OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mutiny! How does Kubernetes fail, and what can we do about it?
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we i) analyze and classify real-world failures of Kubernetes (the most popular container orchestration system), ii) develop a framework to perform a fault/error injection campaign targeting the data store preserving the cluster state, and iii) compare results of our fault/error injection experiments with real-world failures, showing that our fault/error injections can recreate many real-world failure patterns. The paper aims to address the lack of studies on systematic analyses of Kubernetes failures to date. Our results show that even a single fault/error (e.g., a bit-flip) in the data stored can propagate, causing cluster-wide failures (3% of injections), service networking issues (4%), and service under/overprovisioning (24%). Errors in the fields tracking dependencies between object caused 51% of such cluster-wide failures. We argue that controlled fault/error injection-based testing should be employed to proactively assess Kubernetes' resiliency and guide the design of failure mitigation strategies.
KI-GAN: Knowledge-Informed Generative Adversarial Networks for Enhanced Multi-Vehicle Trajectory Forecasting at Signalized Intersections
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reliable prediction of vehicle trajectories at signalized intersections is crucial to urban traffic management and autonomous driving systems. However, it presents unique challenges, due to the complex roadway layout at intersections, involvement of traffic signal controls, and interactions among different types of road users. To address these issues, we present in this paper a novel model called Knowledge-Informed Generative Adversarial Network (KI-GAN), which integrates both traffic signal information and multi-vehicle interactions to predict vehicle trajectories accurately. Additionally, we propose a specialized attention pooling method that accounts for vehicle orientation and proximity at intersections. Based on the SinD dataset, our KI-GAN model is able to achieve an Average Displacement Error (ADE) of 0.05 and a Final Displacement Error (FDE) of 0.12 for a 6-second observation and 6-second prediction cycle. When the prediction window is extended to 9 seconds, the ADE and FDE values are further reduced to 0.11 and 0.26, respectively. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed KI-GAN model in vehicle trajectory prediction under complex scenarios at signalized intersections, which represents a significant advancement in the target field.
GhostNetV3: Exploring the Training Strategies for Compact Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Compact neural networks are specially designed for applications on edge devices with faster inference speed yet modest performance. However, training strategies of compact models are borrowed from that of conventional models at present, which ignores their difference in model capacity and thus may impede the performance of compact models. In this paper, by systematically investigating the impact of different training ingredients, we introduce a strong training strategy for compact models. We find that the appropriate designs of re-parameterization and knowledge distillation are crucial for training high-performance compact models, while some commonly used data augmentations for training conventional models, such as Mixup and CutMix, lead to worse performance. Our experiments on ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that our specialized training strategy for compact models is applicable to various architectures, including GhostNetV2, MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNetV2. Specifically, equipped with our strategy, GhostNetV3 1.3$\times$ achieves a top-1 accuracy of 79.1% with only 269M FLOPs and a latency of 14.46ms on mobile devices, surpassing its ordinarily trained counterpart by a large margin. Moreover, our observation can also be extended to object detection scenarios. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones/tree/master/ghostnetv3_pytorch.
CAGE: Causality-Aware Shapley Value for Global Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having more influence on our everyday lives, it becomes important that AI-based decisions are transparent and explainable. As a consequence, the field of eXplainable AI (or XAI) has become popular in recent years. One way to explain AI models is to elucidate the predictive importance of the input features for the AI model in general, also referred to as global explanations. Inspired by cooperative game theory, Shapley values offer a convenient way for quantifying the feature importance as explanations. However many methods based on Shapley values are built on the assumption of feature independence and often overlook causal relations of the features which could impact their importance for the ML model. Inspired by studies of explanations at the local level, we propose CAGE (Causally-Aware Shapley Values for Global Explanations). In particular, we introduce a novel sampling procedure for out-coalition features that respects the causal relations of the input features. We derive a practical approach that incorporates causal knowledge into global explanation and offers the possibility to interpret the predictive feature importance considering their causal relation. We evaluate our method on synthetic data and real-world data. The explanations from our approach suggest that they are not only more intuitive but also more faithful compared to previous global explanation methods.
