OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Technical Design Review of Duke Robotics Club's Oogway: An AUV for RoboSub 2024
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The Duke Robotics Club is proud to present our robot for the 2024 RoboSub Competition: Oogway. Now in its second year, Oogway has been dramatically upgraded in both its capabilities and reliability. Oogway was built on the principle of independent, well-integrated, and reliable subsystems. Individual components and subsystems were tested and designed separately. Oogway's most advanced capabilities are a result of the tight integration between these subsystems. Such examples include a re-envisioned controls system, an entirely new electrical stack, advanced sonar integration, additional cameras and system monitoring, a new marker dropper, and a watertight capsule mechanism. These additions enabled Oogway to prequalify for Robosub 2024.
Generalization of Compositional Tasks with Logical Specification via Implicit Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we address the challenge of learning generalizable policies for compositional tasks defined by logical specifications. These tasks consist of multiple temporally extended sub-tasks. Due to the sub-task inter-dependencies and sparse reward issue in long-horizon tasks, existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, such as task-conditioned and goal-conditioned policies, continue to struggle with slow convergence and sub-optimal performance in generalizing to compositional tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a new hierarchical RL framework that enhances the efficiency and optimality of task generalization. At the high level, we present an implicit planner specifically designed for generalizing compositional tasks. This planner selects the next sub-task and estimates the multi-step return for completing the remaining task to complete from the current state. It learns a latent transition model and performs planning in the latent space by using a graph neural network (GNN). Subsequently, the high-level planner's selected sub-task guides the low-level agent to effectively handle long-horizon tasks, while the multi-step return encourages the low-level policy to account for future sub-task dependencies, enhancing its optimality. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the framework's advantages over previous methods in terms of both efficiency and optimality.
Robust 3D Point Clouds Classification based on Declarative Defenders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

3D point cloud classification requires distinct models from 2D image classification due to the divergent characteristics of the respective input data. While 3D point clouds are unstructured and sparse, 2D images are structured and dense. Bridging the domain gap between these two data types is a non-trivial challenge to enable model interchangeability. Recent research using Lattice Point Classifier (LPC) highlights the feasibility of cross-domain applicability. However, the lattice projection operation in LPC generates 2D images with disconnected projected pixels. In this paper, we explore three distinct algorithms for mapping 3D point clouds into 2D images. Through extensive experiments, we thoroughly examine and analyze their performance and defense mechanisms. Leveraging current large foundation models, we scrutinize the feature disparities between regular 2D images and projected 2D images. The proposed approaches demonstrate superior accuracy and robustness against adversarial attacks. The generative model-based mapping algorithms yield regular 2D images, further minimizing the domain gap from regular 2D classification tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/KaidongLi/pytorch-LatticePointClassifier.git.
MIRAGE: Multimodal Identification and Recognition of Annotations in Indian General Prescriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Hospitals in India still rely on handwritten medical records despite the availability of Electronic Medical Records (EMR), complicating statistical analysis and record retrieval. Handwritten records pose a unique challenge, requiring specialized data for training models to recognize medications and their recommendation patterns. While traditional handwriting recognition approaches employ 2-D LSTMs, recent studies have explored using Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for OCR tasks. Building on this approach, we focus on extracting medication names and dosages from simulated medical records. Our methodology MIRAGE (Multimodal Identification and Recognition of Annotations in indian GEneral prescriptions) involves fine-tuning the QWEN VL, LLaVA 1.6 and Idefics2 models on 743,118 high resolution simulated medical record images-fully annotated from 1,133 doctors across India. Our approach achieves 82% accuracy in extracting medication names and dosages.
Distributed Intelligent Video Surveillance for Early Armed Robbery Detection based on Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Low employment rates in Latin America have contributed to a substantial rise in crime, prompting the emergence of new criminal tactics. For instance, "express robbery" has become a common crime committed by armed thieves, in which they drive motorcycles and assault people in public in a matter of seconds. Recent research has approached the problem by embedding weapon detectors in surveillance cameras; however, these systems are prone to false positives if no counterpart confirms the event. In light of this, we present a distributed IoT system that integrates a computer vision pipeline and object detection capabilities into multiple end-devices, constantly monitoring for the presence of firearms and sharp weapons. Once a weapon is detected, the end-device sends a series of frames to a cloud server that implements a 3DCNN to classify the scene as either a robbery or a normal situation, thus minimizing false positives. The deep learning process to train and deploy weapon detection models uses a custom dataset with 16,799 images of firearms and sharp weapons. The best-performing model, YOLOv5s, optimized using TensorRT, achieved a final mAP of 0.87 running at 4.43 FPS. Additionally, the 3DCNN demonstrated 0.88 accuracy in detecting abnormal situations. Extensive experiments validate that the proposed system significantly reduces false positives while autonomously monitoring multiple locations in real-time.
