OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Temporal Graph Neural Network-Powered Paper Recommendation on Dynamic Citation Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Due to the rapid growth of scientific publications, identifying all related reference articles in the literature has become increasingly challenging yet highly demanding. Existing methods primarily assess candidate publications from a static perspective, focusing on the content of articles and their structural information, such as citation relationships. There is a lack of research regarding how to account for the evolving impact among papers on their embeddings. Toward this goal, this paper introduces a temporal dimension to paper recommendation strategies. The core idea is to continuously update a paper's embedding when new citation relationships appear, enhancing its relevance for future recommendations. Whenever a citation relationship is added to the literature upon the publication of a paper, the embeddings of the two related papers are updated through a Temporal Graph Neural Network (TGN). A learnable memory update module based on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is utilized to study the evolution of the embedding of a paper in order to predict its reference impact in a future timestamp. Such a TGN-based model learns a pattern of how people's views of the paper may evolve, aiming to guide paper recommendations more precisely. Extensive experiments on an open citation network dataset, including 313,278 articles from https://paperswithcode.com/about PaperWithCode, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Showing the Receipts: Understanding the Modern Ransomware Ecosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Ransomware attacks continue to wreak havoc across the globe, with public reports of total ransomware payments topping billions of dollars annually. While the use of cryptocurrency presents an avenue to understand the tactics of ransomware actors, to date published research has been constrained by relatively limited public datasets of ransomware payments. We present novel techniques to identify ransomware payments with low false positives, classifying nearly \$700 million in previously-unreported ransomware payments. We publish the largest public dataset of over \$900 million in ransomware payments -- several times larger than any existing public dataset. We then leverage this expanded dataset to present an analysis focused on understanding the activities of ransomware groups over time. This provides unique insights into ransomware behavior and a corpus for future study of ransomware cybercriminal activity.
HEAD: A Bandwidth-Efficient Cooperative Perception Approach for Heterogeneous Connected and Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In cooperative perception studies, there is often a trade-off between communication bandwidth and perception performance. While current feature fusion solutions are known for their excellent object detection performance, transmitting the entire sets of intermediate feature maps requires substantial bandwidth. Furthermore, these fusion approaches are typically limited to vehicles that use identical detection models. Our goal is to develop a solution that supports cooperative perception across vehicles equipped with different modalities of sensors. This method aims to deliver improved perception performance compared to late fusion techniques, while achieving precision similar to the state-of-art intermediate fusion, but requires an order of magnitude less bandwidth. We propose HEAD, a method that fuses features from the classification and regression heads in 3D object detection networks. Our method is compatible with heterogeneous detection networks such as LiDAR PointPillars, SECOND, VoxelNet, and camera Bird's-eye View (BEV) Encoder. Given the naturally smaller feature size in the detection heads, we design a self-attention mechanism to fuse the classification head and a complementary feature fusion layer to fuse the regression head. Our experiments, comprehensively evaluated on the V2V4Real and OPV2V datasets, demonstrate that HEAD is a fusion method that effectively balances communication bandwidth and perception performance.
Towards cloud-native scientific workflow management
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Cloud-native is an approach to building and running scalable applications in modern cloud infrastructures, with the Kubernetes container orchestration platform being often considered as a fundamental cloud-native building block. In this paper, we evaluate alternative execution models for scientific workflows in Kubernetes. We compare the simplest job-based model, its variant with task clustering, and finally we propose a cloud-native model based on microservices comprising auto-scalable worker-pools. We implement the proposed models in the HyperFlow workflow management system, and evaluate them using a large Montage workflow on a Kubernetes cluster. The results indicate that the proposed cloud-native worker-pools execution model achieves best performance in terms of average cluster utilization, resulting in a nearly 20\% improvement of the workflow makespan compared to the best-performing job-based model. However, better performance comes at the cost of significantly higher complexity of the implementation and maintenance. We believe that our experiments provide a valuable insight into the performance, advantages and disadvantages of alternative cloud-native execution models for scientific workflows.
Bio-inspired circular soft actuators for simulating defecation process of human rectum
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Soft robots have found extensive applications in the medical field, particularly in rehabilitation exercises, assisted grasping, and artificial organs. Despite significant advancements in simulating various components of the digestive system, the rectum has been largely neglected due to societal stigma. This study seeks to address this gap by developing soft circular muscle actuators (CMAs) and rectum models to replicate the defecation process. Using soft materials, both the rectum and the actuators were fabricated to enable seamless integration and attachment. We designed, fabricated, and tested three types of CMAs and compared them to the simulated results. A pneumatic system was employed to control the actuators, and simulated stool was synthesized using sodium alginate and calcium chloride. Experimental results indicated that the third type of actuator exhibited superior performance in terms of area contraction and pressure generation. The successful simulation of the defecation process highlights the potential of these soft actuators in biomedical applications, providing a foundation for further research and development in the field of soft robotics.
