OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Optimistic Thompson Sampling for No-Regret Learning in Unknown Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This work tackles the complexities of multi-player scenarios in \emph{unknown games}, where the primary challenge lies in navigating the uncertainty of the environment through bandit feedback alongside strategic decision-making. We introduce Thompson Sampling (TS)-based algorithms that exploit the information of opponents' actions and reward structures, leading to a substantial reduction in experimental budgets -- achieving over tenfold improvements compared to conventional approaches. Notably, our algorithms demonstrate that, given specific reward structures, the regret bound depends logarithmically on the total action space, significantly alleviating the curse of multi-player. Furthermore, we unveil the \emph{Optimism-then-NoRegret} (OTN) framework, a pioneering methodology that seamlessly incorporates our advancements with established algorithms, showcasing its utility in practical scenarios such as traffic routing and radar sensing in the real world.
Visualization Requirements for Business Intelligence Analytics: A Goal-Based, Iterative Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Information visualization plays a key role in business intelligence analytics. With ever larger amounts of data that need to be interpreted, using the right visualizations is crucial in order to understand the underlying patterns and results obtained by analysis algorithms. Despite its importance, defining the right visualization is still a challenging task. Business users are rarely experts in information visualization, and they may not exactly know the most adequate visualization tools or patterns for their goals. Consequently, misinterpreted graphs and wrong results can be obtained, leading to missed opportunities and significant losses for companies. The main problem underneath is a lack of tools and methodologies that allow non-expert users to define their visualization and data analysis goals in business terms. In order to tackle this problem, we present an iterative goal-oriented approach based on the i* language for the automatic derivation of data visualizations. Our approach links non-expert user requirements to the data to be analyzed, choosing the most suited visualization techniques in a semi-automatic way. The great advantage of our proposal is that we provide non-expert users with the best suited visualizations according to their information needs and their data with little effort and without requiring expertise in information visualization.
Can AI and humans genuinely communicate?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Can AI and humans genuinely communicate? In this article, after giving some background and motivating my proposal (sections 1 to 3), I explore a way to answer this question that I call the "mental-behavioral methodology" (sections 4 and 5). This methodology follows the following three steps: First, spell out what mental capacities are sufficient for human communication (as opposed to communication more generally). Second, spell out the experimental paradigms required to test whether a behavior exhibits these capacities. Third, apply or adapt these paradigms to test whether an AI displays the relevant behaviors. If the first two steps are successfully completed, and if the AI passes the tests with human-like results, this constitutes evidence that this AI and humans can genuinely communicate. This mental-behavioral methodology has the advantage that we don't need to understand the workings of black-box algorithms, such as standard deep neural networks. This is comparable to the fact that we don't need to understand how human brains work to know that humans can genuinely communicate. This methodology also has its disadvantages and I will discuss some of them (section 6).
On Formally Undecidable Traits of Intelligent Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Building on work by Alfonseca et al. (2021), we study the conditions necessary for it to be logically possible to prove that an arbitrary artificially intelligent machine will exhibit certain behavior. To do this, we develop a formalism like -- but mathematically distinct from -- the theory of formal languages and their properties. Our formalism affords a precise means for not only talking about the traits we desire of machines (such as them being intelligent, contained, moral, and so forth), but also for detailing the conditions necessary for it to be logically possible to decide whether a given arbitrary machine possesses such a trait or not. Contrary to Alfonseca et al.'s (2021) results, we find that Rice's theorem from computability theory cannot in general be used to determine whether an arbitrary machine possesses a given trait or not. Therefore, it is not necessarily the case that deciding whether an arbitrary machine is intelligent, contained, moral, and so forth is logically impossible.
The Manifold Density Function: An Intrinsic Method for the Validation of Manifold Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce the manifold density function, which is an intrinsic method to validate manifold learning techniques. Our approach adapts and extends Ripley's $K$-function, and categorizes in an unsupervised setting the extent to which an output of a manifold learning algorithm captures the structure of a latent manifold. Our manifold density function generalizes to broad classes of Riemannian manifolds. In particular, we extend the manifold density function to general two-manifolds using the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, and demonstrate that the manifold density function for hypersurfaces is well approximated using the first Laplacian eigenvalue. We prove desirable convergence and robustness properties.
