OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Unified Framework for Context-Aware IoT Management and State-of-the-Art IoT Traffic Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems has introduced growing complexities in device management and network security. To address these challenges, we present a unified framework that combines context-driven large language models (LLMs) for IoT administrative tasks with a fine-tuned anomaly detection module for network traffic analysis. The framework streamlines administrative processes such as device management, troubleshooting, and security enforcement by harnessing contextual knowledge from IoT manuals and operational data. The anomaly detection model achieves state-of-the-art performance in identifying irregularities and threats within IoT traffic, leveraging fine-tuning to deliver exceptional accuracy. Evaluations demonstrate that incorporating relevant contextual information significantly enhances the precision and reliability of LLM-based responses for diverse IoT administrative tasks. Additionally, resource usage metrics such as execution time, memory consumption, and response efficiency demonstrate the framework's scalability and suitability for real-world IoT deployments.
Back To The Future: A Hybrid Transformer-XGBoost Model for Action-oriented Future-proofing Nowcasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Inspired by the iconic movie Back to the Future, this paper explores an innovative adaptive nowcasting approach that reimagines the relationship between present actions and future outcomes. In the movie, characters travel through time to manipulate past events, aiming to create a better future. Analogously, our framework employs predictive insights about the future to inform and adjust present conditions. This dual-stage model integrates the forecasting power of Transformers (future visionary) with the interpretability and efficiency of XGBoost (decision maker), enabling a seamless loop of future prediction and present adaptation. Through experimentation with meteorological datasets, we demonstrate the framework's advantage in achieving more accurate forecasting while guiding actionable interventions for real-time applications.
A Fully Hardware Implemented Accelerator Design in ReRAM Analog Computing without ADCs
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Emerging ReRAM-based accelerators process neural networks via analog Computing-in-Memory (CiM) for ultra-high energy efficiency. However, significant overhead in peripheral circuits and complex nonlinear activation modes constrain system energy efficiency improvements. This work explores the hardware implementation of the Sigmoid and SoftMax activation functions of neural networks with stochastically binarized neurons by utilizing sampled noise signals from ReRAM devices to achieve a stochastic effect. We propose a complete ReRAM-based Analog Computing Accelerator (RACA) that accelerates neural network computation by leveraging stochastically binarized neurons in combination with ReRAM crossbars. The novel circuit design removes significant sources of energy/area efficiency degradation, i.e., the Digital-to-Analog and Analog-to-Digital Converters (DACs and ADCs) as well as the components to explicitly calculate the activation functions. Experimental results show that our proposed design outperforms traditional architectures across all overall performance metrics without compromising inference accuracy.
Char-SAM: Turning Segment Anything Model into Scene Text Segmentation Annotator with Character-level Visual Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The recent emergence of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) enables various domain-specific segmentation tasks to be tackled cost-effectively by using bounding boxes as prompts. However, in scene text segmentation, SAM can not achieve desirable performance. The word-level bounding box as prompts is too coarse for characters, while the character-level bounding box as prompts suffers from over-segmentation and under-segmentation issues. In this paper, we propose an automatic annotation pipeline named Char-SAM, that turns SAM into a low-cost segmentation annotator with a Character-level visual prompt. Specifically, leveraging some existing text detection datasets with word-level bounding box annotations, we first generate finer-grained character-level bounding box prompts using the Character Bounding-box Refinement CBR module. Next, we employ glyph information corresponding to text character categories as a new prompt in the Character Glyph Refinement (CGR) module to guide SAM in producing more accurate segmentation masks, addressing issues of over-segmentation and under-segmentation. These modules fully utilize the bbox-to-mask capability of SAM to generate high-quality text segmentation annotations automatically. Extensive experiments on TextSeg validate the effectiveness of Char-SAM. Its training-free nature also enables the generation of high-quality scene text segmentation datasets from real-world datasets like COCO-Text and MLT17.
Not all Views are Created Equal: Analyzing Viewpoint Instabilities in Vision Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we analyze the viewpoint stability of foundational models - specifically, their sensitivity to changes in viewpoint- and define instability as significant feature variations resulting from minor changes in viewing angle, leading to generalization gaps in 3D reasoning tasks. We investigate nine foundational models, focusing on their responses to viewpoint changes, including the often-overlooked accidental viewpoints where specific camera orientations obscure an object's true 3D structure. Our methodology enables recognizing and classifying out-of-distribution (OOD), accidental, and stable viewpoints using feature representations alone, without accessing the actual images. Our findings indicate that while foundation models consistently encode accidental viewpoints, they vary in their interpretation of OOD viewpoints due to inherent biases, at times leading to object misclassifications based on geometric resemblance. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations on three downstream tasks - classification, VQA, and 3D reconstruction - we illustrate the impact of viewpoint instability and underscore the importance of feature robustness across diverse viewing conditions.
