OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Personalized Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Edge Content Caching Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Proactive caching is essential for minimizing latency and improving Quality of Experience (QoE) in multi-server edge networks. Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning (FDRL) is a promising approach for developing cache policies tailored to dynamic content requests. However, FDRL faces challenges such as an expanding caching action space due to increased content numbers and difficulty in adapting global information to heterogeneous edge environments. In this paper, we propose a Personalized Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for Caching, called PF-DRL-Ca, with the aim to maximize system utility while satisfying caching capability constraints. To manage the expanding action space, we employ a new DRL algorithm, Multi-head Deep Q-Network (MH-DQN), which reshapes the action output layers of DQN into a multi-head structure where each head generates a sub-dimensional action. We next integrate the proposed MH-DQN into a personalized federated training framework, employing a layer-wise approach for training to derive a personalized model that can adapt to heterogeneous environments while exploiting the global information to accelerate learning convergence. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MH-DQN over traditional DRL algorithms on a single server, as well as the advantages of the personal federated training architecture compared to other frameworks.
Task-Agnostic Language Model Watermarking via High Entropy Passthrough Layers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the era of costly pre-training of large language models, ensuring the intellectual property rights of model owners, and insuring that said models are responsibly deployed, is becoming increasingly important. To this end, we propose model watermarking via passthrough layers, which are added to existing pre-trained networks and trained using a self-supervised loss such that the model produces high-entropy output when prompted with a unique private key, and acts normally otherwise. Unlike existing model watermarking methods, our method is fully task-agnostic, and can be applied to both classification and sequence-to-sequence tasks without requiring advanced access to downstream fine-tuning datasets. We evaluate the proposed passthrough layers on a wide range of downstream tasks, and show experimentally our watermarking method achieves a near-perfect watermark extraction accuracy and false-positive rate in most cases without damaging original model performance. Additionally, we show our method is robust to both downstream fine-tuning, fine-pruning, and layer removal attacks, and can be trained in a fraction of the time required to train the original model. Code is available in the paper.
License Plate Detection and Character Recognition Using Deep Learning and Font Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

License plate detection (LPD) is essential for traffic management, vehicle tracking, and law enforcement but faces challenges like variable lighting and diverse font types, impacting accuracy. Traditionally reliant on image processing and machine learning, the field is now shifting towards deep learning for its robust performance in various conditions. Current methods, however, often require tailoring to specific regional datasets. This paper proposes a dual deep learning strategy using a Faster R-CNN for detection and a CNN-RNN model with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and a MobileNet V3 backbone for recognition. This approach aims to improve model performance using datasets from Ontario, Quebec, California, and New York State, achieving a recall rate of 92% on the Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (CENPARMI) dataset and 90% on the UFPR-ALPR dataset. It includes a detailed error analysis to identify the causes of false positives. Additionally, the research examines the role of font features in license plate (LP) recognition, analyzing fonts like Driver Gothic, Dreadnought, California Clarendon, and Zurich Extra Condensed with the OpenALPR system. It discovers significant performance discrepancies influenced by font characteristics, offering insights for future LPD system enhancements. Keywords: Deep Learning, License Plate, Font Evaluation
SIDE: Socially Informed Drought Estimation Toward Understanding Societal Impact Dynamics of Environmental Crisis
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Drought has become a critical global threat with significant societal impact. Existing drought monitoring solutions primarily focus on assessing drought severity using quantitative measurements, overlooking the diverse societal impact of drought from human-centric perspectives. Motivated by the collective intelligence on social media and the computational power of AI, this paper studies a novel problem of socially informed AI-driven drought estimation that aims to leverage social and news media information to jointly estimate drought severity and its societal impact. Two technical challenges exist: 1) How to model the implicit temporal dynamics of drought societal impact. 2) How to capture the social-physical interdependence between the physical drought condition and its societal impact. To address these challenges, we develop SIDE, a socially informed AI-driven drought estimation framework that explicitly quantifies the societal impact of drought and effectively models the social-physical interdependency for joint severity-impact estimation. Experiments on real-world datasets from California and Texas demonstrate SIDE's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines in accurately estimating drought severity and its societal impact. SIDE offers valuable insights for developing human-centric drought mitigation strategies to foster sustainable and resilient communities.
