OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Improving the State of the Art for Training Human-AI Teams: Technical Report #2 -- Results of Researcher Knowledge Elicitation Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

A consensus report produced for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Mathematics documented a prevalent and increasing desire to support human-Artificial Intelligence (AI) teaming across military service branches. Sonalysts has begun an internal initiative to explore the training of Human-AI teams. The first step in this effort is to develop a Synthetic Task Environment (STE) that is capable of facilitating research on Human-AI teams. Our goal is to create a STE that offers a task environment that could support the breadth of research that stakeholders plan to perform within this domain. As a result, we wanted to sample the priorities of the relevant research community broadly, and the effort documented in this report is our initial attempt to do so. We created a survey that featured two types of questions. The first asked respondents to report their agreement with STE features that we anticipated might be important. The second represented open-ended questions that asked respondents to specify their priorities within several dimensions of the anticipated STE. The research team invited nineteen researchers from academic and Government labs to participate, and 11 were able to complete the survey. The team analyzed their responses to identify themes that emerged and topics that would benefit from further analysis. The most significant finding of the survey was that a number of researchers felt that various open-source STEs that would meet our needs already exist. Researchers also emphasized the need for automated transcription and coding tools to ease the burden of assessing inter-team communications; the importance of robust data capture and export capabilities; and the desirability of extensive flexibility across many aspects of the tool.
Spatio-Temporal Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for POI-level Crowd Flow Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate acquisition of crowd flow at Points of Interest (POIs) is pivotal for effective traffic management, public service, and urban planning. Despite this importance, due to the limitations of urban sensing techniques, the data quality from most sources is inadequate for monitoring crowd flow at each POI. This renders the inference of accurate crowd flow from low-quality data a critical and challenging task. The complexity is heightened by three key factors: 1) The scarcity and rarity of labeled data, 2) The intricate spatio-temporal dependencies among POIs, and 3) The myriad correlations between precise crowd flow and GPS reports. To address these challenges, we recast the crowd flow inference problem as a self-supervised attributed graph representation learning task and introduce a novel Contrastive Self-learning framework for Spatio-Temporal data (CSST). Our approach initiates with the construction of a spatial adjacency graph founded on the POIs and their respective distances. We then employ a contrastive learning technique to exploit large volumes of unlabeled spatio-temporal data. We adopt a swapped prediction approach to anticipate the representation of the target subgraph from similar instances. Following the pre-training phase, the model is fine-tuned with accurate crowd flow data. Our experiments, conducted on two real-world datasets, demonstrate that the CSST pre-trained on extensive noisy data consistently outperforms models trained from scratch.
RepSGG: Novel Representations of Entities and Relationships for Scene Graph Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) has achieved significant progress recently. However, most previous works rely heavily on fixed-size entity representations based on bounding box proposals, anchors, or learnable queries. As each representation's cardinality has different trade-offs between performance and computation overhead, extracting highly representative features efficiently and dynamically is both challenging and crucial for SGG. In this work, a novel architecture called RepSGG is proposed to address the aforementioned challenges, formulating a subject as queries, an object as keys, and their relationship as the maximum attention weight between pairwise queries and keys. With more fine-grained and flexible representation power for entities and relationships, RepSGG learns to sample semantically discriminative and representative points for relationship inference. Moreover, the long-tailed distribution also poses a significant challenge for generalization of SGG. A run-time performance-guided logit adjustment (PGLA) strategy is proposed such that the relationship logits are modified via affine transformations based on run-time performance during training. This strategy encourages a more balanced performance between dominant and rare classes. Experimental results show that RepSGG achieves the state-of-the-art or comparable performance on the Visual Genome and Open Images V6 datasets with fast inference speed, demonstrating the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed methods.
Expert Uncertainty and Severity Aware Chest X-Ray Classification by Multi-Relationship Graph Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Patients undergoing chest X-rays (CXR) often endure multiple lung diseases. When evaluating a patient's condition, due to the complex pathologies, subtle texture changes of different lung lesions in images, and patient condition differences, radiologists may make uncertain even when they have experienced long-term clinical training and professional guidance, which makes much noise in extracting disease labels based on CXR reports. In this paper, we re-extract disease labels from CXR reports to make them more realistic by considering disease severity and uncertainty in classification. Our contributions are as follows: 1. We re-extracted the disease labels with severity and uncertainty by a rule-based approach with keywords discussed with clinical experts. 2. To further improve the explainability of chest X-ray diagnosis, we designed a multi-relationship graph learning method with an expert uncertainty-aware loss function. 3. Our multi-relationship graph learning method can also interpret the disease classification results. Our experimental results show that models considering disease severity and uncertainty outperform previous state-of-the-art methods.
