OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Geospatial foundation models for image analysis: evaluating and enhancing NASA-IBM Prithvi's domain adaptability
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Research on geospatial foundation models (GFMs) has become a trending topic in geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) research due to their potential for achieving high generalizability and domain adaptability, reducing model training costs for individual researchers. Unlike large language models, such as ChatGPT, constructing visual foundation models for image analysis, particularly in remote sensing, encountered significant challenges such as formulating diverse vision tasks into a general problem framework. This paper evaluates the recently released NASA-IBM GFM Prithvi for its predictive performance on high-level image analysis tasks across multiple benchmark datasets. Prithvi was selected because it is one of the first open-source GFMs trained on time-series of high-resolution remote sensing imagery. A series of experiments were designed to assess Prithvi's performance as compared to other pre-trained task-specific AI models in geospatial image analysis. New strategies, including band adaptation, multi-scale feature generation, and fine-tuning techniques, are introduced and integrated into an image analysis pipeline to enhance Prithvi's domain adaptation capability and improve model performance. In-depth analyses reveal Prithvi's strengths and weaknesses, offering insights for both improving Prithvi and developing future visual foundation models for geospatial tasks.
Mapping earth mounds from space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Regular patterns of vegetation are considered widespread landscapes, although their global extent has never been estimated. Among them, spotted landscapes are of particular interest in the context of climate change. Indeed, regularly spaced vegetation spots in semi-arid shrublands result from extreme resource depletion and prefigure catastrophic shift of the ecosystem to a homogeneous desert, while termite mounds also producing spotted landscapes were shown to increase robustness to climate change. Yet, their identification at large scale calls for automatic methods, for instance using the popular deep learning framework, able to cope with a vast amount of remote sensing data, e.g., optical satellite imagery. In this paper, we tackle this problem and benchmark some state-of-the-art deep networks on several landscapes and geographical areas. Despite the promising results we obtained, we found that more research is needed to be able to map automatically these earth mounds from space.
Large Language Models-Enabled Digital Twins for Precision Medicine in Rare Gynecological Tumors
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Rare gynecological tumors (RGTs) present major clinical challenges due to their low incidence and heterogeneity. The lack of clear guidelines leads to suboptimal management and poor prognosis. Molecular tumor boards accelerate access to effective therapies by tailoring treatment based on biomarkers, beyond cancer type. Unstructured data that requires manual curation hinders efficient use of biomarker profiling for therapy matching. This study explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to construct digital twins for precision medicine in RGTs. Our proof-of-concept digital twin system integrates clinical and biomarker data from institutional and published cases (n=21) and literature-derived data (n=655 publications with n=404,265 patients) to create tailored treatment plans for metastatic uterine carcinosarcoma, identifying options potentially missed by traditional, single-source analysis. LLM-enabled digital twins efficiently model individual patient trajectories. Shifting to a biology-based rather than organ-based tumor definition enables personalized care that could advance RGT management and thus enhance patient outcomes.
Data Augmentation for Image Classification using Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Scaling laws dictate that the performance of AI models is proportional to the amount of available data. Data augmentation is a promising solution to expanding the dataset size. Traditional approaches focused on augmentation using rotation, translation, and resizing. Recent approaches use generative AI models to improve dataset diversity. However, the generative methods struggle with issues such as subject corruption and the introduction of irrelevant artifacts. In this paper, we propose the Automated Generative Data Augmentation (AGA). The framework combines the utility of large language models (LLMs), diffusion models, and segmentation models to augment data. AGA preserves foreground authenticity while ensuring background diversity. Specific contributions include: i) segment and superclass based object extraction, ii) prompt diversity with combinatorial complexity using prompt decomposition, and iii) affine subject manipulation. We evaluate AGA against state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques on three representative datasets, ImageNet, CUB, and iWildCam. The experimental evaluation demonstrates an accuracy improvement of 15.6% and 23.5% for in and out-of-distribution data compared to baseline models, respectively. There is also a 64.3% improvement in SIC score compared to the baselines.