Analytical results for uncertainty propagation through trained machine learning regression models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly being used in metrology applications. However, for ML models to be credible in a metrology context they should be accompanied by principled uncertainty quantification. This paper addresses the challenge of uncertainty propagation through trained/fixed machine learning (ML) regression models. Analytical expressions for the mean and variance of the model output are obtained/presented for certain input data distributions and for a variety of ML models. Our results cover several popular ML models including linear regression, penalised linear regression, kernel ridge regression, Gaussian Processes (GPs), support vector machines (SVMs) and relevance vector machines (RVMs). We present numerical experiments in which we validate our methods and compare them with a Monte Carlo approach from a computational efficiency point of view. We also illustrate our methods in the context of a metrology application, namely modelling the state-of-health of lithium-ion cells based upon Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) data
PartiPlay: A Participatory Game Design Kit for Neurodiverse Classrooms
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Play is a central aspect of childhood development, with games as a vital tool to promote it. However, neurodivergent children, especially those in neurodiverse environments, are underserved by HCI games research. Most existing work takes on a top-down approach, disregarding neurodivergent interest for the majority of the design process. Co-design is often proposed as a tool to create truly accessible and inclusive gaming experiences. Nevertheless, co-designing with neurodivergent children within neurodiverse groups brings about unique challenges, such as different communication styles, sensory needs and preferences. Building upon recommendations from prior work in neurodivergent, mixed-ability, and child-led co-design, we propose a concrete participatory game design kit for neurodiverse classrooms: PartiPlay. Moreover, we present preliminary findings from an in-the-wild experiment with the said kit, showcasing its ability to create an inclusive co-design process for neurodiverse groups of children. We aim to provide actionable steps for future participatory design research with neurodiverse children.
Learning Social Navigation from Demonstrations with Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional path-planning techniques treat humans as obstacles. This has changed since robots started to enter human environments. On modern robots, social navigation has become an important aspect of navigation systems. To use learning-based techniques to achieve social navigation, a powerful framework that is capable of representing complex functions with as few data as possible is required. In this study, we benefited from recent advances in deep learning at both global and local planning levels to achieve human-aware navigation on a simulated robot. Two distinct deep models are trained with respective objectives: one for global planning and one for local planning. These models are then employed in the simulated robot. In the end, it has been shown that our model can successfully carry out both global and local planning tasks. We have shown that our system could generate paths that successfully reach targets while avoiding obstacles with better performance compared to feed-forward neural networks.
Milling using two mechatronically coupled robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Industrial robots are commonly used in various industries due to their flexibility. However, their adoption for machining tasks is minimal because of the low dynamic stiffness characteristic of serial kinematic chains. To overcome this problem, we propose coupling two industrial robots at the flanges to form a parallel kinematic machining system. Although parallel kinematic chains are inherently stiffer, one possible disadvantage of the proposed system is that it is heavily overactuated. We perform a modal analysis to show that this may be an advantage, as the redundant degrees of freedom can be used to shift the natural frequencies by applying tension to the coupling module. To demonstrate the validity of our approach, we perform a milling experiment using our coupled system. An external measurement system is used to show that tensioning the coupling module causes a deformation of the system. We further show that this deformation is static over the tool path and can be compensated for.
A Semantic Segmentation-guided Approach for Ground-to-Aerial Image Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Nowadays the accurate geo-localization of ground-view images has an important role across domains as diverse as journalism, forensics analysis, transports, and Earth Observation. This work addresses the problem of matching a query ground-view image with the corresponding satellite image without GPS data. This is done by comparing the features from a ground-view image and a satellite one, innovatively leveraging the corresponding latter's segmentation mask through a three-stream Siamese-like network. The proposed method, Semantic Align Net (SAN), focuses on limited Field-of-View (FoV) and ground panorama images (images with a FoV of 360°). The novelty lies in the fusion of satellite images in combination with their semantic segmentation masks, aimed at ensuring that the model can extract useful features and focus on the significant parts of the images. This work shows how SAN through semantic analysis of images improves the performance on the unlabelled CVUSA dataset for all the tested FoVs.