PO3AD: Predicting Point Offsets toward Better 3D Point Cloud Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Point cloud anomaly detection under the anomaly-free setting poses significant challenges as it requires accurately capturing the features of 3D normal data to identify deviations indicative of anomalies. Current efforts focus on devising reconstruction tasks, such as acquiring normal data representations by restoring normal samples from altered, pseudo-anomalous counterparts. Our findings reveal that distributing attention equally across normal and pseudo-anomalous data tends to dilute the model's focus on anomalous deviations. The challenge is further compounded by the inherently disordered and sparse nature of 3D point cloud data. In response to those predicaments, we introduce an innovative approach that emphasizes learning point offsets, targeting more informative pseudo-abnormal points, thus fostering more effective distillation of normal data representations. We also have crafted an augmentation technique that is steered by normal vectors, facilitating the creation of credible pseudo anomalies that enhance the efficiency of the training process. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation on the Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD datasets evidences that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an average enhancement of 9.0% and 1.4% in the AUC-ROC detection metric across these datasets, respectively.
MoodCam: Mood Prediction Through Smartphone-Based Facial Affect Analysis in Real-World Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

MoodCam introduces a novel method for assessing mood by utilizing facial affect analysis through the front-facing camera of smartphones during everyday activities. We collected facial behavior primitives during 15,995 real-world phone interactions involving 25 participants over four weeks. We developed three models for timely intervention: momentary, daily average, and next day average. Notably, our models exhibit AUC scores ranging from 0.58 to 0.64 for Valence and 0.60 to 0.63 for Arousal. These scores are comparable to or better than those from some previous studies. This predictive ability suggests that MoodCam can effectively forecast mood trends, providing valuable insights for timely interventions and resource planning in mental health management. The results are promising as they demonstrate the viability of using real-time and predictive mood analysis to aid in mental health interventions and potentially offer preemptive support during critical periods identified through mood trend shifts.
ShotVL: Human-Centric Highlight Frame Retrieval via Language Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Existing works on human-centric video understanding typically focus on analyzing specific moment or entire videos. However, many applications require higher precision at the frame level. In this work, we propose a novel task, BestShot, which aims to locate highlight frames within human-centric videos via language queries. This task demands not only a deep semantic comprehension of human actions but also precise temporal localization. To support this task, we introduce the BestShot Benchmark. %The benchmark is meticulously constructed by combining human detection and tracking, potential frame selection based on human judgment, and detailed textual descriptions crafted by human input to ensure precision. The benchmark is meticulously constructed by combining human-annotated highlight frames, detailed textual descriptions and duration labeling. These descriptions encompass three critical elements: (1) Visual content; (2) Fine-grained action; and (3) Human Pose Description. Together, these elements provide the necessary precision to identify the exact highlight frames in videos. To tackle this problem, we have collected two distinct datasets: (i) ShotGPT4o Dataset, which is algorithmically generated by GPT-4o and (ii) Image-SMPLText Dataset, a dataset with large-scale and accurate per-frame pose description leveraging PoseScript and existing pose estimation datasets. Based on these datasets, we present a strong baseline model, ShotVL, fine-tuned from InternVL, specifically for BestShot. We highlight the impressive zero-shot capabilities of our model and offer comparative analyses with existing SOTA models. ShotVL demonstrates a significant 52% improvement over InternVL on the BestShot Benchmark and a notable 57% improvement on the THUMOS14 Benchmark, all while maintaining the SOTA performance in general image classification and retrieval.
UniEntrezDB: Large-scale Gene Ontology Annotation Dataset and Evaluation Benchmarks with Unified Entrez Gene Identifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Gene studies are crucial for fields such as protein structure prediction, drug discovery, and cancer genomics, yet they face challenges in fully utilizing the vast and diverse information available. Gene studies require clean, factual datasets to ensure reliable results. Ontology graphs, neatly organized domain terminology graphs, provide ideal sources for domain facts. However, available gene ontology annotations are currently distributed across various databases without unified identifiers for genes and gene products. To address these challenges, we introduce Unified Entrez Gene Identifier Dataset and Benchmarks (UniEntrezDB), the first systematic effort to unify large-scale public Gene Ontology Annotations (GOA) from various databases using unique gene identifiers. UniEntrezDB includes a pre-training dataset and four downstream tasks designed to comprehensively evaluate gene embedding performance from gene, protein, and cell levels, ultimately enhancing the reliability and applicability of LLMs in gene research and other professional settings.