Reducing Texture Bias of Deep Neural Networks via Edge Enhancing Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image processing tend to focus on localized texture patterns, commonly referred to as texture bias. While most of the previous works in the literature focus on the task of image classification, we go beyond this and study the texture bias of CNNs in semantic segmentation. In this work, we propose to train CNNs on pre-processed images with less texture to reduce the texture bias. Therein, the challenge is to suppress image texture while preserving shape information. To this end, we utilize edge enhancing diffusion (EED), an anisotropic image diffusion method initially introduced for image compression, to create texture reduced duplicates of existing datasets. Extensive numerical studies are performed with both CNNs and vision transformer models trained on original data and EED-processed data from the Cityscapes dataset and the CARLA driving simulator. We observe strong texture-dependence of CNNs and moderate texture-dependence of transformers. Training CNNs on EED-processed images enables the models to become completely ignorant with respect to texture, demonstrating resilience with respect to texture re-introduction to any degree. Additionally we analyze the performance reduction in depth on a level of connected components in the semantic segmentation and study the influence of EED pre-processing on domain generalization as well as adversarial robustness.
Distribution-Free Rates in Neyman-Pearson Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the problem of Neyman-Pearson classification which models unbalanced classification settings where error w.r.t. a distribution $μ_1$ is to be minimized subject to low error w.r.t. a different distribution $μ_0$. Given a fixed VC class $\mathcal{H}$ of classifiers to be minimized over, we provide a full characterization of possible distribution-free rates, i.e., minimax rates over the space of all pairs $(μ_0, μ_1)$. The rates involve a dichotomy between hard and easy classes $\mathcal{H}$ as characterized by a simple geometric condition, a three-points-separation condition, loosely related to VC dimension.
Irreducible Markov Chains on spaces of graphs with fixed degree-color sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

We study a colored generalization of the famous simple-switch Markov chain for sampling the set of graphs with a fixed degree sequence. Here we consider the space of graphs with colored vertices, in which we fix the degree sequence and another statistic arising from the vertex coloring, and prove that the set can be connected with simple color-preserving switches or moves. These moves form a basis for defining an irreducible Markov chain necessary for testing statistical model fit to block-partitioned network data. Our methods further generalize well-known algebraic results from the 1990s: namely, that the corresponding moves can be used to construct a regular triangulation for a generalization of the second hypersimplex. On the other hand, in contrast to the monochromatic case, we show that for simple graphs, the 1-norm of the moves necessary to connect the space increases with the number of colors.
DeepATLAS: One-Shot Localization for Biomedical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the DeepATLAS foundational model for localization tasks in the domain of high-dimensional biomedical data. Upon convergence of the proposed self-supervised objective, a pretrained model maps an input to an anatomically-consistent embedding from which any point or set of points (e.g., boxes or segmentations) may be identified in a one-shot or few-shot approach. As a representative benchmark, a DeepATLAS model pretrained on a comprehensive cohort of 51,000+ unlabeled 3D computed tomography exams yields high one-shot segmentation performance on over 50 anatomic structures across four different external test sets, either matching or exceeding the performance of a standard supervised learning model. Further improvements in accuracy can be achieved by adding a small amount of labeled data using either a semisupervised or more conventional fine-tuning strategy.
Scalable Graph Self-Supervised Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In regularization Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods for graphs, computational complexity increases with the number of nodes in graphs and embedding dimensions. To mitigate the scalability of non-contrastive graph SSL, we propose a novel approach to reduce the cost of computing the covariance matrix for the pre-training loss function with volume-maximization terms. Our work focuses on reducing the cost associated with the loss computation via graph node or dimension sampling. We provide theoretical insight into why dimension sampling would result in accurate loss computations and support it with mathematical derivation of the novel approach. We develop our experimental setup on the node-level graph prediction tasks, where SSL pre-training has shown to be difficult due to the large size of real world graphs. Our experiments demonstrate that the cost associated with the loss computation can be reduced via node or dimension sampling without lowering the downstream performance. Our results demonstrate that sampling mostly results in improved downstream performance. Ablation studies and experimental analysis are provided to untangle the role of the different factors in the experimental setup.