Improving Composed Image Retrieval via Contrastive Learning with Scaling Positives and Negatives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) task aims to retrieve target images using a composed query consisting of a reference image and a modified text. Advanced methods often utilize contrastive learning as the optimization objective, which benefits from adequate positive and negative examples. However, the triplet for CIR incurs high manual annotation costs, resulting in limited positive examples. Furthermore, existing methods commonly use in-batch negative sampling, which reduces the negative number available for the model. To address the problem of lack of positives, we propose a data generation method by leveraging a multi-modal large language model to construct triplets for CIR. To introduce more negatives during fine-tuning, we design a two-stage fine-tuning framework for CIR, whose second stage introduces plenty of static representations of negatives to optimize the representation space rapidly. The above two improvements can be effectively stacked and designed to be plug-and-play, easily applied to existing CIR models without changing their original architectures. Extensive experiments and ablation analysis demonstrate that our method effectively scales positives and negatives and achieves state-of-the-art results on both FashionIQ and CIRR datasets. In addition, our method also performs well in zero-shot composed image retrieval, providing a new CIR solution for the low-resources scenario. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/BUAADreamer/SPN4CIR.
Single-temporal Supervised Remote Change Detection for Domain Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Change detection is widely applied in remote sensing image analysis. Existing methods require training models separately for each dataset, which leads to poor domain generalization. Moreover, these methods rely heavily on large amounts of high-quality pair-labelled data for training, which is expensive and impractical. In this paper, we propose a multimodal contrastive learning (ChangeCLIP) based on visual-language pre-training for change detection domain generalization. Additionally, we propose a dynamic context optimization for prompt learning. Meanwhile, to address the data dependency issue of existing methods, we introduce a single-temporal and controllable AI-generated training strategy (SAIN). This allows us to train the model using a large number of single-temporal images without image pairs in the real world, achieving excellent generalization. Extensive experiments on series of real change detection datasets validate the superiority and strong generalization of ChangeCLIP, outperforming state-of-the-art change detection methods. Code will be available.
SoccerNet Game State Reconstruction: End-to-End Athlete Tracking and Identification on a Minimap
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Tracking and identifying athletes on the pitch holds a central role in collecting essential insights from the game, such as estimating the total distance covered by players or understanding team tactics. This tracking and identification process is crucial for reconstructing the game state, defined by the athletes' positions and identities on a 2D top-view of the pitch, (i.e. a minimap). However, reconstructing the game state from videos captured by a single camera is challenging. It requires understanding the position of the athletes and the viewpoint of the camera to localize and identify players within the field. In this work, we formalize the task of Game State Reconstruction and introduce SoccerNet-GSR, a novel Game State Reconstruction dataset focusing on football videos. SoccerNet-GSR is composed of 200 video sequences of 30 seconds, annotated with 9.37 million line points for pitch localization and camera calibration, as well as over 2.36 million athlete positions on the pitch with their respective role, team, and jersey number. Furthermore, we introduce GS-HOTA, a novel metric to evaluate game state reconstruction methods. Finally, we propose and release an end-to-end baseline for game state reconstruction, bootstrapping the research on this task. Our experiments show that GSR is a challenging novel task, which opens the field for future research. Our dataset and codebase are publicly available at https://github.com/SoccerNet/sn-gamestate.
LLMs for Cyber Security: New Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are a class of powerful and versatile models that are beneficial to many industries. With the emergence of LLMs, we take a fresh look at cyber security, specifically exploring and summarizing the potential of LLMs in addressing challenging problems in the security and safety domains.
Consisaug: A Consistency-based Augmentation for Polyp Detection in Endoscopy Image Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Colorectal cancer (CRC), which frequently originates from initially benign polyps, remains a significant contributor to global cancer-related mortality. Early and accurate detection of these polyps via colonoscopy is crucial for CRC prevention. However, traditional colonoscopy methods depend heavily on the operator's experience, leading to suboptimal polyp detection rates. Besides, the public database are limited in polyp size and shape diversity. To enhance the available data for polyp detection, we introduce Consisaug, an innovative and effective methodology to augment data that leverages deep learning. We utilize the constraint that when the image is flipped the class label should be equal and the bonding boxes should be consistent. We implement our Consisaug on five public polyp datasets and at three backbones, and the results show the effectiveness of our method.
