OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Machine Learning and Data Analysis Using Posets: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Posets are discrete mathematical structures which are ubiquitous in a broad range of data analysis and machine learning applications. Research connecting posets to the data science domain has been ongoing for many years. In this paper, a comprehensive review of a wide range of studies on data analysis and machine learning using posets are examined in terms of their theory, algorithms and applications. In addition, the applied lattice theory domain of formal concept analysis will also be highlighted in terms of its machine learning applications.
Unsupervised, Bottom-up Category Discovery for Symbol Grounding with a Curious Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Towards addressing the Symbol Grounding Problem and motivated by early childhood language development, we leverage a robot which has been equipped with an approximate model of curiosity with particular focus on bottom-up building of unsupervised categories grounded in the physical world. That is, rather than starting with a top-down symbol (e.g., a word referring to an object) and providing meaning through the application of predetermined samples, the robot autonomously and gradually breaks up its exploration space into a series of increasingly specific unlabeled categories at which point an external expert may optionally provide a symbol association. We extend prior work by using a robot that can observe the visual world, introducing a higher dimensional sensory space, and using a more generalizable method of category building. Our experiments show that the robot learns categories based on actions and what it visually observes, and that those categories can be symbolically grounded into.https://info.arxiv.org/help/prep#comments
QED: Scalable Verification of Hardware Memory Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Memory consistency model (MCM) issues in out-of-order-issue microprocessor-based shared-memory systems are notoriously non-intuitive and a source of hardware design bugs. Prior hardware verification work is limited to in-order-issue processors, to proving the correctness only of some test cases, or to bounded verification that does not scale in practice beyond 7 instructions across all threads. Because cache coherence (i.e., write serialization and atomicity) and pipeline front-end verification and testing are well-studied, we focus on the memory ordering in an out-of-order-issue processor's load-store queue and the coherence interface between the core and global coherence. We propose QED based on the key notion of observability that any hardware reordering matters only if a forbidden value is produced. We argue that one needs to consider (1) only directly-ordered instruction pairs -- transitively non-redundant pairs connected by an edge in the MCM-imposed partial order -- and not all in-flight instructions, and (2) only the ordering of external events from other cores (e.g.,invalidations) but not the events' originating cores, achieving verification scalability in both the numbers of in-flight memory instructions and of cores. Exhaustively considering all pairs of instruction types and all types of external events intervening between each pair, QED attempts to restore any reordered instructions to an MCM-complaint order without changing the execution values, where failure indicates an MCM violation. Each instruction pair's exploration results in a decision tree of simple, narrowly-defined predicates to be evaluated against the RTL. In our experiments, we automatically generate the decision trees for SC, TSO, and RISC-V WMO, and illustrate automatable verification by evaluating a substantial predicate against BOOMv3 implementation of RISC-V WMO, leaving full automation to future work.
Deep Learning-Based Weather-Related Power Outage Prediction with Socio-Economic and Power Infrastructure Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a deep learning-based approach for hourly power outage probability prediction within census tracts encompassing a utility company's service territory. Two distinct deep learning models, conditional Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and unconditional MLP, were developed to forecast power outage probabilities, leveraging a rich array of input features gathered from publicly available sources including weather data, weather station locations, power infrastructure maps, socio-economic and demographic statistics, and power outage records. Given a one-hour-ahead weather forecast, the models predict the power outage probability for each census tract, taking into account both the weather prediction and the location's characteristics. The deep learning models employed different loss functions to optimize prediction performance. Our experimental results underscore the significance of socio-economic factors in enhancing the accuracy of power outage predictions at the census tract level.
LVLM-Interpret: An Interpretability Tool for Large Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, multi-modal large language models are emerging as a significant area of interest. These models, which combine various forms of data input, are becoming increasingly popular. However, understanding their internal mechanisms remains a complex task. Numerous advancements have been made in the field of explainability tools and mechanisms, yet there is still much to explore. In this work, we present a novel interactive application aimed towards understanding the internal mechanisms of large vision-language models. Our interface is designed to enhance the interpretability of the image patches, which are instrumental in generating an answer, and assess the efficacy of the language model in grounding its output in the image. With our application, a user can systematically investigate the model and uncover system limitations, paving the way for enhancements in system capabilities. Finally, we present a case study of how our application can aid in understanding failure mechanisms in a popular large multi-modal model: LLaVA.