Reasoning over Uncertain Text by Generative Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper considers the challenges Large Language Models (LLMs) face when reasoning over text that includes information involving uncertainty explicitly quantified via probability values. This type of reasoning is relevant to a variety of contexts ranging from everyday conversations to medical decision-making. Despite improvements in the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, they still exhibit significant difficulties when it comes to probabilistic reasoning. To deal with this problem, we introduce the Bayesian Linguistic Inference Dataset (BLInD), a new dataset specifically designed to test the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We use BLInD to find out the limitations of LLMs for tasks involving probabilistic reasoning. In addition, we present several prompting strategies that map the problem to different formal representations, including Python code, probabilistic algorithms, and probabilistic logical programming. We conclude by providing an evaluation of our methods on BLInD and an adaptation of a causal reasoning question-answering dataset. Our empirical results highlight the effectiveness of our proposed strategies for multiple LLMs.
How to Train Data-Efficient LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The training of large language models (LLMs) is expensive. In this paper, we study data-efficient approaches for pre-training LLMs, i.e., techniques that aim to optimize the Pareto frontier of model quality and training resource/data consumption. We seek to understand the tradeoffs associated with data selection routines based on (i) expensive-to-compute data-quality estimates, and (ii) maximization of coverage and diversity-based measures in the feature space. Our first technique, Ask-LLM, leverages the zero-shot reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned LLMs to directly assess the quality of a training example. To target coverage, we propose Density sampling, which models the data distribution to select a diverse sample. In our comparison of 19 samplers, involving hundreds of evaluation tasks and pre-training runs, we find that Ask-LLM and Density are the best methods in their respective categories. Coverage sampling can recover the performance of the full data, while models trained on Ask-LLM data consistently outperform full-data training -- even when we reject 90% of the original dataset, while converging up to 70% faster.
Pheno-Robot: An Auto-Digital Modelling System for In-Situ Phenotyping in the Field
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate reconstruction of plant models for phenotyping analysis is critical for optimising sustainable agricultural practices in precision agriculture. Traditional laboratory-based phenotyping, while valuable, falls short of understanding how plants grow under uncontrolled conditions. Robotic technologies offer a promising avenue for large-scale, direct phenotyping in real-world environments. This study explores the deployment of emerging robotics and digital technology in plant phenotyping to improve performance and efficiency. Three critical functional modules: environmental understanding, robotic motion planning, and in-situ phenotyping, are introduced to automate the entire process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in agricultural environments. The pheno-robot system autonomously collects high-quality data by navigating around plants. In addition, the in-situ modelling model reconstructs high-quality plant models from the data collected by the robot. The developed robotic system shows high efficiency and robustness, demonstrating its potential to advance plant science in real-world agricultural environments.
A System-Level Dynamic Binary Translator using Automatically-Learned Translation Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2024
Year: 2024

System-level emulators have been used extensively for system design, debugging and evaluation. They work by providing a system-level virtual machine to support a guest operating system (OS) running on a platform with the same or different native OS that uses the same or different instruction-set architecture. For such system-level emulation, dynamic binary translation (DBT) is one of the core technologies. A recently proposed learning-based DBT approach has shown a significantly improved performance with a higher quality of translated code using automatically learned translation rules. However, it has only been applied to user-level emulation, and not yet to system-level emulation. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of applying this approach to improve system-level emulation, and use QEMU to build a prototype. ... To achieve better performance, we leverage several optimizations that include coordination overhead reduction to reduce the overhead of each coordination, and coordination elimination and code scheduling to reduce the coordination frequency. Experimental results show that it can achieve an average of 1.36X speedup over QEMU 6.1 with negligible coordination overhead in the system emulation mode using SPEC CINT2006 as application benchmarks and 1.15X on real-world applications.
An Analysis of Language Frequency and Error Correction for Esperanto
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Current Grammar Error Correction (GEC) initiatives tend to focus on major languages, with less attention given to low-resource languages like Esperanto. In this article, we begin to bridge this gap by first conducting a comprehensive frequency analysis using the Eo-GP dataset, created explicitly for this purpose. We then introduce the Eo-GEC dataset, derived from authentic user cases and annotated with fine-grained linguistic details for error identification. Leveraging GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, our experiments show that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5 in both automated and human evaluations, highlighting its efficacy in addressing Esperanto's grammatical peculiarities and illustrating the potential of advanced language models to enhance GEC strategies for less commonly studied languages.
On the adversarial robustness of Locality-Sensitive Hashing in Hamming space
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Locality-sensitive hashing~[Indyk,Motwani'98] is a classical data structure for approximate nearest neighbor search. It allows, after a close to linear time preprocessing of the input dataset, to find an approximately nearest neighbor of any fixed query in sublinear time in the dataset size. The resulting data structure is randomized and succeeds with high probability for every fixed query. In many modern applications of nearest neighbor search the queries are chosen adaptively. In this paper, we study the robustness of the locality-sensitive hashing to adaptive queries in Hamming space. We present a simple adversary that can, under mild assumptions on the initial point set, provably find a query to the approximate near neighbor search data structure that the data structure fails on. Crucially, our adaptive algorithm finds the hard query exponentially faster than random sampling.