ParMod: A Parallel and Modular Framework for Learning Non-Markovian Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The commonly used Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, MDPs (Markov Decision Processes), has a basic premise that rewards depend on the current state and action only. However, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, which has long-term memory and dependency. The reward sparseness problem is further amplified in non-Markovian scenarios. Hence learning a non-Markovian task (NMT) is inherently more difficult than learning a Markovian one. In this paper, we propose a novel \textbf{Par}allel and \textbf{Mod}ular RL framework, ParMod, specifically for learning NMTs specified by temporal logic. With the aid of formal techniques, the NMT is modulaized into a series of sub-tasks based on the automaton structure (equivalent to its temporal logic counterpart). On this basis, sub-tasks will be trained by a group of agents in a parallel fashion, with one agent handling one sub-task. Besides parallel training, the core of ParMod lies in: a flexible classification method for modularizing the NMT, and an effective reward shaping method for improving the sample efficiency. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted on several challenging benchmark problems with respect to various metrics. The experimental results show that ParMod achieves superior performance over other relevant studies. Our work thus provides a good synergy among RL, NMT and temporal logic.
Trigger$^3$: Refining Query Correction via Adaptive Model Selector
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In search scenarios, user experience can be hindered by erroneous queries due to typos, voice errors, or knowledge gaps. Therefore, query correction is crucial for search engines. Current correction models, usually small models trained on specific data, often struggle with queries beyond their training scope or those requiring contextual understanding. While the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a potential solution, they are still limited by their pre-training data and inference cost, particularly for complex queries, making them not always effective for query correction. To tackle these, we propose Trigger$^3$, a large-small model collaboration framework that integrates the traditional correction model and LLM for query correction, capable of adaptively choosing the appropriate correction method based on the query and the correction results from the traditional correction model and LLM. Trigger$^3$ first employs a correction trigger to filter out correct queries. Incorrect queries are then corrected by the traditional correction model. If this fails, an LLM trigger is activated to call the LLM for correction. Finally, for queries that no model can correct, a fallback trigger decides to return the original query. Extensive experiments demonstrate Trigger$^3$ outperforms correction baselines while maintaining efficiency.
MapExpert: Online HD Map Construction with Simple and Efficient Sparse Map Element Expert
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Constructing online High-Definition (HD) maps is crucial for the static environment perception of autonomous driving systems (ADS). Existing solutions typically attempt to detect vectorized HD map elements with unified models; however, these methods often overlook the distinct characteristics of different non-cubic map elements, making accurate distinction challenging. To address these issues, we introduce an expert-based online HD map method, termed MapExpert. MapExpert utilizes sparse experts, distributed by our routers, to describe various non-cubic map elements accurately. Additionally, we propose an auxiliary balance loss function to distribute the load evenly across experts. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the limitations of prevalent bird's-eye view (BEV) feature temporal fusion methods and introduce an efficient temporal fusion module called Learnable Weighted Moving Descentage. This module effectively integrates relevant historical information into the final BEV features. Combined with an enhanced slice head branch, the proposed MapExpert achieves state-of-the-art performance and maintains good efficiency on both nuScenes and Argoverse2 datasets.
GIRAFFE: Design Choices for Extending the Context Length of Visual Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in processing multimodal inputs, yet applications such as visual agents, which require handling multiple images and high-resolution videos, demand enhanced long-range modeling. Moreover, existing open-source VLMs lack systematic exploration into extending their context length, and commercial models often provide limited details. To tackle this, we aim to establish an effective solution that enhances long context performance of VLMs while preserving their capacities in short context scenarios. Towards this goal, we make the best design choice through extensive experiment settings from data curation to context window extending and utilizing: (1) we analyze data sources and length distributions to construct ETVLM - a data recipe to balance the performance across scenarios; (2) we examine existing position extending methods, identify their limitations and propose M-RoPE++ as an enhanced approach; we also choose to solely instruction-tune the backbone with mixed-source data; (3) we discuss how to better utilize extended context windows and propose hybrid-resolution training. Built on the Qwen-VL series model, we propose Giraffe, which is effectively extended to 128K lengths. Evaluated on extensive long context VLM benchmarks such as VideoMME and Viusal Haystacks, our Giraffe achieves state-of-the-art performance among similarly sized open-source long VLMs and is competitive with commercial model GPT-4V. We will open-source the code, data, and models.