DreamWalk: Style Space Exploration using Diffusion Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Text-conditioned diffusion models can generate impressive images, but fall short when it comes to fine-grained control. Unlike direct-editing tools like Photoshop, text conditioned models require the artist to perform "prompt engineering," constructing special text sentences to control the style or amount of a particular subject present in the output image. Our goal is to provide fine-grained control over the style and substance specified by the prompt, for example to adjust the intensity of styles in different regions of the image (Figure 1). Our approach is to decompose the text prompt into conceptual elements, and apply a separate guidance term for each element in a single diffusion process. We introduce guidance scale functions to control when in the diffusion process and \emph{where} in the image to intervene. Since the method is based solely on adjusting diffusion guidance, it does not require fine-tuning or manipulating the internal layers of the diffusion model's neural network, and can be used in conjunction with LoRA- or DreamBooth-trained models (Figure2). Project page: https://mshu1.github.io/dreamwalk.github.io/
Eigenpruning: an Interpretability-Inspired PEFT Method
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce eigenpruning, a method that removes singular values from weight matrices in an LLM to improve its performance in a particular task. This method is inspired by interpretability methods designed to automatically find subnetworks of a model which solve a specific task. In our tests, the pruned model outperforms the original model by a large margin, while only requiring minimal computation to prune the weight matrices. In the case of a small synthetic task in integer multiplication, the Phi-2 model can improve its accuracy in the test set from 13.75% to 97.50%. Interestingly, these results seem to indicate the existence of a computation path that can solve the task very effectively, but it was not being used by the original model. Finally, we publicly release our implementation.
OmniGS: Fast Radiance Field Reconstruction using Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Photorealistic reconstruction relying on 3D Gaussian Splatting has shown promising potential in various domains. However, the current 3D Gaussian Splatting system only supports radiance field reconstruction using undistorted perspective images. In this paper, we present OmniGS, a novel omnidirectional Gaussian splatting system, to take advantage of omnidirectional images for fast radiance field reconstruction. Specifically, we conduct a theoretical analysis of spherical camera model derivatives in 3D Gaussian Splatting. According to the derivatives, we then implement a new GPU-accelerated omnidirectional rasterizer that directly splats 3D Gaussians onto the equirectangular screen space for omnidirectional image rendering. We realize differentiable optimization of the omnidirectional radiance field without the requirement of cube-map rectification or tangent-plane approximation. Extensive experiments conducted in egocentric and roaming scenarios demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality and high rendering speed using omnidirectional images. The code will be publicly available.
HDR Imaging for Dynamic Scenes with Events
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) for real-world dynamic scenes is challenging because moving objects may lead to hybrid degradation of low dynamic range and motion blur. Existing event-based approaches only focus on a separate task, while cascading HDRI and motion deblurring would lead to sub-optimal solutions, and unavailable ground-truth sharp HDR images aggravate the predicament. To address these challenges, we propose an Event-based HDRI framework within a Self-supervised learning paradigm, i.e., Self-EHDRI, which generalizes HDRI performance in real-world dynamic scenarios. Specifically, a self-supervised learning strategy is carried out by learning cross-domain conversions from blurry LDR images to sharp LDR images, which enables sharp HDR images to be accessible in the intermediate process even though ground-truth sharp HDR images are missing. Then, we formulate the event-based HDRI and motion deblurring model and conduct a unified network to recover the intermediate sharp HDR results, where both the high dynamic range and high temporal resolution of events are leveraged simultaneously for compensation. We construct large-scale synthetic and real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our method. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed Self-EHDRI outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin. The codes, datasets, and results are available at https://lxp-whu.github.io/Self-EHDRI.