Power, Control, and Data Acquisition Systems for Rectal Simulator Integrated with Soft Pouch Actuators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Fecal incontinence (FI) is a significant health issue with various underlying causes. Research in this field is limited by social stigma and the lack of effective replication models. To address these challenges, we developed a sophisticated rectal simulator that integrates power, control, and data acquisition systems with soft pouch actuators. The system comprises four key subsystems: mechanical, electrical, pneumatic, and control and data acquisition. The mechanical subsystem utilizes common materials such as aluminum frames, wooden boards, and compact structural components to facilitate the installation and adjustment of electrical and control components. The electrical subsystem supplies power to regulators and sensors. The pneumatic system provides compressed air to actuators, enabling the simulation of FI. The control and data acquisition subsystem collects pressure data and regulates actuator movement. This comprehensive approach allows the robot to accurately replicate human defecation, managing various feces types including liquid, solid, and extremely solid. This innovation enhances our understanding of defecation and holds potential for advancing quality-of-life devices related to this condition.
NAS-BNN: Neural Architecture Search for Binary Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) have gained extensive attention for their superior inferencing efficiency and compression ratio compared to traditional full-precision networks. However, due to the unique characteristics of BNNs, designing a powerful binary architecture is challenging and often requires significant manpower. A promising solution is to utilize Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to assist in designing BNNs, but current NAS methods for BNNs are relatively straightforward and leave a performance gap between the searched models and manually designed ones. To address this gap, we propose a novel neural architecture search scheme for binary neural networks, named NAS-BNN. We first carefully design a search space based on the unique characteristics of BNNs. Then, we present three training strategies, which significantly enhance the training of supernet and boost the performance of all subnets. Our discovered binary model family outperforms previous BNNs for a wide range of operations (OPs) from 20M to 200M. For instance, we achieve 68.20% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet with only 57M OPs. In addition, we validate the transferability of these searched BNNs on the object detection task, and our binary detectors with the searched BNNs achieve a novel state-of-the-art result, e.g., 31.6% mAP with 370M OPs, on MS COCO dataset. The source code and models will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/NAS-BNN.
Improving Thompson Sampling via Information Relaxation for Budgeted Multi-armed Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a Bayesian budgeted multi-armed bandit problem, in which each arm consumes a different amount of resources when selected and there is a budget constraint on the total amount of resources that can be used. Budgeted Thompson Sampling (BTS) offers a very effective heuristic to this problem, but its arm-selection rule does not take into account the remaining budget information. We adopt \textit{Information Relaxation Sampling} framework that generalizes Thompson Sampling for classical $K$-armed bandit problems, and propose a series of algorithms that are randomized like BTS but more carefully optimize their decisions with respect to the budget constraint. In a one-to-one correspondence with these algorithms, a series of performance benchmarks that improve the conventional benchmark are also suggested. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our algorithms (and our benchmarks) make incremental improvements over BTS (respectively, the conventional benchmark) across various settings including a real-world example.
New quantum codes from constacyclic codes over finite chain rings
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Let $R$ be the finite chain ring $\mathbb{F}_{p^{2m}}+{u}\mathbb{F}_{p^{2m}}$, where $\mathbb{F}_{p^{2m}}$ is the finite field with $p^{2m}$ elements, $p$ is a prime, $m$ is a non-negative integer and ${u}^{2}=0.$ In this paper, we firstly define a class of Gray maps, which changes the Hermitian self-orthogonal property of linear codes over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}+{u}\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}$ into the Hermitian self-orthogonal property of linear codes over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}$. Applying the Hermitian construction, a new class of $2^{m}$-ary quantum codes are obtained from Hermitian constacyclic self-orthogonal codes over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}+{u}\mathbb{F}_{2^{2m}}.$ We secondly define another class of maps, which changes the Hermitian self-orthogonal property of linear codes over $R$ into the trace self-orthogonal property of linear codes over $\mathbb{F}_{p^{2m}}$. Using the Symplectic construction, a new class of $p^{m}$-ary quantum codes are obtained from Hermitian constacyclic self-orthogonal codes over $R.$
An eBPF-Based Trace-Driven Emulation Method for Satellite Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

System-level performance evaluation over satellite networks often requires a simulated or emulated environment for reproducibility and low cost. However, the existing tools may not meet the needs for scenarios such as the low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks. To address the problem, this paper proposes and implements a trace-driven emulation method based on Linux's eBPF technology. Building a Starlink traces collection system, we demonstrate that the method can effectively and efficiently emulate the connection conditions, and therefore provides a means for evaluating applications on local hosts.