Relay Diffusion: Unifying diffusion process across resolutions for image synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Diffusion models achieved great success in image synthesis, but still face challenges in high-resolution generation. Through the lens of discrete cosine transformation, we find the main reason is that \emph{the same noise level on a higher resolution results in a higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio in the frequency domain}. In this work, we present Relay Diffusion Model (RDM), which transfers a low-resolution image or noise into an equivalent high-resolution one for diffusion model via blurring diffusion and block noise. Therefore, the diffusion process can continue seamlessly in any new resolution or model without restarting from pure noise or low-resolution conditioning. RDM achieves state-of-the-art FID on CelebA-HQ and sFID on ImageNet 256$\times$256, surpassing previous works such as ADM, LDM and DiT by a large margin. All the codes and checkpoints are open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/RelayDiffusion}.
Unity is Strength: Cross-Task Knowledge Distillation to Improve Code Review Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Code review is a fundamental process in software development that plays a critical role in ensuring code quality and reducing the likelihood of errors and bugs. However, code review might be complex, subjective, and time-consuming. Comment generation and code refinement are two key tasks of this process and their automation has traditionally been addressed separately in the literature using different approaches. In this paper, we propose a novel deep-learning architecture, DISCOREV, based on cross-task knowledge distillation that addresses these two tasks simultaneously. In our approach, the fine-tuning of the comment generation model is guided by the code refinement model. We implemented this guidance using two strategies, feedback-based learning objective and embedding alignment objective. We evaluated our approach based on cross-task knowledge distillation by comparing it to the state-of-the-art methods that are based on independent training and fine-tuning. Our results show that our approach generates better review comments as measured by the BLEU score.
Community-Based Hierarchical Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Model Fusion for Chronic Disease Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning is a challenge presented by binary classification problems where there is an abundance of unlabeled data along with a small number of positive data instances, which can be used to address chronic disease screening problem. State-of-the-art PU learning methods have resulted in the development of various risk estimators, yet they neglect the differences among distinct populations. To address this issue, we present a novel Positive-Unlabeled Learning Tree (PUtree) algorithm. PUtree is designed to take into account communities such as different age or income brackets, in tasks of chronic disease prediction. We propose a novel approach for binary decision-making, which hierarchically builds community-based PU models and then aggregates their deliverables. Our method can explicate each PU model on the tree for the optimized non-leaf PU node splitting. Furthermore, a mask-recovery data augmentation strategy enables sufficient training of the model in individual communities. Additionally, the proposed approach includes an adversarial PU risk estimator to capture hierarchical PU-relationships, and a model fusion network that integrates data from each tree path, resulting in robust binary classification results. We demonstrate the superior performance of PUtree as well as its variants on two benchmarks and a new diabetes-prediction dataset.
Requirements Analysis of Variability Constraints in a Configurable Flight Software System
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Variability constraints are an integral part of the requirements for a configurable system. The constraints specified in the requirements on the legal combinations of options define the space of potential valid configurations for the system-to-be. This paper reports on our experience with the variability-related requirements constraints of a flight software framework used by multiple space missions. A challenge that we saw for practitioners using the current framework, now open-sourced, is that the specifications of its variability-related requirements and constraints are dispersed across several documents, rather than being centralized in the software requirements specification. Such dispersion can contribute to misunderstandings of the side-effects of design choices, increased effort for developers, and bugs during operations. Based on our experience, we propose a new software variability model, similar to a product-line feature model, in the flight software framework. We describe the structured technique by which our model is developed, demonstrate its use, and evaluate it on a key service module of the flight software. Results show that our lightweight modeling technique helped find missing and inconsistent variability-related requirements and constraints. More generally, we suggest that a variability modeling technique such as this can be an efficient way for developers to centralize the specification and improve the analysis of dispersed variability-related requirements and constraints in other configurable systems.
