OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fair Knowledge Tracing in Second Language Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In second-language acquisition, predictive modeling aids educators in implementing diverse teaching strategies, attracting significant research attention. However, while model accuracy is widely explored, model fairness remains under-examined. Model fairness ensures equitable treatment of groups, preventing unintentional biases based on attributes such as gender, ethnicity, or economic background. A fair model should produce impartial outcomes that do not systematically disadvantage any group. This study evaluates the fairness of two predictive models using the Duolingo dataset's en\_es (English learners speaking Spanish), es\_en (Spanish learners speaking English), and fr\_en (French learners speaking English) tracks. We analyze: 1. Algorithmic fairness across platforms (iOS, Android, Web). 2. Algorithmic fairness between developed and developing countries. Key findings include: 1. Deep learning outperforms machine learning in second-language knowledge tracing due to improved accuracy and fairness. 2. Both models favor mobile users over non-mobile users. 3. Machine learning exhibits stronger bias against developing countries compared to deep learning. 4. Deep learning strikes a better balance of fairness and accuracy in the en\_es and es\_en tracks, while machine learning is more suitable for fr\_en. This study highlights the importance of addressing fairness in predictive models to ensure equitable educational strategies across platforms and regions.
BRIDGE: Bundle Recommendation via Instruction-Driven Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Bundle recommendation aims to suggest a set of interconnected items to users. However, diverse interaction types and sparse interaction matrices often pose challenges for previous approaches in accurately predicting user-bundle adoptions. Inspired by the distant supervision strategy and generative paradigm, we propose BRIDGE, a novel framework for bundle recommendation. It consists of two main components namely the correlation-based item clustering and the pseudo bundle generation modules. Inspired by the distant supervision approach, the former is to generate more auxiliary information, e.g., instructive item clusters, for training without using external data. This information is subsequently aggregated with collaborative signals from user historical interactions to create pseudo `ideal' bundles. This capability allows BRIDGE to explore all aspects of bundles, rather than being limited to existing real-world bundles. It effectively bridging the gap between user imagination and predefined bundles, hence improving the bundle recommendation performance. Experimental results validate the superiority of our models over state-of-the-art ranking-based methods across five benchmark datasets.
SAR Despeckling via Log-Yeo-Johnson Transformation and Sparse Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images are widely used in remote sensing due to their all-weather, all-day imaging capabilities. However, SAR images are highly susceptible to noise, particularly speckle noise, caused by the coherent imaging process, which severely degrades image quality. This has driven increasing research interest in SAR despeckling. Sparse representation-based denoising has been extensively applied in natural image processing, yet SAR despeckling requires addressing non-Gaussian noise and ensuring sparsity in the transform domain. In this work, we propose an innovative SAR despeckling approach grounded in compressive sensing theory. By applying the Log-Yeo-Johnson transformation, we convert gamma-distributed noise into an approximate Gaussian distribution, facilitating sparse representation. The method incorporates noise and sparsity priors, leveraging a non-local sparse representation through auxiliary matrices: one capturing varying noise characteristics across regions and the other encoding adaptive sparsity information.
Exact Acceleration of Subgraph Graph Neural Networks by Eliminating Computation Redundancy
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a prevalent framework for graph tasks. Many recent studies have proposed the use of graph convolution methods over the numerous subgraphs of each graph, a concept known as subgraph graph neural networks (subgraph GNNs), to enhance GNNs' ability to distinguish non-isomorphic graphs. To maximize the expressiveness, subgraph GNNs often require each subgraph to have equal size to the original graph. Despite their impressive performance, subgraph GNNs face challenges due to the vast number and large size of subgraphs which lead to a surge in training data, resulting in both storage and computational inefficiencies. In response to this problem, this paper introduces Ego-Nets-Fit-All (ENFA), a model that uniformly takes the smaller ego nets as subgraphs, thereby providing greater storage and computational efficiency, while at the same time guarantees identical outputs to the original subgraph GNNs even taking the whole graph as subgraphs. The key is to identify and eliminate the redundant computation among subgraphs. For example, a node $v_i$ may appear in multiple subgraphs but is far away from all of their centers (the unsymmetric part between subgraphs). Therefore, its first few rounds of message passing within each subgraph can be computed once in the original graph instead of being computed multiple times within each subgraph. Such strategy enables our ENFA to accelerate subgraph GNNs in an exact way, unlike previous sampling approaches that often lose the performance. Extensive experiments across various datasets reveal that compared with the conventional subgraph GNNs, ENFA can reduce storage space by 29.0% to 84.5% and improve training efficiency by up to 1.66x.