"I think you need help! Here's why": Understanding the Effect of Explanations on Automatic Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Facial expression recognition (FER) has emerged as a promising approach to the development of emotion-aware intelligent systems. The performance of FER in multiple domains is continuously being improved, especially through advancements in data-driven learning approaches. However, a key challenge remains in utilizing FER in real-world contexts, namely ensuring user understanding of these systems and establishing a suitable level of user trust towards this technology. We conducted an empirical user study to investigate how explanations of FER can improve trust, understanding and performance in a human-computer interaction task that uses FER to trigger helpful hints during a navigation game. Our results showed that users provided with explanations of the FER system demonstrated improved control in using the system to their advantage, leading to a significant improvement in their understanding of the system, reduced collisions in the navigation game, as well as increased trust towards the system.
Empirical Study of Mutual Reinforcement Effect and Application in Few-shot Text Classification Tasks via Prompt
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) investigates the synergistic relationship between word-level and text-level classifications in text classification tasks. It posits that the performance of both classification levels can be mutually enhanced. However, this mechanism has not been adequately demonstrated or explained in prior research. To address this gap, we employ empirical experiment to observe and substantiate the MRE theory. Our experiments on 21 MRE mix datasets revealed the presence of MRE in the model and its impact. Specifically, we conducted compare experiments use fine-tune. The results of findings from comparison experiments corroborates the existence of MRE. Furthermore, we extended the application of MRE to prompt learning, utilizing word-level information as a verbalizer to bolster the model's prediction of text-level classification labels. In our final experiment, the F1-score significantly surpassed the baseline in 18 out of 21 MRE Mix datasets, further validating the notion that word-level information enhances the language model's comprehension of the text as a whole.
t-READi: Transformer-Powered Robust and Efficient Multimodal Inference for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Given the wide adoption of multimodal sensors (e.g., camera, lidar, radar) by autonomous vehicles (AVs), deep analytics to fuse their outputs for a robust perception become imperative. However, existing fusion methods often make two assumptions rarely holding in practice: i) similar data distributions for all inputs and ii) constant availability for all sensors. Because, for example, lidars have various resolutions and failures of radars may occur, such variability often results in significant performance degradation in fusion. To this end, we present tREADi, an adaptive inference system that accommodates the variability of multimodal sensory data and thus enables robust and efficient perception. t-READi identifies variation-sensitive yet structure-specific model parameters; it then adapts only these parameters while keeping the rest intact. t-READi also leverages a cross-modality contrastive learning method to compensate for the loss from missing modalities. Both functions are implemented to maintain compatibility with existing multimodal deep fusion methods. The extensive experiments evidently demonstrate that compared with the status quo approaches, t-READi not only improves the average inference accuracy by more than 6% but also reduces the inference latency by almost 15x with the cost of only 5% extra memory overhead in the worst case under realistic data and modal variations.
INA-Infra: An Open and Extensible Infrastructure for Intent-driven Network Automation Research
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

As telecommunications systems progress to support diverse use cases with heterogeneous and dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, it becomes an increasingly complex task to automatically manage various resources involved -- from radio, compute, to X-haul network, which are distributed from the edge to the cloud. Intent-driven network automation can play an important role in NextG networks to meet this need. Towards this, we have developed INA-Infra, an open, extensible, and end-to-end 5G/beyond 5G network infrastructure with intent-driven network automation and end-to-end network slicing capability. INA-Infra is designed using open-source components and is based on O-RAN architecture. INA-Infra manages the network infrastructure, various resources, and (virtualized / containerized) network functions using Nephio -- a cloud-native intent automation solution. It also incorporates intent-driven intelligent control using a Resource Management rApp and a Network Slicing xApp. We demonstrate that INA-Infra can manage the 5G network in a highly automatic and optimized manner, allowing the mobile network operators to focus on specifying the intents of different traffic classes.
LEAD Dataset: How Can Labels for Sound Event Detection Vary Depending on Annotators?