Modeling and Analysis of SCFA-Driven Vagus Nerve Signaling in the Gut-Brain Axis via Molecular Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Molecular communication (MC) is a bio-inspired communication paradigm that utilizes molecules to transfer information and offers a robust framework for understanding biological signaling systems. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end MC framework for short-chain fatty acid (SCFA)-driven vagus nerve signaling within the gut-brain axis (GBA) to enhance our understanding of gut-brain communication mechanisms. SCFA molecules, produced by gut microbiota, serve as important biomarkers in physiological and psychological processes, including neurodegenerative and mental health disorders. The developed end-to-end model integrates SCFA binding to vagal afferent fibers, G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR)-mediated calcium signaling, and Hodgkin-Huxley-based action potential generation into a comprehensive vagus nerve signaling mechanism through GBA. Information-theoretic metrics such as mutual information and delay are used to evaluate the efficiency of this SCFA-driven signaling pathway model. Simulations demonstrate how molecular inputs translate into neural outputs, highlighting critical aspects that govern gut-brain communication. In this work, the integration of SCFA-driven signaling into the MC framework provides a novel perspective on gut-brain communication and paves the way for the development of innovative therapeutic advancements targeting neurological and psychiatric disorders.
MAKIMA: Tuning-free Multi-Attribute Open-domain Video Editing via Mask-Guided Attention Modulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion-based text-to-image (T2I) models have demonstrated remarkable results in global video editing tasks. However, their focus is primarily on global video modifications, and achieving desired attribute-specific changes remains a challenging task, specifically in multi-attribute editing (MAE) in video. Contemporary video editing approaches either require extensive fine-tuning or rely on additional networks (such as ControlNet) for modeling multi-object appearances, yet they remain in their infancy, offering only coarse-grained MAE solutions. In this paper, we present MAKIMA, a tuning-free MAE framework built upon pretrained T2I models for open-domain video editing. Our approach preserves video structure and appearance information by incorporating attention maps and features from the inversion process during denoising. To facilitate precise editing of multiple attributes, we introduce mask-guided attention modulation, enhancing correlations between spatially corresponding tokens and suppressing cross-attribute interference in both self-attention and cross-attention layers. To balance video frame generation quality and efficiency, we implement consistent feature propagation, which generates frame sequences by editing keyframes and propagating their features throughout the sequence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAKIMA outperforms existing baselines in open-domain multi-attribute video editing tasks, achieving superior results in both editing accuracy and temporal consistency while maintaining computational efficiency.
Delayed Random Partial Gradient Averaging for Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that enables multiple clients to train a shared model collaboratively while preserving privacy. However, the scaling of real-world FL systems is often limited by two communication bottlenecks:(a) while the increasing computing power of edge devices enables the deployment of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), the limited bandwidth constraints frequent transmissions over large DNNs; and (b) high latency cost greatly degrades the performance of FL. In light of these bottlenecks, we propose a Delayed Random Partial Gradient Averaging (DPGA) to enhance FL. Under DPGA, clients only share partial local model gradients with the server. The size of the shared part in a local model is determined by the update rate, which is coarsely initialized and subsequently refined over the temporal dimension. Moreover, DPGA largely reduces the system run time by enabling computation in parallel with communication. We conduct experiments on non-IID CIFAR-10/100 to demonstrate the efficacy of our method.
An Ordinary Differential Equation Sampler with Stochastic Start for Diffusion Bridge Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion bridge models have demonstrated promising performance in conditional image generation tasks, such as image restoration and translation, by initializing the generative process from corrupted images instead of pure Gaussian noise. However, existing diffusion bridge models often rely on Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) samplers, which result in slower inference speed compared to diffusion models that employ high-order Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solvers for acceleration. To mitigate this gap, we propose a high-order ODE sampler with a stochastic start for diffusion bridge models. To overcome the singular behavior of the probability flow ODE (PF-ODE) at the beginning of the reverse process, a posterior sampling approach was introduced at the first reverse step. The sampling was designed to ensure a smooth transition from corrupted images to the generative trajectory while reducing discretization errors. Following this stochastic start, Heun's second-order solver is applied to solve the PF-ODE, achieving high perceptual quality with significantly reduced neural function evaluations (NFEs). Our method is fully compatible with pretrained diffusion bridge models and requires no additional training. Extensive experiments on image restoration and translation tasks, including super-resolution, JPEG restoration, Edges-to-Handbags, and DIODE-Outdoor, demonstrated that our sampler outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and Frechet Inception Distance (FID).