Two-Stage Hierarchical and Explainable Feature Selection Framework for Dimensionality Reduction in Sleep Staging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Sleep is crucial for human health, and EEG signals play a significant role in sleep research. Due to the high-dimensional nature of EEG signal data sequences, data visualization and clustering of different sleep stages have been challenges. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage hierarchical and explainable feature selection framework by incorporating a feature selection algorithm to improve the performance of dimensionality reduction. Inspired by topological data analysis, which can analyze the structure of high-dimensional data, we extract topological features from the EEG signals to compensate for the structural information loss that happens in traditional spectro-temporal data analysis. Supported by the topological visualization of the data from different sleep stages and the classification results, the proposed features are proven to be effective supplements to traditional features. Finally, we compare the performances of three dimensionality reduction algorithms: Principal Component Analysis (PCA), t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), and Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP). Among them, t-SNE achieved the highest accuracy of 79.8%, but considering the overall performance in terms of computational resources and metrics, UMAP is the optimal choice.
FastBO: Fast HPO and NAS with Adaptive Fidelity Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) and neural architecture search (NAS) are powerful in attaining state-of-the-art machine learning models, with Bayesian optimization (BO) standing out as a mainstream method. Extending BO into the multi-fidelity setting has been an emerging research topic, but faces the challenge of determining an appropriate fidelity for each hyperparameter configuration to fit the surrogate model. To tackle the challenge, we propose a multi-fidelity BO method named FastBO, which adaptively decides the fidelity for each configuration and efficiently offers strong performance. The advantages are achieved based on the novel concepts of efficient point and saturation point for each configuration.We also show that our adaptive fidelity identification strategy provides a way to extend any single-fidelity method to the multi-fidelity setting, highlighting its generality and applicability.
McCaD: Multi-Contrast MRI Conditioned, Adaptive Adversarial Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity MRI Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is instrumental in clinical diagnosis, offering diverse contrasts that provide comprehensive diagnostic information. However, acquiring multiple MRI contrasts is often constrained by high costs, long scanning durations, and patient discomfort. Current synthesis methods, typically focused on single-image contrasts, fall short in capturing the collective nuances across various contrasts. Moreover, existing methods for multi-contrast MRI synthesis often fail to accurately map feature-level information across multiple imaging contrasts. We introduce McCaD (Multi-Contrast MRI Conditioned Adaptive Adversarial Diffusion), a novel framework leveraging an adversarial diffusion model conditioned on multiple contrasts for high-fidelity MRI synthesis. McCaD significantly enhances synthesis accuracy by employing a multi-scale, feature-guided mechanism, incorporating denoising and semantic encoders. An adaptive feature maximization strategy and a spatial feature-attentive loss have been introduced to capture more intrinsic features across multiple contrasts. This facilitates a precise and comprehensive feature-guided denoising process. Extensive experiments on tumor and healthy multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrated that the McCaD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines quantitively and qualitatively. The code is provided with supplementary materials.
Uncertainty-oriented Order Learning for Facial Beauty Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Previous Facial Beauty Prediction (FBP) methods generally model FB feature of an image as a point on the latent space, and learn a mapping from the point to a precise score. Although existing regression methods perform well on a single dataset, they are inclined to be sensitive to test data and have weak generalization ability. We think they underestimate two inconsistencies existing in the FBP problem: 1. inconsistency of FB standards among multiple datasets, and 2. inconsistency of human cognition on FB of an image. To address these issues, we propose a new Uncertainty-oriented Order Learning (UOL), where the order learning addresses the inconsistency of FB standards by learning the FB order relations among face images rather than a mapping, and the uncertainty modeling represents the inconsistency in human cognition. The key contribution of UOL is a designed distribution comparison module, which enables conventional order learning to learn the order of uncertain data. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that UOL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both accuracy and generalization ability.
Style Transfer: From Stitching to Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This article compares two style transfer methods in image processing: the traditional method, which synthesizes new images by stitching together small patches from existing images, and a modern machine learning-based approach that uses a segmentation network to isolate foreground objects and apply style transfer solely to the background. The traditional method excels in creating artistic abstractions but can struggle with seamlessness, whereas the machine learning method preserves the integrity of foreground elements while enhancing the background, offering improved aesthetic quality and computational efficiency. Our study indicates that machine learning-based methods are more suited for real-world applications where detail preservation in foreground elements is essential.
Assessing the Impact of Upselling in Online Fantasy Sports
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This study explores the impact of upselling on user engagement. We model users' deposit behaviour on the fantasy sports platform Dream11. Subsequently, we develop an experimental framework to evaluate the effect of upselling using an intensity parameter. Our live experiments on user deposit behaviour reveal decreased user recall with heightened upselling intensity. Our findings indicate that increased upselling intensity improves user deposit metrics and concurrently diminishes user satisfaction and conversion rates. We conduct robust counterfactual analysis and train causal meta-learners to personalise users' upselling intensity levels to reach an optimal trade-off point.
