OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fast Query of Biharmonic Distance in Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

The \textit{biharmonic distance} (BD) is a fundamental metric that measures the distance of two nodes in a graph. It has found applications in network coherence, machine learning, and computational graphics, among others. In spite of BD's importance, efficient algorithms for the exact computation or approximation of this metric on large graphs remain notably absent. In this work, we provide several algorithms to estimate BD, building on a novel formulation of this metric. These algorithms enjoy locality property (that is, they only read a small portion of the input graph) and at the same time possess provable performance guarantees. In particular, our main algorithms approximate the BD between any node pair with an arbitrarily small additive error $\eps$ in time $O(\frac{1}{\eps^2}\text{poly}(\log\frac{n}{\eps} ))$. Furthermore, we perform an extensive empirical study on several benchmark networks, validating the performance and accuracy of our algorithms.
FLEURS-ASL: Including American Sign Language in Massively Multilingual Multitask Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Sign language translation has historically been peripheral to mainstream machine translation research. In order to help converge the fields, we introduce FLEURS-ASL, an extension of the multiway parallel benchmarks FLORES (for text) and FLEURS (for speech) to support their first sign language (as video), American Sign Language, translated by 5 Certified Deaf Interpreters. FLEURS-ASL can be used to evaluate a variety of tasks -- primarily sentence- and discourse-level translation -- between ASL and 200 other languages as text, or 102 languages as speech. We provide baselines for tasks from ASL to English text using a unified modeling approach that incorporates timestamp tokens and previous text tokens in a 34-second context window, trained on random video clips from YouTube-ASL. This model meets or exceeds the performance of phrase-level baselines while supporting a multitude of new tasks. We also use FLEURS-ASL to show that multimodal frontier models have virtually no understanding of ASL, underscoring the importance of including sign languages in standard evaluation suites.
SpeechCraft: A Fine-grained Expressive Speech Dataset with Natural Language Description
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

Speech-language multi-modal learning presents a significant challenge due to the fine nuanced information inherent in speech styles. Therefore, a large-scale dataset providing elaborate comprehension of speech style is urgently needed to facilitate insightful interplay between speech audio and natural language. However, constructing such datasets presents a major trade-off between large-scale data collection and high-quality annotation. To tackle this challenge, we propose an automatic speech annotation system for expressiveness interpretation that annotates in-the-wild speech clips with expressive and vivid human language descriptions. Initially, speech audios are processed by a series of expert classifiers and captioning models to capture diverse speech characteristics, followed by a fine-tuned LLaMA for customized annotation generation. Unlike previous tag/templet-based annotation frameworks with limited information and diversity, our system provides in-depth understandings of speech style through tailored natural language descriptions, thereby enabling accurate and voluminous data generation for large model training. With this system, we create SpeechCraft, a fine-grained bilingual expressive speech dataset. It is distinguished by highly descriptive natural language style prompts, containing approximately 2,000 hours of audio data and encompassing over two million speech clips. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed dataset significantly boosts speech-language task performance in stylist speech synthesis and speech style understanding.
Discovery and Simulation of Data-Aware Business Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Simulation is a common approach to predict the effect of business process changes on quantitative performance. The starting point of Business Process Simulation (BPS) is a process model enriched with simulation parameters. To cope with the typically large parameter spaces of BPS models, several methods have been proposed to automatically discover BPS models from event logs. Virtually all these approaches neglect the data perspective of business processes. Yet, the data attributes manipulated by a business process often determine which activities are performed, how many times, and when. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a data-aware BPS modeling approach and a method to discover data-aware BPS models from event logs. The BPS modeling approach supports three types of data attributes (global, case-level, and event-level) as well as deterministic and stochastic attribute update rules and data-aware branching conditions. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method accurately discovers the type of each data attribute and its associated update rules, and that the resulting BPS models more closely replicate the process execution control flow relative to data-unaware BPS models.
Evaluating Alternative Training Interventions Using Personalized Computational Models of Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Evaluating different training interventions to determine which produce the best learning outcomes is one of the main challenges faced by instructional designers. Typically, these designers use A/B experiments to evaluate each intervention; however, it is costly and time consuming to run such studies. To address this issue, we explore how computational models of learning might support designers in reasoning causally about alternative interventions within a fractions tutor. We present an approach for automatically tuning models to specific individuals and show that personalized models make better predictions of students' behavior than generic ones. Next, we conduct simulations to generate counterfactual predictions of performance and learning for two students (high and low performing) in different versions of the fractions tutor. Our approach makes predictions that align with previous human findings, as well as testable predictions that might be evaluated with future human experiments.