Approximate Min-Sum Subset Convolution
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Exponential-time approximation has recently gained attention as a practical way to deal with the bitter NP-hardness of well-known optimization problems. We study for the first time the $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximate min-sum subset convolution. This enables exponential-time $(1 + \varepsilon)$-approximation schemes for problems such as minimum-cost $k$-coloring, the prize-collecting Steiner tree, and many others in computational biology. Technically, we present both a weakly- and strongly-polynomial approximation algorithm for this convolution, running in time $\widetilde O(2^n \log M / \varepsilon)$ and $\widetilde O(2^\frac{3n}{2} / \sqrt{\varepsilon})$, respectively. Our work revives research on tropical subset convolutions after nearly two decades.
From Image to UML: First Results of Image Based UML Diagram Generation Using LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In software engineering processes, systems are first specified using a modeling language such as UML. These initial designs are often collaboratively created, many times in meetings where different domain experts use whiteboards, paper or other types of quick supports to create drawings and blueprints that then will need to be formalized. These proper, machine-readable, models are key to ensure models can be part of automated processes (e.g. input of a low-code generation pipeline, a model-based testing system, ...). But going from hand-drawn diagrams to actual models is a time-consuming process that sometimes ends up with such drawings just added as informal images to the software documentation, reducing their value a lot. To avoid this tedious task, we explore the usage of Large Language Models (LLM) to generate the formal representation of (UML) models from a given drawing. More specifically, we have evaluated the capabilities of different LLMs to convert images of UML class diagrams into the actual models represented in the images. While the results are good enough to use such an approach as part of a model-driven engineering pipeline we also highlight some of their current limitations and the need to keep the human in the loop to overcome those limitations.
Short-term wind speed forecasting model based on an attention-gated recurrent neural network and error correction strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The accurate wind speed series forecast is very pivotal to security of grid dispatching and the application of wind power. Nevertheless, on account of their nonlinear and non-stationary nature, their short-term forecast is extremely challenging. Therefore, this dissertation raises one short-term wind speed forecast pattern on the foundation of attention with an improved gated recurrent neural network (AtGRU) and a tactic of error correction. That model uses the AtGRU model as the preliminary predictor and the GRU model as the error corrector. At the beginning, SSA (singular spectrum analysis) is employed in previous wind speed series for lessening the noise. Subsequently, historical wind speed series is going to be used for the predictor training. During this process, the prediction can have certain errors. The sequence of these errors processed by variational modal decomposition (VMD) is used to train the corrector of error. The eventual forecast consequence is just the sum of predictor forecast and error corrector. The proposed SSA-AtGRU-VMD-GRU model outperforms the compared models in three case studies on Woodburn, St. Thomas, and Santa Cruz. It is indicated that the model evidently enhances the correction of the wind speed forecast.
Research on emotionally intelligent dialogue generation based on automatic dialogue system
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Automated dialogue systems are important applications of artificial intelligence, and traditional systems struggle to understand user emotions and provide empathetic feedback. This study integrates emotional intelligence technology into automated dialogue systems and creates a dialogue generation model with emotional intelligence through deep learning and natural language processing techniques. The model can detect and understand a wide range of emotions and specific pain signals in real time, enabling the system to provide empathetic interaction. By integrating the results of the study "Can artificial intelligence detect pain and express pain empathy?", the model's ability to understand the subtle elements of pain empathy has been enhanced, setting higher standards for emotional intelligence dialogue systems. The project aims to provide theoretical understanding and practical suggestions to integrate advanced emotional intelligence capabilities into dialogue systems, thereby improving user experience and interaction quality.
Using Game Engines and Machine Learning to Create Synthetic Satellite Imagery for a Tabletop Verification Exercise
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Satellite imagery is regarded as a great opportunity for citizen-based monitoring of activities of interest. Relevant imagery may however not be available at sufficiently high resolution, quality, or cadence -- let alone be uniformly accessible to open-source analysts. This limits an assessment of the true long-term potential of citizen-based monitoring of nuclear activities using publicly available satellite imagery. In this article, we demonstrate how modern game engines combined with advanced machine-learning techniques can be used to generate synthetic imagery of sites of interest with the ability to choose relevant parameters upon request; these include time of day, cloud cover, season, or level of activity onsite. At the same time, resolution and off-nadir angle can be adjusted to simulate different characteristics of the satellite. While there are several possible use-cases for synthetic imagery, here we focus on its usefulness to support tabletop exercises in which simple monitoring scenarios can be examined to better understand verification capabilities enabled by new satellite constellations and very short revisit times.