A Learnable Agent Collaboration Network Framework for Personalized Multimodal AI Search Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have revolutionized traditional information access, enabling AI agent to search and summarize information on behalf of users during dynamic dialogues. Despite their potential, current AI search engines exhibit considerable room for improvement in several critical areas. These areas include the support for multimodal information, the delivery of personalized responses, the capability to logically answer complex questions, and the facilitation of more flexible interactions. This paper proposes a novel AI Search Engine framework called the Agent Collaboration Network (ACN). The ACN framework consists of multiple specialized agents working collaboratively, each with distinct roles such as Account Manager, Solution Strategist, Information Manager, and Content Creator. This framework integrates mechanisms for picture content understanding, user profile tracking, and online evolution, enhancing the AI search engine's response quality, personalization, and interactivity. A highlight of the ACN is the introduction of a Reflective Forward Optimization method (RFO), which supports the online synergistic adjustment among agents. This feature endows the ACN with online learning capabilities, ensuring that the system has strong interactive flexibility and can promptly adapt to user feedback. This learning method may also serve as an optimization approach for agent-based systems, potentially influencing other domains of agent applications.
Seed-to-Seed: Image Translation in Diffusion Seed Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce Seed-to-Seed Translation (StS), a novel approach for Image-to-Image Translation using diffusion models (DMs), aimed at translations that require close adherence to the structure of the source image. In contrast to existing methods that modify images during the diffusion sampling process, we leverage the semantic information encoded within the space of inverted seeds of a pretrained DM, dubbed as the seed-space. We demonstrate that inverted seeds can be used for discriminative tasks, and can also be manipulated to achieve desired transformations in an unpaired image-to-image translation setting. Our method involves training an sts-GAN, an unpaired translation model between source and target seeds, based on CycleGAN. The final translated images are obtained by initiating the DM's sampling process from the translated seeds. A ControlNet is used to ensure the structural preservation of the input image. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for the task of translating automotive scenes, showcasing superior performance compared to existing GAN-based and diffusion-based methods, as well as for several other unpaired image translation tasks. Our approach offers a fresh perspective on leveraging the semantic information encoded within the seed-space of pretrained DMs for effective image editing and manipulation.
Research on LLM Acceleration Using the High-Performance RISC-V Processor "Xiangshan" (Nanhu Version) Based on the Open-Source Matrix Instruction Set Extension (Vector Dot Product)
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Considering the high-performance and low-power requirements of edge AI, this study designs a specialized instruction set processor for edge AI based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture, addressing practical issues in digital signal processing for edge devices. This design enhances the execution efficiency of edge AI and reduces its energy consumption with limited hardware overhead, meeting the demands for efficient large language model (LLM) inference computation in edge AI applications. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: For the characteristics of large language models, custom instructions were extended based on the RISC-V instruction set to perform vector dot product calculations, accelerating the computation of large language models on dedicated vector dot product acceleration hardware. Based on the open-source high-performance RISC-V processor core XiangShan Nanhu architecture, the vector dot product specialized instruction set processor Nanhu-vdot was implemented, which adds vector dot product calculation units and pipeline processing logic on top of the XiangShan Nanhu.The Nanhu-vdot underwent FPGA hardware testing, achieving over four times the speed of scalar methods in vector dot product computation. Using a hardware-software co-design approach for second-generation Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT-2) model inference, the speed improved by approximately 30% compared to pure software implementation with almost no additional consumption of hardware resources and power consumption.
Towards Faster Graph Partitioning via Pre-training and Inductive Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph partitioning (GP) is a classic problem that divides the node set of a graph into densely-connected blocks. Following the IEEE HPEC Graph Challenge and recent advances in pre-training techniques (e.g., large-language models), we propose PR-GPT (Pre-trained & Refined Graph ParTitioning) based on a novel pre-training & refinement paradigm. We first conduct the offline pre-training of a deep graph learning (DGL) model on small synthetic graphs with various topology properties. By using the inductive inference of DGL, one can directly generalize the pre-trained model (with frozen model parameters) to large graphs and derive feasible GP results. We also use the derived partition as a good initialization of an efficient GP method (e.g., InfoMap) to further refine the quality of partitioning. In this setting, the online generalization and refinement of PR-GPT can not only benefit from the transfer ability regarding quality but also ensure high inference efficiency without re-training. Based on a mechanism of reducing the scale of a graph to be processed by the refinement method, PR-GPT also has the potential to support streaming GP. Experiments on the Graph Challenge benchmark demonstrate that PR-GPT can ensure faster GP on large-scale graphs without significant quality degradation, compared with running a refinement method from scratch. We will make our code public at https://github.com/KuroginQin/PRGPT.
