-grained visual classification (UFGVC) task, which is facing a huge challenge. In practice, an instance may be related to multiple varieties to varying degrees, especially in the UFGVC datasets. However, deep learning methods trained on one-hot labels fail to reflect patterns shared across categories and thus perform poorly on this task. To address this issue, we generate soft targets integrated with inter-class similarity information. Specifically, we continuously update the prototypical features for each category and then capture the similarity scores between instances and prototypes accordingly. Original one-hot labels and the similarity scores are incorporated to yield enhanced labels. Prototype-enhanced soft labels not only contain original one-hot label information, but also introduce rich inter-category semantic association information, thus providing more effective supervision for deep model training. Extensive experimental results on public datasets show that our method can significantly improve the performance on the UFGVC task of leaf cultivar identification.
Repairing Deep Neural Networks Based on Behavior Imitation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical systems has raised concerns about their potential for exhibiting ill-behaviors. While DNN verification and testing provide post hoc conclusions regarding unexpected behaviors, they do not prevent the erroneous behaviors from occurring. To address this issue, DNN repair/patch aims to eliminate unexpected predictions generated by defective DNNs. Two typical DNN repair paradigms are retraining and fine-tuning. However, existing methods focus on the high-level abstract interpretation or inference of state spaces, ignoring the underlying neurons' outputs. This renders patch processes computationally prohibitive and limited to piecewise linear (PWL) activation functions to great extent. To address these shortcomings, we propose a behavior-imitation based repair framework, BIRDNN, which integrates the two repair paradigms for the first time. BIRDNN corrects incorrect predictions of negative samples by imitating the closest expected behaviors of positive samples during the retraining repair procedure. For the fine-tuning repair process, BIRDNN analyzes the behavior differences of neurons on positive and negative samples to identify the most responsible neurons for the erroneous behaviors. To tackle more challenging domain-wise repair problems (DRPs), we synthesize BIRDNN with a domain behavior characterization technique to repair buggy DNNs in a probably approximated correct style. We also implement a prototype tool based on BIRDNN and evaluate it on ACAS Xu DNNs. Our experimental results show that BIRDNN can successfully repair buggy DNNs with significantly higher efficiency than state-of-the-art repair tools. Additionally, BIRDNN is highly compatible with different activation functions.
Towards Effective Collaborative Learning in Long-Tailed Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Real-world data usually suffers from severe class imbalance and long-tailed distributions, where minority classes are significantly underrepresented compared to the majority ones. Recent research prefers to utilize multi-expert architectures to mitigate the model uncertainty on the minority, where collaborative learning is employed to aggregate the knowledge of experts, i.e., online distillation. In this paper, we observe that the knowledge transfer between experts is imbalanced in terms of class distribution, which results in limited performance improvement of the minority classes. To address it, we propose a re-weighted distillation loss by comparing two classifiers' predictions, which are supervised by online distillation and label annotations, respectively. We also emphasize that feature-level distillation will significantly improve model performance and increase feature robustness. Finally, we propose an Effective Collaborative Learning (ECL) framework that integrates a contrastive proxy task branch to further improve feature quality. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on four standard datasets demonstrate that ECL achieves state-of-the-art performance and the detailed ablation studies manifest the effectiveness of each component in ECL.
Detecting GNSS misbehavior leveraging secure heterogeneous time sources
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Civilian Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) vulnerabilities are a threat to a wide gamut of critical systems. GNSS receivers, as part of the encompassing platform, can leverage external information to detect GNSS attacks. Specifically, cross-checking the time produced by the GNSS receiver against multiple trusted time sources can provide robust and assured PNT. In this work, we explore the combination of secure remote, network-based time providers and local precision oscillators. This multi-layered defense mechanism detects GNSS attacks that induce even small time offsets, including attacks mounted in cold start. Our system does not require any modification to the current structure of the GNSS receiver, it is agnostic to the satellite constellation and the attacker type. This makes time-based data validation of GNSS information compatible with existing receivers and readily deployable.