The Quiet Eye Phenomenon in Minimally Invasive Surgery
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we report our discovery of a gaze behavior called Quiet Eye (QE) in minimally invasive surgery. The QE behavior has been extensively studied in sports training and has been associated with higher level of expertise in multiple sports. We investigated the QE behavior in two independently collected data sets of surgeons performing tasks in a sinus surgery setting and a robotic surgery setting, respectively. Our results show that the QE behavior is more likely to occur in successful task executions and in performances of surgeons of high level of expertise. These results open the door to use the QE behavior in both training and skill assessment in minimally invasive surgery.
Cooperative Multi-Agent Planning Framework for Fuel Constrained UAV-UGV Routing Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), although adept at aerial surveillance, are often constrained by limited battery capacity. By refueling on slow-moving Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), their operational endurance can be significantly enhanced. This paper explores the computationally complex problem of cooperative UAV-UGV routing for vast area surveillance within the speed and fuel constraints, presenting a sequential multi-agent planning framework for achieving feasible and optimally satisfactory solutions. By considering the UAV fuel limits and utilizing a minimum set cover algorithm, we determine UGV refueling stops, which in turn facilitate UGV route planning at the first step and through a task allocation technique and energy constrained vehicle routing problem modeling with time windows (E-VRPTW) we achieve the UAV route at the second step of the framework. The effectiveness of our multi-agent strategy is demonstrated through the implementation on 30 different task scenarios across 3 different scales. This work offers significant insight into the collaborative advantages of UAV-UGV systems and introduces heuristic approaches to bypass computational challenges and swiftly reach high-quality solutions.
From Base to Conversational: Japanese Instruction Dataset and Tuning Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Instruction tuning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to become interactive. While many instruction tuning datasets exist in English, there is a noticeable lack in other languages. Also, their effectiveness has not been well verified in non-English languages. We construct a Japanese instruction dataset by expanding and filtering existing datasets and apply the dataset to a Japanese pre-trained base model. We performed Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) tuning on both Japanese and English existing models using our instruction dataset. We evaluated these models from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. As a result, the effectiveness of Japanese instruction datasets is confirmed. The results also indicate that even with relatively small LLMs, performances in downstream tasks would be improved through instruction tuning. Our instruction dataset, tuned models, and implementation are publicly available online.
Byzantine-Robust Federated Learning with Variance Reduction and Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning (FL) is designed to preserve data privacy during model training, where the data remains on the client side (i.e., IoT devices), and only model updates of clients are shared iteratively for collaborative learning. However, this process is vulnerable to privacy attacks and Byzantine attacks: the local model updates shared throughout the FL network will leak private information about the local training data, and they can also be maliciously crafted by Byzantine attackers to disturb the learning. In this paper, we propose a new FL scheme that guarantees rigorous privacy and simultaneously enhances system robustness against Byzantine attacks. Our approach introduces sparsification- and momentum-driven variance reduction into the client-level differential privacy (DP) mechanism, to defend against Byzantine attackers. The security design does not violate the privacy guarantee of the client-level DP mechanism; hence, our approach achieves the same client-level DP guarantee as the state-of-the-art. We conduct extensive experiments on both IID and non-IID datasets and different tasks and evaluate the performance of our approach against different Byzantine attacks by comparing it with state-of-the-art defense methods. The results of our experiments show the efficacy of our framework and demonstrate its ability to improve system robustness against Byzantine attacks while achieving a strong privacy guarantee.
Password-Stealing without Hacking: Wi-Fi Enabled Practical Keystroke Eavesdropping
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The contact-free sensing nature of Wi-Fi has been leveraged to achieve privacy breaches, yet existing attacks relying on Wi-Fi CSI (channel state information) demand hacking Wi-Fi hardware to obtain desired CSIs. Since such hacking has proven prohibitively hard due to compact hardware, its feasibility in keeping up with fast-developing Wi-Fi technology becomes very questionable. To this end, we propose WiKI-Eve to eavesdrop keystrokes on smartphones without the need for hacking. WiKI-Eve exploits a new feature, BFI (beamforming feedback information), offered by latest Wi-Fi hardware: since BFI is transmitted from a smartphone to an AP in clear-text, it can be overheard (hence eavesdropped) by any other Wi-Fi devices switching to monitor mode. As existing keystroke inference methods offer very limited generalizability, WiKI-Eve further innovates in an adversarial learning scheme to enable its inference generalizable towards unseen scenarios. We implement WiKI-Eve and conduct extensive evaluation on it; the results demonstrate that WiKI-Eve achieves 88.9% inference accuracy for individual keystrokes and up to 65.8% top-10 accuracy for stealing passwords of mobile applications (e.g., WeChat).