Open-World Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Perception is a key building block of autonomously acting vision systems such as autonomous vehicles. It is crucial that these systems are able to understand their surroundings in order to operate safely and robustly. Additionally, autonomous systems deployed in unconstrained real-world scenarios must be able of dealing with novel situations and object that have never been seen before. In this article, we tackle the problem of open-world panoptic segmentation, i.e., the task of discovering new semantic categories and new object instances at test time, while enforcing consistency among the categories that we incrementally discover. We propose Con2MAV, an approach for open-world panoptic segmentation that extends our previous work, ContMAV, which was developed for open-world semantic segmentation. Through extensive experiments across multiple datasets, we show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on open-world segmentation tasks, while still performing competitively on the known categories. We will open-source our implementation upon acceptance. Additionally, we propose PANIC (Panoptic ANomalies In Context), a benchmark for evaluating open-world panoptic segmentation in autonomous driving scenarios. This dataset, recorded with a multi-modal sensor suite mounted on a car, provides high-quality, pixel-wise annotations of anomalous objects at both semantic and instance level. Our dataset contains 800 images, with more than 50 unknown classes, i.e., classes that do not appear in the training set, and 4000 object instances, making it an extremely challenging dataset for open-world segmentation tasks in the autonomous driving scenario. We provide competitions for multiple open-world tasks on a hidden test set. Our dataset and competitions are available at https://www.ipb.uni-bonn.de/data/panic.
Automated Penetration Testing: Formalization and Realization
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent changes in standards and regulations, driven by the increasing importance of software systems in meeting societal needs, mandate increased security testing of software systems. Penetration testing has been shown to be a reliable method to asses software system security. However, manual penetration testing is labor-intensive and requires highly skilled practitioners. Given the shortage of cybersecurity experts and current societal needs, increasing the degree of automation involved in penetration testing can aid in fulfilling the demands for increased security testing. In this work, we formally express the penetration testing problem at the architectural level and suggest a general self-organizing architecture that can be instantiated to automate penetration testing of real systems. We further describe and implement a specialization of the architecture in the ADAPT tool, targeting systems composed of hosts and services. We evaluate and demonstrate the feasibility of ADAPT by automatically performing penetration tests with success against: Metasploitable2, Metasploitable3, and a realistic virtual network used as a lab environment for penetration tester training.
Forbidden Patterns in Mixed Linear Layouts
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

An ordered graph is a graph with a total order over its vertices. A linear layout of an ordered graph is a partition of the edges into sets of either non-crossing edges, called stacks, or non-nesting edges, called queues. The stack (queue) number of an ordered graph is the minimum number of required stacks (queues). Mixed linear layouts combine these layouts by allowing each set of edges to form either a stack or a queue. The minimum number of stacks plus queues is called the mixed page number. It is well known that ordered graphs with small stack number are characterized, up to a function, by the absence of large twists (that is, pairwise crossing edges). Similarly, ordered graphs with small queue number are characterized by the absence of large rainbows (that is, pairwise nesting edges). However, no such characterization via forbidden patterns is known for mixed linear layouts. We address this gap by introducing patterns similar to twists and rainbows, which we call thick patterns; such patterns allow a characterization, again up to a function, of mixed linear layouts of bounded-degree graphs. That is, we show that a family of ordered graphs with bounded maximum degree has bounded mixed page number if and only if the size of the largest thick pattern is bounded. In addition, we investigate an exact characterization of ordered graphs whose mixed page number equals a fixed integer $ k $ via a finite set of forbidden patterns. We show that for every $ k \ge 2 $, there is no such characterization, which supports the nature of our first result.
TabSniper: Towards Accurate Table Detection & Structure Recognition for Bank Statements
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Extraction of transaction information from bank statements is required to assess one's financial well-being for credit rating and underwriting decisions. Unlike other financial documents such as tax forms or financial statements, extracting the transaction descriptions from bank statements can provide a comprehensive and recent view into the cash flows and spending patterns. With multiple variations in layout and templates across several banks, extracting transactional level information from different table categories is an arduous task. Existing table structure recognition approaches produce sub optimal results for long, complex tables and are unable to capture all transactions accurately. This paper proposes TabSniper, a novel approach for efficient table detection, categorization and structure recognition from bank statements. The pipeline starts with detecting and categorizing tables of interest from the bank statements. The extracted table regions are then processed by the table structure recognition model followed by a post-processing module to transform the transactional data into a structured and standardised format. The detection and structure recognition architectures are based on DETR, fine-tuned with diverse bank statements along with additional feature enhancements. Results on challenging datasets demonstrate that TabSniper outperforms strong baselines and produces high-quality extraction of transaction information from bank and other financial documents across multiple layouts and templates.