Compressing audio CNNs with graph centrality based filter pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are commonplace in high-performing solutions to many real-world problems, such as audio classification. CNNs have many parameters and filters, with some having a larger impact on the performance than others. This means that networks may contain many unnecessary filters, increasing a CNN's computation and memory requirements while providing limited performance benefits. To make CNNs more efficient, we propose a pruning framework that eliminates filters with the highest "commonality". We measure this commonality using the graph-theoretic concept of "centrality". We hypothesise that a filter with a high centrality should be eliminated as it represents commonality and can be replaced by other filters without affecting the performance of a network much. An experimental evaluation of the proposed framework is performed on acoustic scene classification and audio tagging. On the DCASE 2021 Task 1A baseline network, our proposed method reduces computations per inference by 71\% with 50\% fewer parameters at less than a two percentage point drop in accuracy compared to the original network. For large-scale CNNs such as PANNs designed for audio tagging, our method reduces 24\% computations per inference with 41\% fewer parameters at a slight improvement in performance.
Evolution under Length Constraints for CNN Architecture design
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the CNN architectures designed by evolution algorithms have proven to be competitive with handcrafted architectures designed by experts. However, these algorithms need a lot of computational power, which is beyond the capabilities of most researchers and engineers. To overcome this problem, we propose an evolution architecture under length constraints. It consists of two algorithms: a search length strategy to find an optimal space and a search architecture strategy based on genetic algorithm to find the best individual in the optimal space. Our algorithms reduce drastically resource cost and also keep good performance. On the Cifar-10 dataset, our framework presents outstanding performance with an error rate of 5.12% and only 4.6 GPU a day to converge to the optimal individual -22 GPU a day less than the lowest cost automatic evolutionary algorithm in the peer competition.
GAANet: Ghost Auto Anchor Network for Detecting Varying Size Drones in Dark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The usage of drones has tremendously increased in different sectors spanning from military to industrial applications. Despite all the benefits they offer, their misuse can lead to mishaps, and tackling them becomes more challenging particularly at night due to their small size and low visibility conditions. To overcome those limitations and improve the detection accuracy at night, we propose an object detector called Ghost Auto Anchor Network (GAANet) for infrared (IR) images. The detector uses a YOLOv5 core to address challenges in object detection for IR images, such as poor accuracy and a high false alarm rate caused by extended altitudes, poor lighting, and low image resolution. To improve performance, we implemented auto anchor calculation, modified the conventional convolution block to ghost-convolution, adjusted the input channel size, and used the AdamW optimizer. To enhance the precision of multiscale tiny object recognition, we also introduced an additional extra-small object feature extractor and detector. Experimental results in a custom IR dataset with multiple classes (birds, drones, planes, and helicopters) demonstrate that GAANet shows improvement compared to state-of-the-art detectors. In comparison to GhostNet-YOLOv5, GAANet has higher overall mean average precision (mAP@50), recall, and precision around 2.5\%, 2.3\%, and 1.4\%, respectively. The dataset and code for this paper are available as open source at https://github.com/ZeeshanKaleem/GhostAutoAnchorNet.
LMs stand their Ground: Investigating the Effect of Embodiment in Figurative Language Interpretation by Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Figurative language is a challenge for language models since its interpretation is based on the use of words in a way that deviates from their conventional order and meaning. Yet, humans can easily understand and interpret metaphors, similes or idioms as they can be derived from embodied metaphors. Language is a proxy for embodiment and if a metaphor is conventional and lexicalised, it becomes easier for a system without a body to make sense of embodied concepts. Yet, the intricate relation between embodiment and features such as concreteness or age of acquisition has not been studied in the context of figurative language interpretation concerning language models. Hence, the presented study shows how larger language models perform better at interpreting metaphoric sentences when the action of the metaphorical sentence is more embodied. The analysis rules out multicollinearity with other features (e.g. word length or concreteness) and provides initial evidence that larger language models conceptualise embodied concepts to a degree that facilitates figurative language understanding.
T-SciQ: Teaching Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Mixed Large Language Model Signals for Science Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the external essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed T-SciQ that aims at teaching science question answering with LLM signals. The T-SciQ approach generates high-quality CoT rationales as teaching signals and is advanced to train much smaller models to perform CoT reasoning in complex modalities. Additionally, we introduce a novel data mixing strategy to produce more effective teaching data samples for simple and complex science question answer problems. Extensive experimental results show that our T-SciQ method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the ScienceQA benchmark, with an accuracy of 96.18%. Moreover, our approach outperforms the most powerful fine-tuned baseline by 4.5%. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/T-SciQ/T-SciQ.
