OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Optimal SVC Bitstream Schema for Viewport-dependent 360-degree Video Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

To deliver ultra-high resolution 360-degree video (such as 8K, 12K, or even higher) across the internet, viewport-dependent streaming becomes necessary to save bandwidth. During viewport switches, clients and servers will instantly exchange coordination info and contents for the given viewports. However, those viewport switches pose a serious challenge for video encoding because the temporal dependency between contents within changing viewports is unpredictable. In existing practices, it is commonly noted that GOP (Group of Pictures) size in a bitstream intrinsically prohibits the reduction of the viewport switch latency, such as Motion-to-photon (MTP) latency, or motion-to-high-quality (MTHQ) latency. In this paper, we presented a Scalable Video Coding (SVC) based bitstream schema, which can structurally remove the impacts of GOP in viewport-dependent streaming and provide instant viewport switches within one-frame time (the best possible). In addition, combined with tiling, this new coding schema allows an efficient packing of the non-adjacent regions within a viewport of 360-degree video. Our experiments also show that the overall encoding with this SVC-based approach is faster than with multi-stream approaches. Compared with current 360-degree video streaming solutions based on MPEG-I OMAF, our approach is superior in terms of viewport switch latency, simplicity of viewport packing, and encoding performance.
SuperpixelGraph: Semi-automatic generation of building footprint through semantic-sensitive superpixel and neural graph networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Most urban applications necessitate building footprints in the form of concise vector graphics with sharp boundaries rather than pixel-wise raster images. This need contrasts with the majority of existing methods, which typically generate over-smoothed footprint polygons. Editing these automatically produced polygons can be inefficient, if not more time-consuming than manual digitization. This paper introduces a semi-automatic approach for building footprint extraction through semantically-sensitive superpixels and neural graph networks. Drawing inspiration from object-based classification techniques, we first learn to generate superpixels that are not only boundary-preserving but also semantically-sensitive. The superpixels respond exclusively to building boundaries rather than other natural objects, while simultaneously producing semantic segmentation of the buildings. These intermediate superpixel representations can be naturally considered as nodes within a graph. Consequently, graph neural networks are employed to model the global interactions among all superpixels and enhance the representativeness of node features for building segmentation. Classical approaches are utilized to extract and regularize boundaries for the vectorized building footprints. Utilizing minimal clicks and straightforward strokes, we efficiently accomplish accurate segmentation outcomes, eliminating the necessity for editing polygon vertices. Our proposed approach demonstrates superior precision and efficacy, as validated by experimental assessments on various public benchmark datasets. A significant improvement of 8% in AP50 was observed in vector graphics evaluation, surpassing established techniques. Additionally, we have devised an optimized and sophisticated pipeline for interactive editing, poised to further augment the overall quality of the results.
Stand-Up Indulgent Gathering on Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a variant of the crash-fault gathering problem called stand-up indulgent gathering (SUIG). In this problem, a group of mobile robots must eventually gather at a single location, which is not known in advance. If no robots crash, they must all meet at the same location. However, if one or more robots crash at a single location, all non-crashed robots must eventually gather at that location. The SUIG problem was first introduced for robots operating in a two-dimensional continuous Euclidean space, with most solutions relying on the ability of robots to move a prescribed (real) distance at each time instant. In this paper, we investigate the SUIG problem for robots operating in a discrete universe (i.e., a graph) where they can only move one unit of distance (i.e., to an adjacent node) at each time instant. Specifically, we focus on line-shaped networks and characterize the solvability of the SUIG problem for oblivious robots without multiplicity detection.
Preemptively Pruning Clever-Hans Strategies in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Robustness has become an important consideration in deep learning. With the help of explainable AI, mismatches between an explained model's decision strategy and the user's domain knowledge (e.g. Clever Hans effects) have been identified as a starting point for improving faulty models. However, it is less clear what to do when the user and the explanation agree. In this paper, we demonstrate that acceptance of explanations by the user is not a guarantee for a machine learning model to be robust against Clever Hans effects, which may remain undetected. Such hidden flaws of the model can nevertheless be mitigated, and we demonstrate this by contributing a new method, Explanation-Guided Exposure Minimization (EGEM), that preemptively prunes variations in the ML model that have not been the subject of positive explanation feedback. Experiments demonstrate that our approach leads to models that strongly reduce their reliance on hidden Clever Hans strategies, and consequently achieve higher accuracy on new data.