XSema: A Novel Framework for Semantic Extraction of Cross-chain Transactions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

As the number of blockchain platforms continues to grow, the independence of these networks poses challenges for transferring assets and information across chains. Cross-chain bridge technology has emerged to address this issue, establishing communication protocols to facilitate cross-chain interaction of assets and information, thereby enhancing user experience. However, the complexity of cross-chain transactions increases the difficulty of security regulation, rendering traditional single-chain detection methods inadequate for cross-chain scenarios. Therefore, understanding cross-chain transaction semantics is crucial, as it forms the foundation for cross-chain security detection tasks. Although there are existing methods for extracting transaction semantics specifically for single chains, these approaches often overlook the unique characteristics of cross-chain scenarios, limiting their applicability. This paper introduces XSema, a novel cross-chain semantic extraction framework grounded in asset transfer and message-passing, designed specifically for cross-chain contexts. Experimental results demonstrate that XSema effectively distinguishes between cross-chain and non-cross-chain transactions, surpassing existing methods by over 9% for the generality metric and over 10% for the generalization metric. Furthermore, we analyze the underlying asset transfer patterns and message-passing event logs associated with cross-chain transactions. We offer new insights into the coexistence of multiple blockchains and the cross-chain ecosystem.
Accelerating Post-Tornado Disaster Assessment Using Advanced Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Post-disaster assessments of buildings and infrastructure are crucial for both immediate recovery efforts and long-term resilience planning. This research introduces an innovative approach to automating post-disaster assessments through advanced deep learning models. Our proposed system employs state-of-the-art computer vision techniques (YOLOv11 and ResNet50) to rapidly analyze images and videos from disaster sites, extracting critical information about building characteristics, including damage level of structural components and the extent of damage. Our experimental results show promising performance, with ResNet50 achieving 90.28% accuracy and an inference time of 1529ms per image on multiclass damage classification. This study contributes to the field of disaster management by offering a scalable, efficient, and objective tool for post-disaster analysis, potentially capable of transforming how communities and authorities respond to and learn from catastrophic events.
Enhancing Online Continual Learning with Plug-and-Play State Space Model and Class-Conditional Mixture of Discretization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Online continual learning (OCL) seeks to learn new tasks from data streams that appear only once, while retaining knowledge of previously learned tasks. Most existing methods rely on replay, focusing on enhancing memory retention through regularization or distillation. However, they often overlook the adaptability of the model, limiting the ability to learn generalizable and discriminative features incrementally from online training data. To address this, we introduce a plug-and-play module, S6MOD, which can be integrated into most existing methods and directly improve adaptability. Specifically, S6MOD introduces an extra branch after the backbone, where a mixture of discretization selectively adjusts parameters in a selective state space model, enriching selective scan patterns such that the model can adaptively select the most sensitive discretization method for current dynamics. We further design a class-conditional routing algorithm for dynamic, uncertainty-based adjustment and implement a contrastive discretization loss to optimize it. Extensive experiments combining our module with various models demonstrate that S6MOD significantly enhances model adaptability, leading to substantial performance gains and achieving the state-of-the-art results.
Accelerating AIGC Services with Latent Action Diffusion Scheduling in Edge Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has gained significant popularity for creating diverse content. Current AIGC models primarily focus on content quality within a centralized framework, resulting in a high service delay and negative user experiences. However, not only does the workload of an AIGC task depend on the AIGC model's complexity rather than the amount of data, but the large model and its multi-layer encoder structure also result in a huge demand for computational and memory resources. These unique characteristics pose new challenges in its modeling, deployment, and scheduling at edge networks. Thus, we model an offloading problem among edges for providing real AIGC services and propose LAD-TS, a novel Latent Action Diffusion-based Task Scheduling method that orchestrates multiple edge servers for expedited AIGC services. The LAD-TS generates a near-optimal offloading decision by leveraging the diffusion model's conditional generation capability and the reinforcement learning's environment interaction ability, thereby minimizing the service delays under multiple resource constraints. Meanwhile, a latent action diffusion strategy is designed to guide decision generation by utilizing historical action probability, enabling rapid achievement of near-optimal decisions. Furthermore, we develop DEdgeAI, a prototype edge system with a refined AIGC model deployment to implement and evaluate our LAD-TS method. DEdgeAI provides a real AIGC service for users, demonstrating up to 29.18% shorter service delays than the current five representative AIGC platforms. We release our open-source code at https://github.com/ChangfuXu/DEdgeAI/.