Embodied AI-empowered Low Altitude Economy: Integrated Sensing, Communications, Computation, and Control (ISC3)
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Low altitude economy (LAE) holds immense potential to drive urban development across various sectors. However, LAE also faces challenges in data collection and processing efficiency, flight control precision, and network performance. The challenges could be solved by realizing an integration of sensing, communications, computation, and control (ISC3) for LAE. In this regard, embodied artificial intelligence (EAI), with its unique perception, planning, and decision-making capabilities, offers a promising solution to realize ISC3. Specifically, this paper investigates an application of EAI into ISC3 to support LAE, exploring potential research focuses, solutions, and case study. We begin by outlining rationales and benefits of introducing EAI into LAE, followed by reviewing research directions and solutions for EAI in ISC3. We then propose a framework of an EAI-enabled ISC3 for LAE. The framework's effectiveness is evaluated through a case study of express delivery utilizing an EAI-enabled UAV. Finally, we discuss several future research directions for advancing EAI-enabled LAE.
A Contrastive Pretrain Model with Prompt Tuning for Multi-center Medication Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Medication recommendation is one of the most critical health-related applications, which has attracted extensive research interest recently. Most existing works focus on a single hospital with abundant medical data. However, many small hospitals only have a few records, which hinders applying existing medication recommendation works to the real world. Thus, we seek to explore a more practical setting, i.e., multi-center medication recommendation. In this setting, most hospitals have few records, but the total number of records is large. Though small hospitals may benefit from total affluent records, it is also faced with the challenge that the data distributions between various hospitals are much different. In this work, we introduce a novel conTrastive prEtrain Model with Prompt Tuning (TEMPT) for multi-center medication recommendation, which includes two stages of pretraining and finetuning. We first design two self-supervised tasks for the pretraining stage to learn general medical knowledge. They are mask prediction and contrastive tasks, which extract the intra- and inter-relationships of input diagnosis and procedures. Furthermore, we devise a novel prompt tuning method to capture the specific information of each hospital rather than adopting the common finetuning. On the one hand, the proposed prompt tuning can better learn the heterogeneity of each hospital to fit various distributions. On the other hand, it can also relieve the catastrophic forgetting problem of finetuning. To validate the proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on the public eICU, a multi-center medical dataset. The experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our model. The implementation code is available to ease the reproducibility https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/TEMPT.
Improving SSVEP BCI Spellers With Data Augmentation and Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) spellers are a promising communication tool for individuals with disabilities. This Brain-Computer Interface utilizes scalp potential data from (electroencephalography) EEG electrodes on a subject's head to decode specific letters or arbitrary targets the subject is looking at on a screen. However, deep neural networks for SSVEP spellers often suffer from low accuracy and poor generalizability to unseen subjects, largely due to the high variability in EEG data. In this study, we propose a hybrid approach combining data augmentation and language modeling to enhance the performance of SSVEP spellers. Using the Benchmark dataset from Tsinghua University, we explore various data augmentation techniques, including frequency masking, time masking, and noise injection, to improve the robustness of deep learning models. Additionally, we integrate a language model (CharRNN) with EEGNet to incorporate linguistic context, significantly enhancing word-level decoding accuracy. Our results demonstrate accuracy improvements of up to 2.9 percent over the baseline, with time masking and language modeling showing the most promise. This work paves the way for more accurate and generalizable SSVEP speller systems, offering improved communication solutions for individuals with disabilities.
Extract Information from Hybrid Long Documents Leveraging LLMs: A Framework and Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in textual understanding and tabular reasoning tasks. However, their ability to comprehend and analyze hybrid text, containing textual and tabular data, remains unexplored. The hybrid text often appears in the form of hybrid long documents (HLDs), which far exceed the token limit of LLMs. Consequently, we apply an Automated Information Extraction framework (AIE) to enable LLMs to process the HLDs and carry out experiments to analyse four important aspects of information extraction from HLDs. Given the findings: 1) The effective way to select and summarize the useful part of a HLD. 2) An easy table serialization way is enough for LLMs to understand tables. 3) The naive AIE has adaptability in many complex scenarios. 4) The useful prompt engineering to enhance LLMs on HLDs. To address the issue of dataset scarcity in HLDs and support future work, we also propose the Financial Reports Numerical Extraction (FINE) dataset. The dataset and code are publicly available in the attachments.