Accurate Low-Degree Polynomial Approximation of Non-polynomial Operators for Fast Private Inference in Homomorphic Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

As machine learning (ML) permeates fields like healthcare, facial recognition, and blockchain, the need to protect sensitive data intensifies. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows inference on encrypted data, preserving the privacy of both data and the ML model. However, it slows down non-secure inference by up to five magnitudes, with a root cause of replacing non-polynomial operators (ReLU and MaxPooling) with high-degree Polynomial Approximated Function (PAF). We propose SmartPAF, a framework to replace non-polynomial operators with low-degree PAF and then recover the accuracy of PAF-approximated model through four techniques: (1) Coefficient Tuning (CT) -- adjust PAF coefficients based on the input distributions before training, (2) Progressive Approximation (PA) -- progressively replace one non-polynomial operator at a time followed by a fine-tuning, (3) Alternate Training (AT) -- alternate the training between PAFs and other linear operators in the decoupled manner, and (4) Dynamic Scale (DS) / Static Scale (SS) -- dynamically scale PAF input value within (-1, 1) in training, and fix the scale as the running max value in FHE deployment. The synergistic effect of CT, PA, AT, and DS/SS enables SmartPAF to enhance the accuracy of the various models approximated by PAFs with various low degrees under multiple datasets. For ResNet-18 under ImageNet-1k, the Pareto-frontier spotted by SmartPAF in latency-accuracy tradeoff space achieves 1.42x ~ 13.64x accuracy improvement and 6.79x ~ 14.9x speedup than prior works. Further, SmartPAF enables a 14-degree PAF (f1^2 g_1^2) to achieve 7.81x speedup compared to the 27-degree PAF obtained by minimax approximation with the same 69.4% post-replacement accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/EfficientFHE/SmartPAF.
Mining Area Skyline Objects from Map-based Big Data using Apache Spark Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The computation of the skyline provides a mechanism for utilizing multiple location-based criteria to identify optimal data points. However, the efficiency of these computations diminishes and becomes more challenging as the input data expands. This study presents a novel algorithm aimed at mitigating this challenge by harnessing the capabilities of Apache Spark, a distributed processing platform, for conducting area skyline computations. The proposed algorithm enhances processing speed and scalability. In particular, our algorithm encompasses three key phases: the computation of distances between data points, the generation of distance tuples, and the execution of the skyline operators. Notably, the second phase employs a local partial skyline extraction technique to minimize the volume of data transmitted from each executor (a parallel processing procedure) to the driver (a central processing procedure). Afterwards, the driver processes the received data to determine the final skyline and creates filters to exclude irrelevant points. Extensive experimentation on eight datasets reveals that our algorithm significantly reduces both data size and computation time required for area skyline computation.
Gaussian-Smoothed Sliced Probability Divergences
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Gaussian smoothed sliced Wasserstein distance has been recently introduced for comparing probability distributions, while preserving privacy on the data. It has been shown that it provides performances similar to its non-smoothed (non-private) counterpart. However, the computationaland statistical properties of such a metric have not yet been well-established. This work investigates the theoretical properties of this distance as well as those of generalized versions denoted as Gaussian-smoothed sliced divergences. We first show that smoothing and slicing preserve the metric property and the weak topology. To study the sample complexity of such divergences, we then introduce $\hat{\hatμ}_{n}$ the double empirical distribution for the smoothed-projected $μ$. The distribution $\hat{\hatμ}_{n}$ is a result of a double sampling process: one from sampling according to the origin distribution $μ$ and the second according to the convolution of the projection of $μ$ on the unit sphere and the Gaussian smoothing. We particularly focus on the Gaussian smoothed sliced Wasserstein distance and prove that it converges with a rate $O(n^{-1/2})$. We also derive other properties, including continuity, of different divergences with respect to the smoothing parameter. We support our theoretical findings with empirical studies in the context of privacy-preserving domain adaptation.
Meta Invariance Defense Towards Generalizable Robustness to Unknown Adversarial Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite providing high-performance solutions for computer vision tasks, the deep neural network (DNN) model has been proved to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Current defense mainly focuses on the known attacks, but the adversarial robustness to the unknown attacks is seriously overlooked. Besides, commonly used adaptive learning and fine-tuning technique is unsuitable for adversarial defense since it is essentially a zero-shot problem when deployed. Thus, to tackle this challenge, we propose an attack-agnostic defense method named Meta Invariance Defense (MID). Specifically, various combinations of adversarial attacks are randomly sampled from a manually constructed Attacker Pool to constitute different defense tasks against unknown attacks, in which a student encoder is supervised by multi-consistency distillation to learn the attack-invariant features via a meta principle. The proposed MID has two merits: 1) Full distillation from pixel-, feature- and prediction-level between benign and adversarial samples facilitates the discovery of attack-invariance. 2) The model simultaneously achieves robustness to the imperceptible adversarial perturbations in high-level image classification and attack-suppression in low-level robust image regeneration. Theoretical and empirical studies on numerous benchmarks such as ImageNet verify the generalizable robustness and superiority of MID under various attacks.