Align before Attend: Aligning Visual and Textual Features for Multimodal Hateful Content Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal hateful content detection is a challenging task that requires complex reasoning across visual and textual modalities. Therefore, creating a meaningful multimodal representation that effectively captures the interplay between visual and textual features through intermediate fusion is critical. Conventional fusion techniques are unable to attend to the modality-specific features effectively. Moreover, most studies exclusively concentrated on English and overlooked other low-resource languages. This paper proposes a context-aware attention framework for multimodal hateful content detection and assesses it for both English and non-English languages. The proposed approach incorporates an attention layer to meaningfully align the visual and textual features. This alignment enables selective focus on modality-specific features before fusing them. We evaluate the proposed approach on two benchmark hateful meme datasets, viz. MUTE (Bengali code-mixed) and MultiOFF (English). Evaluation results demonstrate our proposed approach's effectiveness with F1-scores of $69.7$% and $70.3$% for the MUTE and MultiOFF datasets. The scores show approximately $2.5$% and $3.2$% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art systems on these datasets. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/eftekhar-hossain/Bengali-Hateful-Memes.
MC-DBN: A Deep Belief Network-Based Model for Modality Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in multi-modal artificial intelligence (AI) have revolutionized the fields of stock market forecasting and heart rate monitoring. Utilizing diverse data sources can substantially improve prediction accuracy. Nonetheless, additional data may not always align with the original dataset. Interpolation methods are commonly utilized for handling missing values in modal data, though they may exhibit limitations in the context of sparse information. Addressing this challenge, we propose a Modality Completion Deep Belief Network-Based Model (MC-DBN). This approach utilizes implicit features of complete data to compensate for gaps between itself and additional incomplete data. It ensures that the enhanced multi-modal data closely aligns with the dynamic nature of the real world to enhance the effectiveness of the model. We conduct evaluations of the MC-DBN model in two datasets from the stock market forecasting and heart rate monitoring domains. Comprehensive experiments showcase the model's capacity to bridge the semantic divide present in multi-modal data, subsequently enhancing its performance. The source code is available at: https://github.com/logan-0623/DBN-generate
Co-Designing a wiki-based community knowledge management system for personal science
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Personal science is the practice of addressing personally relevant health questions through self-research. Implementing personal science can be challenging, due to the need to develop and adopt research protocols, tools, and methods. While online communities can provide valuable peer support, tools for systematically accessing community knowledge are lacking. The objective of this study is to apply a participatory design process involving a community of personal science practitioners to develop a peer-produced knowledge base that supports the needs of practitioners as consumers and contributors of knowledge. The process led to the development of the Personal Science Wiki, an open repository for documenting and accessing individual self-tracking projects while facilitating the establishment of consensus knowledge. After initial design iterations and a field testing phase, we performed a user study with 21 participants to test and improve the platform, and to explore suitable information architectures. The study deepened our understanding of barriers to scaling the personal science community, established an infrastructure for knowledge management actively used by the community, and provided lessons on challenges, information needs, representations, and architectures to support individuals with their personal health inquiries
Large-scale Benchmarking of Metaphor-based Optimization Heuristics
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The number of proposed iterative optimization heuristics is growing steadily, and with this growth, there have been many points of discussion within the wider community. One particular criticism that is raised towards many new algorithms is their focus on metaphors used to present the method, rather than emphasizing their potential algorithmic contributions. Several studies into popular metaphor-based algorithms have highlighted these problems, even showcasing algorithms that are functionally equivalent to older existing methods. Unfortunately, this detailed approach is not scalable to the whole set of metaphor-based algorithms. Because of this, we investigate ways in which benchmarking can shed light on these algorithms. To this end, we run a set of 294 algorithm implementations on the BBOB function suite. We investigate how the choice of the budget, the performance measure, or other aspects of experimental design impact the comparison of these algorithms. Our results emphasize why benchmarking is a key step in expanding our understanding of the algorithm space, and what challenges still need to be overcome to fully gauge the potential improvements to the state-of-the-art hiding behind the metaphors.