SDM-Car: A Dataset for Small and Dim Moving Vehicles Detection in Satellite Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vehicle detection and tracking in satellite video is essential in remote sensing (RS) applications. However, upon the statistical analysis of existing datasets, we find that the dim vehicles with low radiation intensity and limited contrast against the background are rarely annotated, which leads to the poor effect of existing approaches in detecting moving vehicles under low radiation conditions. In this paper, we address the challenge by building a \textbf{S}mall and \textbf{D}im \textbf{M}oving Cars (SDM-Car) dataset with a multitude of annotations for dim vehicles in satellite videos, which is collected by the Luojia 3-01 satellite and comprises 99 high-quality videos. Furthermore, we propose a method based on image enhancement and attention mechanisms to improve the detection accuracy of dim vehicles, serving as a benchmark for evaluating the dataset. Finally, we assess the performance of several representative methods on SDM-Car and present insightful findings. The dataset is openly available at https://github.com/TanedaM/SDM-Car.
U-Mamba-Net: A highly efficient Mamba-based U-net style network for noisy and reverberant speech separation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

The topic of speech separation involves separating mixed speech with multiple overlapping speakers into several streams, with each stream containing speech from only one speaker. Many highly effective models have emerged and proliferated rapidly over time. However, the size and computational load of these models have also increased accordingly. This is a disaster for the community, as researchers need more time and computational resources to reproduce and compare existing models. In this paper, we propose U-mamba-net: a lightweight Mamba-based U-style model for speech separation in complex environments. Mamba is a state space sequence model that incorporates feature selection capabilities. U-style network is a fully convolutional neural network whose symmetric contracting and expansive paths are able to learn multi-resolution features. In our work, Mamba serves as a feature filter, alternating with U-Net. We test the proposed model on Libri2mix. The results show that U-Mamba-Net achieves improved performance with quite low computational cost.
Band Prompting Aided SAR and Multi-Spectral Data Fusion Framework for Local Climate Zone Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Local climate zone (LCZ) classification is of great value for understanding the complex interactions between urban development and local climate. Recent studies have increasingly focused on the fusion of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multi-spectral data to improve LCZ classification performance. However, it remains challenging due to the distinct physical properties of these two types of data and the absence of effective fusion guidance. In this paper, a novel band prompting aided data fusion framework is proposed for LCZ classification, namely BP-LCZ, which utilizes textual prompts associated with band groups to guide the model in learning the physical attributes of different bands and semantics of various categories inherent in SAR and multi-spectral data to augment the fused feature, thus enhancing LCZ classification performance. Specifically, a band group prompting (BGP) strategy is introduced to align the visual representation effectively at the level of band groups, which also facilitates a more adequate extraction of semantic information of different bands with textual information. In addition, a multivariate supervised matrix (MSM) based training strategy is proposed to alleviate the problem of positive and negative sample confusion by completing the supervised information. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed data fusion framework.
RaCMC: Residual-Aware Compensation Network with Multi-Granularity Constraints for Fake News Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multimodal fake news detection aims to automatically identify real or fake news, thereby mitigating the adverse effects caused by such misinformation. Although prevailing approaches have demonstrated their effectiveness, challenges persist in cross-modal feature fusion and refinement for classification. To address this, we present a residual-aware compensation network with multi-granularity constraints (RaCMC) for fake news detection, that aims to sufficiently interact and fuse cross-modal features while amplifying the differences between real and fake news. First, a multiscale residual-aware compensation module is designed to interact and fuse features at different scales, and ensure both the consistency and exclusivity of feature interaction, thus acquiring high-quality features. Second, a multi-granularity constraints module is implemented to limit the distribution of both the news overall and the image-text pairs within the news, thus amplifying the differences between real and fake news at the news and feature levels. Finally, a dominant feature fusion reasoning module is developed to comprehensively evaluate news authenticity from the perspectives of both consistency and inconsistency. Experiments on three public datasets, including Weibo17, Politifact and GossipCop, reveal the superiority of the proposed method.