Decentralised Variational Inference Frameworks for Multi-object Tracking on Sensor Networks: Additional Notes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper tackles the challenge of multi-sensor multi-object tracking by proposing various decentralised Variational Inference (VI) schemes that match the tracking performance of centralised sensor fusion with only local message exchanges among neighboring sensors. We first establish a centralised VI sensor fusion scheme as a benchmark and analyse the limitations of its decentralised counterpart, which requires sensors to await consensus at each VI iteration. Therefore, we propose a decentralised gradient-based VI framework that optimises the Locally Maximised Evidence Lower Bound (LM-ELBO) instead of the standard ELBO, which reduces the parameter search space and enables faster convergence, making it particularly beneficial for decentralised tracking. This proposed framework is inherently self-evolving, improving with advancements in decentralised optimisation techniques for convergence guarantees and efficiency. Further, we enhance the convergence speed of proposed decentralised schemes using natural gradients and gradient tracking strategies. Results verify that our decentralised VI schemes are empirically equivalent to centralised fusion in tracking performance. Notably, the decentralised natural gradient VI method is the most communication-efficient, with communication costs comparable to suboptimal decentralised strategies while delivering notably higher tracking accuracy.
Enhancing Adaptive Deep Networks for Image Classification via Uncertainty-aware Decision Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Handling varying computational resources is a critical issue in modern AI applications. Adaptive deep networks, featuring the dynamic employment of multiple classifier heads among different layers, have been proposed to address classification tasks under varying computing resources. Existing approaches typically utilize the last classifier supported by the available resources for inference, as they believe that the last classifier always performs better across all classes. However, our findings indicate that earlier classifier heads can outperform the last head for certain classes. Based on this observation, we introduce the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) module, which fuses the multiple classifier heads to enhance the inference performance of adaptive deep networks. CDM incorporates an uncertainty-aware fusion method based on evidential deep learning (EDL), that utilizes the reliability (uncertainty values) from the first c-1 classifiers to improve the c-th classifier' accuracy. We also design a balance term that reduces fusion saturation and unfairness issues caused by EDL constraints to improve the fusion quality of CDM. Finally, a regularized training strategy that uses the last classifier to guide the learning process of early classifiers is proposed to further enhance the CDM module's effect, called the Guided Collaborative Decision Making (GCDM) framework. The experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our approaches. Results on ImageNet datasets show CDM and GCDM obtain 0.4% to 2.8% accuracy improvement (under varying computing resources) on popular adaptive networks. The code is available at the link https://github.com/Meteor-Stars/GCDM_AdaptiveNet.
Multi-Agent Target Assignment and Path Finding for Intelligent Warehouse: A Cooperative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-agent target assignment and path planning (TAPF) are two key problems in intelligent warehouse. However, most literature only addresses one of these two problems separately. In this study, we propose a method to simultaneously solve target assignment and path planning from a perspective of cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to model the TAPF problem for intelligent warehouse to cooperative multi-agent deep RL, and the first to simultaneously address TAPF based on multi-agent deep RL. Furthermore, previous literature rarely considers the physical dynamics of agents. In this study, the physical dynamics of the agents is considered. Experimental results show that our method performs well in various task settings, which means that the target assignment is solved reasonably well and the planned path is almost shortest. Moreover, our method is more time-efficient than baselines.
MASQ: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Single Quadruped Robot Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a novel method to improve locomotion learning for a single quadruped robot using multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL). Many existing methods use single-agent reinforcement learning for an individual robot or MARL for the cooperative task in multi-robot systems. Unlike existing methods, this paper proposes using MARL for the locomotion learning of a single quadruped robot. We develop a learning structure called Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Single Quadruped Robot Locomotion (MASQ), considering each leg as an agent to explore the action space of the quadruped robot, sharing a global critic, and learning collaboratively. Experimental results indicate that MASQ not only speeds up learning convergence but also enhances robustness in real-world settings, suggesting that applying MASQ to single robots such as quadrupeds could surpass traditional single-robot reinforcement learning approaches. Our study provides insightful guidance on integrating MARL with single-robot locomotion learning.