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce a LargE-scale Annotator's labels for sound event Detection (LEAD) dataset, which is the dataset used to gain a better understanding of the variation in strong labels in sound event detection (SED). In SED, it is very time-consuming to collect large-scale strong labels, and in most cases, multiple workers divide up the annotations to create a single dataset. In general, strong labels created by multiple annotators have large variations in the type of sound events and temporal onset/offset. Through the annotations of multiple workers, uniquely determining the strong label is quite difficult because the dataset contains sounds that can be mistaken for similar classes and sounds whose temporal onset/offset is difficult to distinguish. If the strong labels of SED vary greatly depending on the annotator, the SED model trained on a dataset created by multiple annotators will be biased. Moreover, if annotators differ between training and evaluation data, there is a risk that the model cannot be evaluated correctly. To investigate the variation in strong labels, we release the LEAD dataset, which provides distinct strong labels for each clip annotated by 20 different annotators. The LEAD dataset allows us to investigate how strong labels vary from annotator to annotator and consider SED models that are robust to the variation of strong labels. The LEAD dataset consists of strong labels assigned to sound clips from TUT Sound Events 2016/2017, TUT Acoustic Scenes 2016, and URBAN-SED. We also analyze variations in the strong labels in the LEAD dataset and provide insights into the variations.
Fusion Based Hand Geometry Recognition Using Dempster-Shafer Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a new technique for person recognition based on the fusion of hand geometric features of both the hands without any pose restrictions. All the features are extracted from normalized left and right hand images. Fusion is applied at feature level and also at decision level. Two probability based algorithms are proposed for classification. The first algorithm computes the maximum probability for nearest three neighbors. The second algorithm determines the maximum probability of the number of matched features with respect to a thresholding on distances. Based on these two highest probabilities initial decisions are made. The final decision is considered according to the highest probability as calculated by the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. Depending on the various combinations of the initial decisions, three schemes are experimented with 201 subjects for identification and verification. The correct identification rate found to be 99.5%, and the False Acceptance Rate (FAR) of 0.625% has been found during verification.
Point Cloud Novelty Detection Based on Latent Representations of a General Feature Extractor
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We propose an effective unsupervised 3D point cloud novelty detection approach, leveraging a general point cloud feature extractor and a one-class classifier. The general feature extractor consists of a graph-based autoencoder and is trained once on a point cloud dataset such as a mathematically generated fractal 3D point cloud dataset that is independent of normal/abnormal categories. The input point clouds are first converted into latent vectors by the general feature extractor, and then one-class classification is performed on the latent vectors. Compared to existing methods measuring the reconstruction error in 3D coordinate space, our approach utilizes latent representations where the shape information is condensed, which allows more direct and effective novelty detection. We confirm that our general feature extractor can extract shape features of unseen categories, eliminating the need for autoencoder re-training and reducing the computational burden. We validate the performance of our method through experiments on several subsets of the ShapeNet dataset and demonstrate that our latent-based approach outperforms the existing methods.
Many Flavors of Edit Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Several measures exist for string similarity, including notable ones like the edit distance and the indel distance. The former measures the count of insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into another, while the latter specifically quantifies the number of insertions and deletions. Many algorithmic solutions explicitly address one of these measures, and frequently techniques applicable to one can also be adapted to work with the other. In this paper, we investigate whether there exists a standardized approach for applying results from one setting to another. Specifically, we demonstrate the capability to reduce questions regarding string similarity over arbitrary alphabets to equivalent questions over a binary alphabet. Furthermore, we illustrate how to transform questions concerning indel distance into equivalent questions based on edit distance. This complements an earlier result of Tiskin (2007) which addresses the inverse direction.
Large-Scale 3D Medical Image Pre-training with Geometric Context Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The scarcity of annotations poses a significant challenge in medical image analysis. Large-scale pre-training has emerged as a promising label-efficient solution, owing to the utilization of large-scale data, large models, and advanced pre-training techniques. However, its development in medical images remains underexplored. The primary challenge lies in harnessing large-scale unlabeled data and learning high-level semantics without annotations. We observe that 3D medical images exhibit consistent geometric context, i.e., consistent geometric relations between different organs, which leads to a promising way for learning consistent representations. Motivated by this, we introduce a simple-yet-effective Volume Contrast (VoCo) framework to leverage geometric context priors for self-supervision. Given an input volume, we extract base crops from different regions to construct positive and negative pairs for contrastive learning. Then we predict the contextual position of a random crop by contrasting its similarity to the base crops. In this way, VoCo encodes the inherent geometric context into model representations, facilitating high-level semantic learning without annotations. Specifically, we (1) introduce the largest medical pre-training dataset PreCT-160K; (2) investigate scaling laws and propose guidelines for tailoring different model sizes to various medical tasks; (3) build a benchmark encompassing 48 medical tasks. Extensive experiments highlight the superiority of VoCo. Codes at https://github.com/Luffy03/Large-Scale-Medical.