$r$-Minimal Codes with Respect to Rank Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose and study $r$-minimal codes, a natural extension of minimal codes which have been extensively studied with respect to Hamming metric, rank metric and sum-rank metric. We first propose $r$-minimal codes in a general setting where the ambient space is a finite dimensional left module over a division ring and is supported on a lattice. We characterize minimal subcodes and $r$-minimal codes, derive a general singleton bound, and give existence results for $r$-minimal codes by using combinatorial arguments. We then consider $r$-minimal rank metric codes over a field extension $\mathbb{E}/\mathbb{F}$ of degree $m$, where $\mathbb{E}$ can be infinite. We characterize these codes in terms of cutting $r$-blocking sets, generalized rank weights of the codes and those of the dual codes, and classify codes whose $r$-dimensional subcodes have constant rank support weight. Next, with the help of the evasiveness property of cutting $r$-blocking sets and some upper bounds for the dimensions of evasive subspaces, we derive several lower and upper bounds for the minimal length of $r$-minimal codes. Furthermore, when $\mathbb{E}$ is finite, we establish a general upper bound which generalizes and improves the counterpart for minimal codes in the literature. As a corollary, we show that if $m=3$, then for any $k\geqslant2$, the minimal length of $k$-dimensional minimal codes is equal to $2k$. To the best of our knowledge, when $m\geqslant3$, there was no known explicit formula for the minimal length of $k$-dimensional minimal codes for arbitrary $k$ in the literature.
Can Visual Language Models Replace OCR-Based Visual Question Answering Pipelines in Production? A Case Study in Retail
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Most production-level deployments for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks are still build as processing pipelines of independent steps including image pre-processing, object- and text detection, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and (mostly supervised) object classification. However, the recent advances in vision Foundation Models [25] and Vision Language Models (VLMs) [23] raise the question if these custom trained, multi-step approaches can be replaced with pre-trained, single-step VLMs. This paper analyzes the performance and limits of various VLMs in the context of VQA and OCR [5, 9, 12] tasks in a production-level scenario. Using data from the Retail-786k [10] dataset, we investigate the capabilities of pre-trained VLMs to answer detailed questions about advertised products in images. Our study includes two commercial models, GPT-4V [16] and GPT-4o [17], as well as four open-source models: InternVL [5], LLaVA 1.5 [12], LLaVA-NeXT [13], and CogAgent [9]. Our initial results show, that there is in general no big performance gap between open-source and commercial models. However, we observe a strong task dependent variance in VLM performance: while most models are able to answer questions regarding the product brand and price with high accuracy, they completely fail at the same time to correctly identity the specific product name or discount. This indicates the problem of VLMs to solve fine-grained classification tasks as well to model the more abstract concept of discounts.
CodeSift: An LLM-Based Reference-Less Framework for Automatic Code Validation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has greatly facilitated code generation, but ensuring the functional correctness of generated code remains a challenge. Traditional validation methods are often time-consuming, error-prone, and impractical for large volumes of code. We introduce CodeSift, a novel framework that leverages LLMs as the first-line filter of code validation without the need for execution, reference code, or human feedback, thereby reducing the validation effort. We assess the effectiveness of our method across three diverse datasets encompassing two programming languages. Our results indicate that CodeSift outperforms state-of-the-art code evaluation methods. Internal testing conducted with subject matter experts reveals that the output generated by CodeSift is in line with human preference, reinforcing its effectiveness as a dependable automated code validation tool.
Online pre-training with long-form videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we investigate the impact of online pre-training with continuous video clips. We will examine three methods for pre-training (masked image modeling, contrastive learning, and knowledge distillation), and assess the performance on downstream action recognition tasks. As a result, online pre-training with contrast learning showed the highest performance in downstream tasks. Our findings suggest that learning from long-form videos can be helpful for action recognition with short videos.