Towards Completeness: A Generalizable Action Proposal Generator for Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

To address the zero-shot temporal action localization (ZSTAL) task, existing works develop models that are generalizable to detect and classify actions from unseen categories. They typically develop a category-agnostic action detector and combine it with the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to solve ZSTAL. However, these methods suffer from incomplete action proposals generated for \textit{unseen} categories, since they follow a frame-level prediction paradigm and require hand-crafted post-processing to generate action proposals. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a novel model named Generalizable Action Proposal generator (GAP), which can interface seamlessly with CLIP and generate action proposals in a holistic way. Our GAP is built in a query-based architecture and trained with a proposal-level objective, enabling it to estimate proposal completeness and eliminate the hand-crafted post-processing. Based on this architecture, we propose an Action-aware Discrimination loss to enhance the category-agnostic dynamic information of actions. Besides, we introduce a Static-Dynamic Rectifying module that incorporates the generalizable static information from CLIP to refine the predicted proposals, which improves proposal completeness in a generalizable manner. Our experiments show that our GAP achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging ZSTAL benchmarks, i.e., Thumos14 and ActivityNet1.3. Specifically, our model obtains significant performance improvement over previous works on the two benchmarks, i.e., +3.2% and +3.4% average mAP, respectively.
Towards Reliable Medical Question Answering: Techniques and Challenges in Mitigating Hallucinations in Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various domains, including healthcare and biomedicine. However, the phenomenon of hallucination, where LLMs generate outputs that deviate from factual accuracy or context, poses a critical challenge, especially in high-stakes domains. This paper conducts a scoping study of existing techniques for mitigating hallucinations in knowledge-based task in general and especially for medical domains. Key methods covered in the paper include Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based techniques, iterative feedback loops, supervised fine-tuning, and prompt engineering. These techniques, while promising in general contexts, require further adaptation and optimization for the medical domain due to its unique demands for up-to-date, specialized knowledge and strict adherence to medical guidelines. Addressing these challenges is crucial for developing trustworthy AI systems that enhance clinical decision-making and patient safety as well as accuracy of biomedical scientific research.
Revisiting the Exit from Nuclear Energy in Germany with NLP
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Annotation of political discourse is resource-intensive, but recent developments in NLP promise to automate complex annotation tasks. Fine-tuned transformer-based models outperform human annotators in some annotation tasks, but they require large manually annotated training datasets. In our contribution, we explore to which degree a manually annotated dataset can be automatically replicated with today's NLP methods, using unsupervised machine learning and zero- and few-shot learning.
Multi-SIGATnet: A multimodal schizophrenia MRI classification algorithm using sparse interaction mechanisms and graph attention networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric disorder. Its pathogenesis is not completely clear, making it difficult to treat patients precisely. Because of the complicated non-Euclidean network structure of the human brain, learning critical information from brain networks remains difficult. To effectively capture the topological information of brain neural networks, a novel multimodal graph attention network based on sparse interaction mechanism (Multi-SIGATnet) was proposed for SZ classification was proposed for SZ classification. Firstly, structural and functional information were fused into multimodal data to obtain more comprehensive and abundant features for patients with SZ. Subsequently, a sparse interaction mechanism was proposed to effectively extract salient features and enhance the feature representation capability. By enhancing the strong connections and weakening the weak connections between feature information based on an asymmetric convolutional network, high-order interactive features were captured. Moreover, sparse learning strategies were designed to filter out redundant connections to improve model performance. Finally, local and global features were updated in accordance with the topological features and connection weight constraints of the higher-order brain network, the features being projected to the classification target space for disorder classification. The effectiveness of the model is verified on the Center for Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) datasets, achieving 81.9\% and 75.8\% average accuracy, respectively, 4.6\% and 5.5\% higher than the graph attention network (GAT) method. Experiments showed that the Multi-SIGATnet method exhibited good performance in identifying SZ.
LowCLIP: Adapting the CLIP Model Architecture for Low-Resource Languages in Multimodal Image Retrieval Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This research explores the development of multimodal vision-language models for image retrieval in low-resource languages, specifically Azerbaijani. Existing vision-language models primarily support high-resource languages, and fine-tuning them remains computationally demanding. To address challenges in vision-language retrieval for low-resource languages, we integrated the CLIP model architecture and employed several techniques to balance computational efficiency with performance. These techniques include synthetic data generation through machine translation, image augmentation, and further training the attention mechanisms of transformer-based models with domain-specific data. We integrated Multilingual BERT as a text encoder with image encoders like ResNet50, EfficientNet0, Vision Transformer (ViT), and Tiny Swin Transformer. Our study found that models like EfficientNet0 and Tiny Swin Transformer perform best on the datasets they were trained on, such as COCO, Flickr30k, and Flickr8k. Augmentation techniques boosted EfficientNet0 MAP on Flickr30k from 0.84 to 0.87 and ResNet50 MAP on MSCOCO from 0.70 to 0.80, contributing to a new state of the art in vision-language retrieval. We share our configurations and results to support further research. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/aliasgerovs/azclip.