The Role of Fake Users in Sequential Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are widely used to model user behavior over time, yet their robustness remains an under-explored area of research. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to assess how the presence of fake users, who engage in random interactions, follow popular or unpopular items, or focus on a single genre, impacts the performance of SRSs in real-world scenarios. We evaluate two SRS models across multiple datasets, using established metrics such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) and Rank Sensitivity List (RLS) to measure performance. While traditional metrics like NDCG remain relatively stable, our findings reveal that the presence of fake users severely degrades RLS metrics, often reducing them to near-zero values. These results highlight the need for further investigation into the effects of fake users on training data and emphasize the importance of developing more resilient SRSs that can withstand different types of adversarial attacks.
Generalized Group Data Attribution
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Data Attribution (DA) methods quantify the influence of individual training data points on model outputs and have broad applications such as explainability, data selection, and noisy label identification. However, existing DA methods are often computationally intensive, limiting their applicability to large-scale machine learning models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Generalized Group Data Attribution (GGDA) framework, which computationally simplifies DA by attributing to groups of training points instead of individual ones. GGDA is a general framework that subsumes existing attribution methods and can be applied to new DA techniques as they emerge. It allows users to optimize the trade-off between efficiency and fidelity based on their needs. Our empirical results demonstrate that GGDA applied to popular DA methods such as Influence Functions, TracIn, and TRAK results in upto 10x-50x speedups over standard DA methods while gracefully trading off attribution fidelity. For downstream applications such as dataset pruning and noisy label identification, we demonstrate that GGDA significantly improves computational efficiency and maintains effectiveness, enabling practical applications in large-scale machine learning scenarios that were previously infeasible.
SlimSeiz: Efficient Channel-Adaptive Seizure Prediction Using a Mamba-Enhanced Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Epileptic seizures cause abnormal brain activity, and their unpredictability can lead to accidents, underscoring the need for long-term seizure prediction. Although seizures can be predicted by analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, existing methods often require too many electrode channels or larger models, limiting mobile usability. This paper introduces a SlimSeiz framework that utilizes adaptive channel selection with a lightweight neural network model. SlimSeiz operates in two states: the first stage selects the optimal channel set for seizure prediction using machine learning algorithms, and the second stage employs a lightweight neural network based on convolution and Mamba for prediction. On the Children's Hospital Boston-MIT (CHB-MIT) EEG dataset, SlimSeiz can reduce channels from 22 to 8 while achieving a satisfactory result of 94.8% accuracy, 95.5% sensitivity, and 94.0% specificity with only 21.2K model parameters, matching or outperforming larger models' performance. We also validate SlimSeiz on a new EEG dataset, SRH-LEI, collected from Shanghai Renji Hospital, demonstrating its effectiveness across different patients. The code and SRH-LEI dataset are available at https://github.com/guoruilu/SlimSeiz.
Leveraging Customer Feedback for Multi-modal Insight Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Businesses can benefit from customer feedback in different modalities, such as text and images, to enhance their products and services. However, it is difficult to extract actionable and relevant pairs of text segments and images from customer feedback in a single pass. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal method that fuses image and text information in a latent space and decodes it to extract the relevant feedback segments using an image-text grounded text decoder. We also introduce a weakly-supervised data generation technique that produces training data for this task. We evaluate our model on unseen data and demonstrate that it can effectively mine actionable insights from multi-modal customer feedback, outperforming the existing baselines by $14$ points in F1 score.
Crowd IQ -- Aggregating Opinions to Boost Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

We show how the quality of decisions based on the aggregated opinions of the crowd can be conveniently studied using a sample of individual responses to a standard IQ questionnaire. We aggregated the responses to the IQ questionnaire using simple majority voting and a machine learning approach based on a probabilistic graphical model. The score for the aggregated questionnaire, Crowd IQ, serves as a quality measure of decisions based on aggregating opinions, which also allows quantifying individual and crowd performance on the same scale. We show that Crowd IQ grows quickly with the size of the crowd but saturates, and that for small homogeneous crowds the Crowd IQ significantly exceeds the IQ of even their most intelligent member. We investigate alternative ways of aggregating the responses and the impact of the aggregation method on the resulting Crowd IQ. We also discuss Contextual IQ, a method of quantifying the individual participant's contribution to the Crowd IQ based on the Shapley value from cooperative game theory.