Schroedinger's Threshold: When the AUC doesn't predict Accuracy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The Area Under Curve measure (AUC) seems apt to evaluate and compare diverse models, possibly without calibration. An important example of AUC application is the evaluation and benchmarking of models that predict faithfulness of generated text. But we show that the AUC yields an academic and optimistic notion of accuracy that can misalign with the actual accuracy observed in application, yielding significant changes in benchmark rankings. To paint a more realistic picture of downstream model performance (and prepare a model for actual application), we explore different calibration modes, testing calibration data and method.
AIGIQA-20K: A Large Database for AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid advancements in AI-Generated Content (AIGC), AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) have been widely applied in entertainment, education, and social media. However, due to the significant variance in quality among different AIGIs, there is an urgent need for models that consistently match human subjective ratings. To address this issue, we organized a challenge towards AIGC quality assessment on NTIRE 2024 that extensively considers 15 popular generative models, utilizing dynamic hyper-parameters (including classifier-free guidance, iteration epochs, and output image resolution), and gather subjective scores that consider perceptual quality and text-to-image alignment altogether comprehensively involving 21 subjects. This approach culminates in the creation of the largest fine-grained AIGI subjective quality database to date with 20,000 AIGIs and 420,000 subjective ratings, known as AIGIQA-20K. Furthermore, we conduct benchmark experiments on this database to assess the correspondence between 16 mainstream AIGI quality models and human perception. We anticipate that this large-scale quality database will inspire robust quality indicators for AIGIs and propel the evolution of AIGC for vision. The database is released on https://www.modelscope.cn/datasets/lcysyzxdxc/AIGCQA-30K-Image.
Integrating Large Language Models with Multimodal Virtual Reality Interfaces to Support Collaborative Human-Robot Construction Work
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In the construction industry, where work environments are complex, unstructured and often dangerous, the implementation of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is emerging as a promising advancement. This underlines the critical need for intuitive communication interfaces that enable construction workers to collaborate seamlessly with robotic assistants. This study introduces a conversational Virtual Reality (VR) interface integrating multimodal interaction to enhance intuitive communication between construction workers and robots. By integrating voice and controller inputs with the Robot Operating System (ROS), Building Information Modeling (BIM), and a game engine featuring a chat interface powered by a Large Language Model (LLM), the proposed system enables intuitive and precise interaction within a VR setting. Evaluated by twelve construction workers through a drywall installation case study, the proposed system demonstrated its low workload and high usability with succinct command inputs. The proposed multimodal interaction system suggests that such technological integration can substantially advance the integration of robotic assistants in the construction industry.
AI and the Problem of Knowledge Collapse
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

While artificial intelligence has the potential to process vast amounts of data, generate new insights, and unlock greater productivity, its widespread adoption may entail unforeseen consequences. We identify conditions under which AI, by reducing the cost of access to certain modes of knowledge, can paradoxically harm public understanding. While large language models are trained on vast amounts of diverse data, they naturally generate output towards the 'center' of the distribution. This is generally useful, but widespread reliance on recursive AI systems could lead to a process we define as "knowledge collapse", and argue this could harm innovation and the richness of human understanding and culture. However, unlike AI models that cannot choose what data they are trained on, humans may strategically seek out diverse forms of knowledge if they perceive them to be worthwhile. To investigate this, we provide a simple model in which a community of learners or innovators choose to use traditional methods or to rely on a discounted AI-assisted process and identify conditions under which knowledge collapse occurs. In our default model, a 20% discount on AI-generated content generates public beliefs 2.3 times further from the truth than when there is no discount. An empirical approach to measuring the distribution of LLM outputs is provided in theoretical terms and illustrated through a specific example comparing the diversity of outputs across different models and prompting styles. Finally, based on the results, we consider further research directions to counteract such outcomes.
Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) models introduce privacy vulnerabilities to systems. These vulnerabilities may impact model owners or system users; they exist during model development, deployment, and inference phases, and threats can be internal or external to the system. In this paper, we investigate potential threats and propose the use of several privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to defend AI-enabled systems. We then provide a framework for PETs evaluation for a AI-enabled systems and discuss the impact PETs may have on system-level variables.