Reducing Idleness in Financial Cloud Services via Multi-objective Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning based Load Balancer
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, various companies have started to shift their data services from traditional data centers to the cloud. One of the major motivations is to save on operational costs with the aid of cloud elasticity. This paper discusses an emerging need from financial services to reduce the incidence of idle servers retaining very few user connections, without disconnecting them from the server side. This paper considers this need as a bi-objective online load balancing problem. A neural network based scalable policy is designed to route user requests to varied numbers of servers for the required elasticity. An evolutionary multi-objective training framework is proposed to optimize the weights of the policy. Not only is the new objective of idleness is reduced by over 130% more than traditional industrial solutions, but the original load balancing objective itself is also slightly improved. Extensive simulations with both synthetic and real-world data help reveal the detailed applicability of the proposed method to the emergent problem of reducing idleness in financial services.
Encoding Variables, Evaluation Criteria and Evaluation Methods for Data Physicalizations: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Data Physicalization focuses on understanding how physical representations of data can support communication, learning and problem-solving. As an emerging area, Data Physicalization research needs conceptual foundations to support thinking about and designing new physical representations of data. Yet, it remains unclear at the moment (i) what encoding variables are at the designer's disposal during the creation of physicalizations, (ii) what evaluation criteria could be useful, and (iii) what methods can be used to evaluate physicalizations. This article addresses these three questions through a narrative review and a systematic review. The narrative review draws on the literature from Information Visualization, HCI and Cartography to provide a holistic view of encoding variables for data. The systematic review looks closely into the evaluation criteria and methods that can be used to evaluate data physicalizations. Both reviews offer a conceptual framework for researchers and designers interested in designing and studying data physicalizations.
HD2Reg: Hierarchical Descriptors and Detectors for Point Cloud Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Feature Descriptors and Detectors are two main components of feature-based point cloud registration. However, little attention has been drawn to the explicit representation of local and global semantics in the learning of descriptors and detectors. In this paper, we present a framework that explicitly extracts dual-level descriptors and detectors and performs coarse-to-fine matching with them. First, to explicitly learn local and global semantics, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning strategy, training the robust matching ability of high-level descriptors, and refining the local feature space using low-level descriptors. Furthermore, we propose to learn dual-level saliency maps that extract two groups of keypoints in two different senses. To overcome the weak supervision of binary matchability labels, we propose a ranking strategy to label the significance ranking of keypoints, and thus provide more fine-grained supervision signals. Finally, we propose a global-to-local matching scheme to obtain robust and accurate correspondences by leveraging the complementary dual-level features.Quantitative experiments on 3DMatch and KITTI odometry datasets show that our method achieves robust and accurate point cloud registration and outperforms recent keypoint-based methods.
Training Natural Language Processing Models on Encrypted Text for Enhanced Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the increasing use of cloud-based services for training and deploying machine learning models, data privacy has become a major concern. This is particularly important for natural language processing (NLP) models, which often process sensitive information such as personal communications and confidential documents. In this study, we propose a method for training NLP models on encrypted text data to mitigate data privacy concerns while maintaining similar performance to models trained on non-encrypted data. We demonstrate our method using two different architectures, namely Doc2Vec+XGBoost and Doc2Vec+LSTM, and evaluate the models on the 20 Newsgroups dataset. Our results indicate that both encrypted and non-encrypted models achieve comparable performance, suggesting that our encryption method is effective in preserving data privacy without sacrificing model accuracy. In order to replicate our experiments, we have provided a Colab notebook at the following address: https://t.ly/lR-TP
Building Multimodal AI Chatbots
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This work aims to create a multimodal AI system that chats with humans and shares relevant photos. While earlier works were limited to dialogues about specific objects or scenes within images, recent works have incorporated images into open-domain dialogues. However, their response generators are unimodal, accepting text input but no image input, thus prone to generating responses contradictory to the images shared in the dialogue. Therefore, this work proposes a complete chatbot system using two multimodal deep learning models: an image retriever that understands texts and a response generator that understands images. The image retriever, implemented by ViT and BERT, selects the most relevant image given the dialogue history and a database of images. The response generator, implemented by ViT and GPT-2/DialoGPT, generates an appropriate response given the dialogue history and the most recently retrieved image. The two models are trained and evaluated on PhotoChat, an open-domain dialogue dataset in which a photo is shared in each session. In automatic evaluation, the proposed image retriever outperforms existing baselines VSE++ and SCAN with Recall@1/5/10 of 0.1/0.3/0.4 and MRR of 0.2 when ranking 1,000 images. The proposed response generator also surpasses the baseline Divter with PPL of 16.9, BLEU-1/2 of 0.13/0.03, and Distinct-1/2 of 0.97/0.86, showing a significant improvement in PPL by -42.8 and BLEU-1/2 by +0.07/0.02. In human evaluation with a Likert scale of 1-5, the complete multimodal chatbot system receives higher image-groundedness of 4.3 and engagingness of 4.3, along with competitive fluency of 4.1, coherence of 3.9, and humanness of 3.1, when compared to other chatbot variants. The source code is available at: https://github.com/minniie/multimodal_chat.git.