Segment Anything Is Not Always Perfect: An Investigation of SAM on Different Real-world Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, Meta AI Research approaches a general, promptable Segment Anything Model (SAM) pre-trained on an unprecedentedly large segmentation dataset (SA-1B). Without a doubt, the emergence of SAM will yield significant benefits for a wide array of practical image segmentation applications. In this study, we conduct a series of intriguing investigations into the performance of SAM across various applications, particularly in the fields of natural images, agriculture, manufacturing, remote sensing, and healthcare. We analyze and discuss the benefits and limitations of SAM, while also presenting an outlook on its future development in segmentation tasks. By doing so, we aim to give a comprehensive understanding of SAM's practical applications. This work is expected to provide insights that facilitate future research activities toward generic segmentation. Source code is publicly available.
LMR: Lane Distance-Based Metric for Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The development of approaches for trajectory prediction requires metrics to validate and compare their performance. Currently established metrics are based on Euclidean distance, which means that errors are weighted equally in all directions. Euclidean metrics are insufficient for structured environments like roads, since they do not properly capture the agent's intent relative to the underlying lane. In order to provide a reasonable assessment of trajectory prediction approaches with regard to the downstream planning task, we propose a new metric that is lane distance-based: Lane Miss Rate (LMR). For the calculation of LMR, the ground-truth and predicted endpoints are assigned to lane segments, more precisely their centerlines. Measured by the distance along the lane segments, predictions that are within a certain threshold distance to the ground-truth count as hits, otherwise they count as misses. LMR is then defined as the ratio of sequences that yield a miss. Our results on three state-of-the-art trajectory prediction models show that LMR preserves the order of Euclidean distance-based metrics. In contrast to the Euclidean Miss Rate, qualitative results show that LMR yields misses for sequences where predictions are located on wrong lanes. Hits on the other hand result for sequences where predictions are located on the correct lane. This means that LMR implicitly weights Euclidean error relative to the lane and goes into the direction of capturing intents of traffic agents. The source code of LMR for Argoverse 2 is publicly available.
Markov chains applied to Parrondo's paradox: The coin tossing problem
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

Parrondo's paradox was introduced by Juan Parrondo in 1996. In game theory, this paradox is described as: A combination of losing strategies becomes a winning strategy. At first glance, this paradox is quite surprising, but we can easily explain it by using simulations and mathematical arguments. Indeed, we first consider some examples with the Parrondo's paradox and, using the software R, we simulate one of them, the coin tossing. Actually, we see that specific combinations of losing games become a winning game. Moreover, even a random combination of these two losing games leads to a winning game. Later, we introduce the major definitions and theorems over Markov chains to study our Parrondo's paradox applied to the coin tossing problem. In particular, we represent our Parrondo's game as a Markov chain and we find its stationary distribution. In that way, we exhibit that our combination of two losing games is truly a winning combination. We also deliberate possible applications of the paradox in some fields such as ecology, biology, finance or reliability theory.
SpectralDiff: A Generative Framework for Hyperspectral Image Classification with Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Hyperspectral Image (HSI) classification is an important issue in remote sensing field with extensive applications in earth science. In recent years, a large number of deep learning-based HSI classification methods have been proposed. However, existing methods have limited ability to handle high-dimensional, highly redundant, and complex data, making it challenging to capture the spectral-spatial distributions of data and relationships between samples. To address this issue, we propose a generative framework for HSI classification with diffusion models (SpectralDiff) that effectively mines the distribution information of high-dimensional and highly redundant data by iteratively denoising and explicitly constructing the data generation process, thus better reflecting the relationships between samples. The framework consists of a spectral-spatial diffusion module, and an attention-based classification module. The spectral-spatial diffusion module adopts forward and reverse spectral-spatial diffusion processes to achieve adaptive construction of sample relationships without requiring prior knowledge of graphical structure or neighborhood information. It captures spectral-spatial distribution and contextual information of objects in HSI and mines unsupervised spectral-spatial diffusion features within the reverse diffusion process. Finally, these features are fed into the attention-based classification module for per-pixel classification. The diffusion features can facilitate cross-sample perception via reconstruction distribution, leading to improved classification performance. Experiments on three public HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods. For the sake of reproducibility, the source code of SpectralDiff will be publicly available at https://github.com/chenning0115/SpectralDiff.