Enhancing Marine Debris Acoustic Monitoring by Optical Flow-Based Motion Vector Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the development of coastal construction, a large amount of human-generated waste, particularly plastic debris, is continuously entering the ocean, posing a severe threat to marine ecosystems. The key to effectively addressing plastic pollution lies in the ability to autonomously monitor such debris. Currently, marine debris monitoring primarily relies on optical sensors, but these methods are limited in their applicability to underwater and seafloor areas due to low-visibility constraints. The acoustic camera, also known as high-resolution forward-looking sonar (FLS), has demonstrated considerable potential in the autonomous monitoring of marine debris, as they are unaffected by water turbidity and dark environments. The appearance of targets in sonar images changes with variations in the imaging viewpoint, while challenges such as low signal-to-noise ratio, weak textures, and imaging distortions in sonar imagery present significant obstacles to debris monitoring based on prior class labels. This paper proposes an optical flow-based method for marine debris monitoring, aiming to fully utilize the time series information captured by the acoustic camera to enhance the performance of marine debris monitoring without relying on prior category labels of the targets. The proposed method was validated through experiments conducted in a circulating water tank, demonstrating its feasibility and robustness. This approach holds promise for providing novel insights into the spatial and temporal distribution of debris.
Distinguishability-guided Test Program Generation for WebAssembly Runtime Performance Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format designed as a portable compilation target, which has been widely used on both the web and server sides in recent years. As high performance is a critical design goal of Wasm, it is essential to conduct performance testing for Wasm runtimes. However, existing research on Wasm runtime performance testing still suffers from insufficient high-quality test programs. To solve this problem, we propose a novel test program generation approach WarpGen. It first extracts code snippets from historical issue-triggering test programs as initial operators, then inserts an operator into a seed program to synthesize a new test program. To verify the quality of generated programs, we propose an indicator called distinguishability, which refers to the ability of a test program to distinguish abnormal performance of specific Wasm runtimes. We apply WarpGen for performance testing on four Wasm runtimes and verify its effectiveness compared with baseline approaches. In particular, WarpGen has identified seven new performance issues in three Wasm runtimes.
Multi-Modality Driven LoRA for Adverse Condition Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The autonomous driving community is increasingly focused on addressing corner case problems, particularly those related to ensuring driving safety under adverse conditions (e.g., nighttime, fog, rain). To this end, the task of Adverse Condition Depth Estimation (ACDE) has gained significant attention. Previous approaches in ACDE have primarily relied on generative models, which necessitate additional target images to convert the sunny condition into adverse weather, or learnable parameters for feature augmentation to adapt domain gaps, resulting in increased model complexity and tuning efforts. Furthermore, unlike CLIP-based methods where textual and visual features have been pre-aligned, depth estimation models lack sufficient alignment between multimodal features, hindering coherent understanding under adverse conditions. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-Modality Driven LoRA (MMD-LoRA), which leverages low-rank adaptation matrices for efficient fine-tuning from source-domain to target-domain. It consists of two core components: Prompt Driven Domain Alignment (PDDA) and Visual-Text Consistent Contrastive Learning(VTCCL). During PDDA, the image encoder with MMD-LoRA generates target-domain visual representations, supervised by alignment loss that the source-target difference between language and image should be equal. Meanwhile, VTCCL bridges the gap between textual features from CLIP and visual features from diffusion model, pushing apart different weather representations (vision and text) and bringing together similar ones. Through extensive experiments, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes and Oxford RobotCar datasets, underscoring robustness and efficiency in adapting to varied adverse environments.
Building a Rich Dataset to Empower the Persian Question Answering Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Question answering systems provide short, precise, and specific answers to questions. So far, many robust question answering systems have been developed for English, while some languages with fewer resources, like Persian, have few numbers of standard dataset. In this study, a comprehensive open-domain dataset is presented for Persian. This dataset is called NextQuAD and has 7,515 contexts, including 23,918 questions and answers. Then, a BERT-based question answering model has been applied to this dataset using two pre-trained language models, including ParsBERT and XLM-RoBERTa. The results of these two models have been ensembled using mean logits. Evaluation on the development set shows 0.95 Exact Match (EM) and 0.97 Fl_score. Also, to compare the NextQuAD with other Persian datasets, our trained model on the NextQuAD, is evaluated on two other datasets named PersianQA and ParSQuAD. Comparisons show that the proposed model increased EM by 0.39 and 0.14 respectively in PersianQA and ParSQuAD-manual, while a slight EM decline of 0.007 happened in ParSQuAD-automatic.