Auxiliary-Loss-Free Load Balancing Strategy for Mixture-of-Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

For Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, an unbalanced expert load will lead to routing collapse or increased computational overhead. Existing methods commonly employ an auxiliary loss to encourage load balance, but a large auxiliary loss will introduce non-negligible interference gradients into training and thus impair the model performance. In order to control load balance while not producing undesired gradients during training, we propose Loss-Free Balancing, featured by an auxiliary-loss-free load balancing strategy. To be specific, before the top-K routing decision, Loss-Free Balancing will first apply an expert-wise bias to the routing scores of each expert. By dynamically updating the bias of each expert according to its recent load, Loss-Free Balancing can consistently maintain a balanced distribution of expert load. In addition, since Loss-Free Balancing does not produce any interference gradients, it also elevates the upper bound of model performance gained from MoE training. We validate the performance of Loss-Free Balancing on MoE models with up to 3B parameters trained on up to 200B tokens. Experimental results show that Loss-Free Balancing achieves both better performance and better load balance compared with traditional auxiliary-loss-controlled load balancing strategies.
Towards reliable respiratory disease diagnosis based on cough sounds and vision transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have sparked performance boosts in various real-world applications including disease diagnosis based on multi-modal medical data. Cough sound data-based respiratory disease (e.g., COVID-19 and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) diagnosis has also attracted much attention. However, existing works usually utilise traditional machine learning or deep models of moderate scales. On the other hand, the developed approaches are trained and evaluated on small-scale data due to the difficulty of curating and annotating clinical data on scale. To address these issues in prior works, we create a unified framework to evaluate various deep models from lightweight Convolutional Neural Networks (e.g., ResNet18) to modern vision transformers and compare their performance in respiratory disease classification. Based on the observations from such an extensive empirical study, we propose a novel approach to cough-based disease classification based on both self-supervised and supervised learning on a large-scale cough data set. Experimental results demonstrate our proposed approach outperforms prior arts consistently on two benchmark datasets for COVID-19 diagnosis and a proprietary dataset for COPD/non-COPD classification with an AUROC of 92.5%.
VoxInstruct: Expressive Human Instruction-to-Speech Generation with Unified Multilingual Codec Language Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Recent AIGC systems possess the capability to generate digital multimedia content based on human language instructions, such as text, image and video. However, when it comes to speech, existing methods related to human instruction-to-speech generation exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they require the division of inputs into content prompt (transcript) and description prompt (style and speaker), instead of directly supporting human instruction. This division is less natural in form and does not align with other AIGC models. Secondly, the practice of utilizing an independent description prompt to model speech style, without considering the transcript content, restricts the ability to control speech at a fine-grained level. To address these limitations, we propose VoxInstruct, a novel unified multilingual codec language modeling framework that extends traditional text-to-speech tasks into a general human instruction-to-speech task. Our approach enhances the expressiveness of human instruction-guided speech generation and aligns the speech generation paradigm with other modalities. To enable the model to automatically extract the content of synthesized speech from raw text instructions, we introduce speech semantic tokens as an intermediate representation for instruction-to-content guidance. We also incorporate multiple Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) strategies into our codec language model, which strengthens the generated speech following human instructions. Furthermore, our model architecture and training strategies allow for the simultaneous support of combining speech prompt and descriptive human instruction for expressive speech synthesis, which is a first-of-its-kind attempt. Codes, models and demos are at: https://github.com/thuhcsi/VoxInstruct.
Deep Learning Based Speckle Filtering for Polarimetric SAR Images. Application to Sentinel-1
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Speckle suppression in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images is a key processing step which continues to be a research topic. A wide variety of methods, using either spatially-based approaches or transform-based strategies, have been developed and have shown to provide outstanding results. However, recent advances in deep learning techniques and their application to SAR image despeckling have been demonstrated to offer state-of-the-art results. Unfortunately, they have been mostly applied to single-polarimetric images. The extension of a deep learning-based approach for speckle removal to polarimetric SAR (PolSAR) images is complicated because of the complex nature of the measured covariance matrices for every image pixel, the properties of which must be preserved during filtering. In this work, we propose a complete framework to remove speckle in polarimetric SAR images using a convolutional neural network. The methodology includes a reversible transformation of the original complex covariance matrix to obtain a set of real-valued intensity bands which are fed to the neural network. In addition, the proposed method includes a change detection strategy to avoid the neural network to learn erroneous features in areas strongly affected by temporal changes, so that the network only learns the underlying speckle component present in the data. The method is implemented and tested with dual-polarimetric images acquired by Sentinel-1. Experiments show that the proposed approach offers exceptional results in both speckle reduction and resolution preservation. More importantly, it is also shown that the neural network is not generating artifacts or introducing bias in the filtered images, making them suitable for further polarimetric processing and exploitation.