HOPPER: Interpretative Fuzzing for Libraries
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Despite the fact that the state-of-the-art fuzzers can generate inputs efficiently, existing fuzz drivers still cannot adequately cover entries in libraries. Most of these fuzz drivers are crafted manually by developers, and their quality depends on the developers' understanding of the code. Existing works have attempted to automate the generation of fuzz drivers by learning API usage from code and execution traces. However, the generated fuzz drivers are limited to a few specific call sequences by the code being learned. To address these challenges, we present HOPPER, which can fuzz libraries without requiring any domain knowledge to craft fuzz drivers. It transforms the problem of library fuzzing into the problem of interpreter fuzzing. The interpreters linked against libraries under test can interpret the inputs that describe arbitrary API usage. To generate semantically correct inputs for the interpreter, HOPPER learns the intra- and inter-API constraints in the libraries and mutates the program with grammar awareness. We implemented HOPPER and evaluated its effectiveness on 11 real-world libraries against manually crafted fuzzers and other automatic solutions. Our results show that HOPPER greatly outperformed the other fuzzers in both code coverage and bug finding, having uncovered 25 previously unknown bugs that other fuzzers couldn't. Moreover, we have demonstrated that the proposed intra- and inter-API constraint learning methods can correctly learn constraints implied by the library and, therefore, significantly improve the fuzzing efficiency. The experiment results indicate that HOPPER is able to explore a vast range of API usages for library fuzzing out of the box.
BroadCAM: Outcome-agnostic Class Activation Mapping for Small-scale Weakly Supervised Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Class activation mapping~(CAM), a visualization technique for interpreting deep learning models, is now commonly used for weakly supervised semantic segmentation~(WSSS) and object localization~(WSOL). It is the weighted aggregation of the feature maps by activating the high class-relevance ones. Current CAM methods achieve it relying on the training outcomes, such as predicted scores~(forward information), gradients~(backward information), etc. However, when with small-scale data, unstable training may lead to less effective model outcomes and generate unreliable weights, finally resulting in incorrect activation and noisy CAM seeds. In this paper, we propose an outcome-agnostic CAM approach, called BroadCAM, for small-scale weakly supervised applications. Since broad learning system (BLS) is independent to the model learning, BroadCAM can avoid the weights being affected by the unreliable model outcomes when with small-scale data. By evaluating BroadCAM on VOC2012 (natural images) and BCSS-WSSS (medical images) for WSSS and OpenImages30k for WSOL, BroadCAM demonstrates superior performance than existing CAM methods with small-scale data (less than 5\%) in different CNN architectures. It also achieves SOTA performance with large-scale training data. Extensive qualitative comparisons are conducted to demonstrate how BroadCAM activates the high class-relevance feature maps and generates reliable CAMs when with small-scale training data.
Keep-Alive Caching for the Hawkes process
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We study the design of caching policies in applications such as serverless computing where there is not a fixed size cache to be filled, but rather there is a cost associated with the time an item stays in the cache. We present a model for such caching policies which captures the trade-off between this cost and the cost of cache misses. We characterize optimal caching policies in general and apply this characterization by deriving a closed form for Hawkes processes. Since optimal policies for Hawkes processes depend on the history of arrivals, we also develop history-independent policies which achieve near-optimal average performance. We evaluate the performances of the optimal policy and approximate polices using simulations and a data trace of Azure Functions, Microsoft's FaaS (Function as a Service) platform for serverless computing.
AR.S.Space: An AR Casual Game for Social Engagement in Work Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

In social situations, individuals often encounter communication challenges, particularly when adapting to new environments. While some studies have acknowledged the potential of AR social games to aid in effective socialization to some extent, little attention has been given to AR HMD-based games specifically designed to facilitate social interactions. In response, we propose AR.S.Space, an AR HMD-based social game that employs augmented reality features to engage users with virtual social agents through asynchronous communication. The game aims to mitigate the unease associated with initial social interactions and foster long-term connections. To assess its efficacy, a user study was conducted within a specific scenario (an office space), gathering quantitative data and qualitative feedback through questionnaires and interviews. The findings highlight the game's potential to enhance socialization in small-scale environments. Moreover, the study offers valuable design guidelines for future research and the application of AR social games in similar settings.