Blockchain for smart cities improvement: an architecture proposal
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The combination between innovative topics and emerging technologies lets researchers define new processes and models. New needs regard the definition of modular and scalable approaches, with society and environment in mind. An important topic to focus on is the smart city one. The use of emerging technologies lets smart cities develop new processes to improve services offered from various actors, either industries or government. Smart cities were born to improve quality of life for citizens. To reach this goal, various approaches have been proposed, but they lack on a common interface to let each stakeholder communicate in a simple and fast way. This paper shows the proposal of an architecture to overcome the actual limitations of smart cities: it uses Blockchain technology as a distributed database to let everyone join the network and feel part of a community. Blockchain can improve processes development for smart cities. Scalability is granted thanks to a context-aware approach: applications do not need to know about the back-end implementation, they just need to adapt to an interface. With Blockchain, it is possible to collect data anonymously to make some statistical analysis, to access public records to ensure security in the city and to guarantee the origin of products and energy.
Contrastive Graph Clustering in Curvature Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph clustering is a longstanding research topic, and has achieved remarkable success with the deep learning methods in recent years. Nevertheless, we observe that several important issues largely remain open. On the one hand, graph clustering from the geometric perspective is appealing but has rarely been touched before, as it lacks a promising space for geometric clustering. On the other hand, contrastive learning boosts the deep graph clustering but usually struggles in either graph augmentation or hard sample mining. To bridge this gap, we rethink the problem of graph clustering from geometric perspective and, to the best of our knowledge, make the first attempt to introduce a heterogeneous curvature space to graph clustering problem. Correspondingly, we present a novel end-to-end contrastive graph clustering model named CONGREGATE, addressing geometric graph clustering with Ricci curvatures. To support geometric clustering, we construct a theoretically grounded Heterogeneous Curvature Space where deep representations are generated via the product of the proposed fully Riemannian graph convolutional nets. Thereafter, we train the graph clusters by an augmentation-free reweighted contrastive approach where we pay more attention to both hard negatives and hard positives in our curvature space. Empirical results on real-world graphs show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.
Disruptive papers in science are losing impact
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

The impact and originality are two critical dimensions for evaluating scientific publications, measured by citation and disruption metrics respectively. Despite the extensive effort made to understand the statistical properties and evolution of each of these metrics, the relations between the two remain unclear. In this paper, we study the evolution during last 70 years of the correlation between scientific papers' citation and disruption, finding surprisingly a decreasing trend from positive to negative correlations over the years. Consequently, during the years, there are fewer and fewer disruptive works among the highly cited papers. These results suggest that highly disruptive studies nowadays attract less attention from the scientific community. The analysis on papers' references supports this trend, showing that papers citing older references, less popular references and diverse references become to have less citations. Possible explanations for the less attention phenomenon could be due to the increasing information overload in science, and citations become more and more prominent for impact. This is supported by the evidence that research fields with more papers have a more negative correlation between citation and disruption. Finally, we show the generality of our findings by analyzing and comparing six disciplines.