Splatt3R: Zero-shot Gaussian Splatting from Uncalibrated Image Pairs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce Splatt3R, a pose-free, feed-forward method for in-the-wild 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis from stereo pairs. Given uncalibrated natural images, Splatt3R can predict 3D Gaussian Splats without requiring any camera parameters or depth information. For generalizability, we build Splatt3R upon a ``foundation'' 3D geometry reconstruction method, MASt3R, by extending it to deal with both 3D structure and appearance. Specifically, unlike the original MASt3R which reconstructs only 3D point clouds, we predict the additional Gaussian attributes required to construct a Gaussian primitive for each point. Hence, unlike other novel view synthesis methods, Splatt3R is first trained by optimizing the 3D point cloud's geometry loss, and then a novel view synthesis objective. By doing this, we avoid the local minima present in training 3D Gaussian Splats from stereo views. We also propose a novel loss masking strategy that we empirically find is critical for strong performance on extrapolated viewpoints. We train Splatt3R on the ScanNet++ dataset and demonstrate excellent generalisation to uncalibrated, in-the-wild images. Splatt3R can reconstruct scenes at 4FPS at 512 x 512 resolution, and the resultant splats can be rendered in real-time.
Wav2Small: Distilling Wav2Vec2 to 72K parameters for Low-Resource Speech emotion recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) needs high computational resources to overcome the challenge of substantial annotator disagreement. Today SER is shifting towards dimensional annotations of arousal, dominance, and valence (A/D/V). Universal metrics as the L2 distance prove unsuitable for evaluating A/D/V accuracy due to non converging consensus of annotator opinions. However, Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) arose as an alternative metric for A/D/V where a model's output is evaluated to match a whole dataset's CCC rather than L2 distances of individual audios. Recent studies have shown that wav2vec2 / wavLM architectures outputing a float value for each A/D/V dimension achieve today's State-of-the-art (Sota) CCC on A/D/V. The Wav2Vec2.0 / WavLM family has a high computational footprint, but training small models using human annotations has been unsuccessful. In this paper we use a large Transformer Sota A/D/V model as Teacher/Annotator to train 5 student models: 4 MobileNets and our proposed Wav2Small, using only the Teacher's A/D/V outputs instead of human annotations. The Teacher model we propose also sets a new Sota on the MSP Podcast dataset of valence CCC=0.676. We choose MobileNetV4 / MobileNet-V3 as students, as MobileNet has been designed for fast execution times. We also propose Wav2Small - an architecture designed for minimal parameters and RAM consumption. Wav2Small with an .onnx (quantised) of only 120KB is a potential solution for A/D/V on hardware with low resources, having only 72K parameters vs 3.12M parameters for MobileNet-V4-Small.
Learning to Move Like Professional Counter-Strike Players
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In multiplayer, first-person shooter games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), coordinated movement is a critical component of high-level strategic play. However, the complexity of team coordination and the variety of conditions present in popular game maps make it impractical to author hand-crafted movement policies for every scenario. We show that it is possible to take a data-driven approach to creating human-like movement controllers for CS:GO. We curate a team movement dataset comprising 123 hours of professional game play traces, and use this dataset to train a transformer-based movement model that generates human-like team movement for all players in a "Retakes" round of the game. Importantly, the movement prediction model is efficient. Performing inference for all players takes less than 0.5 ms per game step (amortized cost) on a single CPU core, making it plausible for use in commercial games today. Human evaluators assess that our model behaves more like humans than both commercially-available bots and procedural movement controllers scripted by experts (16% to 59% higher by TrueSkill rating of "human-like"). Using experiments involving in-game bot vs. bot self-play, we demonstrate that our model performs simple forms of teamwork, makes fewer common movement mistakes, and yields movement distributions, player lifetimes, and kill locations similar to those observed in professional CS:GO match play.