AirCompSim: A Discrete Event Simulator for Air Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Air components, including UAVs, planes, balloons, and satellites have been widely utilized since the fixed capacity of ground infrastructure cannot meet the dynamic load of the users. However, since those air components should be coordinated in order to achieve the desired quality of service, several next-generation paradigms have been defined including air computing. Nevertheless, even though many studies and open research issues exist for air computing, there are limited test environments that cannot satisfy the performance evaluation requirements of the dynamic environment. Therefore, in this study, we introduce our discrete event simulator, AirCompSim, which fulfills an air computing environment considering dynamically changing requirements, loads, and capacities through its modular structure. To show its capabilities, a dynamic capacity enhancement scenario is used for investigating the effect of the number of users, UAVs, and requirements of different application types on the average task success rate, service time, and server utilization. The results demonstrate that AirCompSim can be used for experiments in air computing.
Decoupled and Interactive Regression Modeling for High-performance One-stage 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Inadequate bounding box modeling in regression tasks constrains the performance of one-stage 3D object detection. Our study reveals that the primary reason lies in two aspects: (1) The limited center-offset prediction seriously impairs the bounding box localization since many highest response positions significantly deviate from object centers. (2) The low-quality sample ignored in regression tasks significantly impacts the bounding box prediction since it produces unreliable quality (IoU) rectification. To tackle these problems, we propose Decoupled and Interactive Regression Modeling (DIRM) for one-stage detection. Specifically, Decoupled Attribute Regression (DAR) is implemented to facilitate long regression range modeling for the center attribute through an adaptive multi-sample assignment strategy that deeply decouples bounding box attributes. On the other hand, to enhance the reliability of IoU predictions for low-quality results, Interactive Quality Prediction (IQP) integrates the classification task, proficient in modeling negative samples, with quality prediction for joint optimization. Extensive experiments on Waymo and ONCE datasets demonstrate that DIRM significantly improves the performance of several state-of-the-art methods with minimal additional inference latency. Notably, DIRM achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on both the Waymo and ONCE datasets.
Antagonist Inhibition Control in Redundant Tendon-driven Structures Based on Human Reciprocal Innervation for Wide Range Limb Motion of Musculoskeletal Humanoids
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The body structure of an anatomically correct tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid is complex, and the difference between its geometric model and the actual robot is very large because expressing the complex routes of tendon wires in a geometric model is very difficult. If we move a tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid by the tendon wire lengths of the geometric model, unintended muscle tension and slack will emerge. In some cases, this can lead to the wreckage of the actual robot. To solve this problem, we focused on reciprocal innervation in the human nervous system, and then implemented antagonist inhibition control (AIC) based on the reflex. This control makes it possible to avoid unnecessary internal muscle tension and slack of tendon wires caused by model error, and to perform wide range motion safely for a long time. To verify its effectiveness, we applied AIC to the upper limb of the tendon-driven musculoskeletal humanoid, Kengoro, and succeeded in dangling for 14 minutes and doing pull-ups.
Assessing UHD Image Quality from Aesthetics, Distortions, and Saliency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

UHD images, typically with resolutions equal to or higher than 4K, pose a significant challenge for efficient image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms, as adopting full-resolution images as inputs leads to overwhelming computational complexity and commonly used pre-processing methods like resizing or cropping may cause substantial loss of detail. To address this problem, we design a multi-branch deep neural network (DNN) to assess the quality of UHD images from three perspectives: global aesthetic characteristics, local technical distortions, and salient content perception. Specifically, aesthetic features are extracted from low-resolution images downsampled from the UHD ones, which lose high-frequency texture information but still preserve the global aesthetics characteristics. Technical distortions are measured using a fragment image composed of mini-patches cropped from UHD images based on the grid mini-patch sampling strategy. The salient content of UHD images is detected and cropped to extract quality-aware features from the salient regions. We adopt the Swin Transformer Tiny as the backbone networks to extract features from these three perspectives. The extracted features are concatenated and regressed into quality scores by a two-layer multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network. We employ the mean square error (MSE) loss to optimize prediction accuracy and the fidelity loss to optimize prediction monotonicity. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves the best performance on the UHD-IQA dataset while maintaining the lowest computational complexity, demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency. Moreover, the proposed model won first prize in ECCV AIM 2024 UHD-IQA Challenge. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/UIQA.