UNet--: Memory-Efficient and Feature-Enhanced Network Architecture based on U-Net with Reduced Skip-Connections
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

U-Net models with encoder, decoder, and skip-connections components have demonstrated effectiveness in a variety of vision tasks. The skip-connections transmit fine-grained information from the encoder to the decoder. It is necessary to maintain the feature maps used by the skip-connections in memory before the decoding stage. Therefore, they are not friendly to devices with limited resource. In this paper, we propose a universal method and architecture to reduce the memory consumption and meanwhile generate enhanced feature maps to improve network performance. To this end, we design a simple but effective Multi-Scale Information Aggregation Module (MSIAM) in the encoder and an Information Enhancement Module (IEM) in the decoder. The MSIAM aggregates multi-scale feature maps into single-scale with less memory. After that, the aggregated feature maps can be expanded and enhanced to multi-scale feature maps by the IEM. By applying the proposed method on NAFNet, a SOTA model in the field of image restoration, we design a memory-efficient and feature-enhanced network architecture, UNet--. The memory demand by the skip-connections in the UNet-- is reduced by 93.3%, while the performance is improved compared to NAFNet. Furthermore, we show that our proposed method can be generalized to multiple visual tasks, with consistent improvements in both memory consumption and network accuracy compared to the existing efficient architectures.
Improved Feature Generating Framework for Transductive Zero-shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Feature Generative Adversarial Networks have emerged as powerful generative models in producing high-quality representations of unseen classes within the scope of Zero-shot Learning (ZSL). This paper delves into the pivotal influence of unseen class priors within the framework of transductive ZSL (TZSL) and illuminates the finding that even a marginal prior bias can result in substantial accuracy declines. Our extensive analysis uncovers that this inefficacy fundamentally stems from the utilization of an unconditional unseen discriminator - a core component in existing TZSL. We further establish that the detrimental effects of this component are inevitable unless the generator perfectly fits class-specific distributions. Building on these insights, we introduce our Improved Feature Generation Framework, termed I-VAEGAN, which incorporates two novel components: Pseudo-conditional Feature Adversarial (PFA) learning and Variational Embedding Regression (VER). PFA circumvents the need for prior estimation by explicitly injecting the predicted semantics as pseudo conditions for unseen classes premised by precise semantic regression. Meanwhile, VER utilizes reconstructive pre-training to learn class statistics, obtaining better semantic regression. Our I-VAEGAN achieves state-of-the-art TZSL accuracy across various benchmarks and priors. Our code would be released upon acceptance.
Towards understanding how attention mechanism works in deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Attention mechanism has been extensively integrated within mainstream neural network architectures, such as Transformers and graph attention networks. Yet, its underlying working principles remain somewhat elusive. What is its essence? Are there any connections between it and traditional machine learning algorithms? In this study, we inspect the process of computing similarity using classic metrics and vector space properties in manifold learning, clustering, and supervised learning. We identify the key characteristics of similarity computation and information propagation in these methods and demonstrate that the self-attention mechanism in deep learning adheres to the same principles but operates more flexibly and adaptively. We decompose the self-attention mechanism into a learnable pseudo-metric function and an information propagation process based on similarity computation. We prove that the self-attention mechanism converges to a drift-diffusion process through continuous modeling provided the pseudo-metric is a transformation of a metric and certain reasonable assumptions hold. This equation could be transformed into a heat equation under a new metric. In addition, we give a first-order analysis of attention mechanism with a general pseudo-metric function. This study aids in understanding the effects and principle of attention mechanism through physical intuition. Finally, we propose a modified attention mechanism called metric-attention by leveraging the concept of metric learning to facilitate the ability to learn desired metrics more effectively. Experimental results demonstrate that it outperforms self-attention regarding training efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.
An Optimized Path Planning of Manipulator Using Spline Curves and Real Quantifier Elimination Based on Comprehensive Gröbner Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents an advanced method for addressing the inverse kinematics and optimal path planning challenges in robot manipulators. The inverse kinematics problem involves determining the joint angles for a given position and orientation of the end-effector. Furthermore, the path planning problem seeks a trajectory between two points. Traditional approaches in computer algebra have utilized Gröbner basis computations to solve these problems, offering a global solution but at a high computational cost. To overcome the issue, the present authors have proposed a novel approach that employs the Comprehensive Gröbner System (CGS) and CGS-based quantifier elimination (CGS-QE) methods to efficiently solve the inverse kinematics problem and certify the existence of solutions for trajectory planning. This paper extends these methods by incorporating smooth curves via cubic spline interpolation for path planning and optimizing joint configurations using shortest path algorithms to minimize the sum of joint configurations along a trajectory. This approach significantly enhances the manipulator's ability to navigate complex paths and optimize movement sequences.