EdgeDS: Data Spaces enabled Multi-access Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The potential of Edge Computing technologies is yet to be exploited for multi-domain, multi-party data-driven systems. One aspect that needs to be tackled for the realization of envisioned open edge Ecosystems, is the secure and trusted exchange of data services among diverse stakeholders. In this work, we present a novel approach for integrating mechanisms for trustworthy and sovereign data exchange, into Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) environments. To this end, we introduce an architecture that extends the ETSI MEC Architectural Framework with artifacts from the International Data Spaces Reference Architecture Model, accompanied by processes that automatically enrich Edge Computing applications with data space capabilities in an as-a-service paradigm. To validate our approach, we implement an open-source prototype solution and we conduct experiments that showcase its functionality and scalability. To our knowledge, this is one of the first concrete architectural specifications for enabling data space features in MEC systems.
Angler: Helping Machine Translation Practitioners Prioritize Model Improvements
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning (ML) models can fail in unexpected ways in the real world, but not all model failures are equal. With finite time and resources, ML practitioners are forced to prioritize their model debugging and improvement efforts. Through interviews with 13 ML practitioners at Apple, we found that practitioners construct small targeted test sets to estimate an error's nature, scope, and impact on users. We built on this insight in a case study with machine translation models, and developed Angler, an interactive visual analytics tool to help practitioners prioritize model improvements. In a user study with 7 machine translation experts, we used Angler to understand prioritization practices when the input space is infinite, and obtaining reliable signals of model quality is expensive. Our study revealed that participants could form more interesting and user-focused hypotheses for prioritization by analyzing quantitative summary statistics and qualitatively assessing data by reading sentences.
APPLeNet: Visual Attention Parameterized Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Generalization using CLIP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the success of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP has led to their increased usage in various computer vision tasks. These models enable zero-shot inference through carefully crafted instructional text prompts without task-specific supervision. However, the potential of VLMs for generalization tasks in remote sensing (RS) has not been fully realized. To address this research gap, we propose a novel image-conditioned prompt learning strategy called the Visual Attention Parameterized Prompts Learning Network (APPLeNet). APPLeNet emphasizes the importance of multi-scale feature learning in RS scene classification and disentangles visual style and content primitives for domain generalization tasks. To achieve this, APPLeNet combines visual content features obtained from different layers of the vision encoder and style properties obtained from feature statistics of domain-specific batches. An attention-driven injection module is further introduced to generate visual tokens from this information. We also introduce an anti-correlation regularizer to ensure discrimination among the token embeddings, as this visual information is combined with the textual tokens. To validate APPLeNet, we curated four available RS benchmarks and introduced experimental protocols and datasets for three domain generalization tasks. Our results consistently outperform the relevant literature and code is available at https://github.com/mainaksingha01/APPLeNet
RECLIP: Resource-efficient CLIP by Training with Small Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present RECLIP (Resource-efficient CLIP), a simple method that minimizes computational resource footprint for CLIP (Contrastive Language Image Pretraining). Inspired by the notion of coarse-to-fine in computer vision, we leverage small images to learn from large-scale language supervision efficiently, and finetune the model with high-resolution data in the end. Since the complexity of the vision transformer heavily depends on input image size, our approach significantly reduces the training resource requirements both in theory and in practice. Using the same batch size and training epoch, RECLIP achieves highly competitive zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval accuracy with 6 to 8x less computational resources and 7 to 9x fewer FLOPs than the baseline. Compared to the state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods, RECLIP demonstrates 5 to 59x training resource savings while maintaining highly competitive zero-shot classification and retrieval performance. Finally, RECLIP matches the state of the art in transfer learning to open-vocabulary detection tasks, achieving 32 APr on LVIS. We hope this work will pave the path for the broader research community to explore language supervised pretraining in resource-friendly settings.
Efficient Deep Learning Models for Privacy-preserving People Counting on Low-resolution Infrared Arrays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Ultra-low-resolution Infrared (IR) array sensors offer a low-cost, energy-efficient, and privacy-preserving solution for people counting, with applications such as occupancy monitoring. Previous work has shown that Deep Learning (DL) can yield superior performance on this task. However, the literature was missing an extensive comparative analysis of various efficient DL architectures for IR array-based people counting, that considers not only their accuracy, but also the cost of deploying them on memory- and energy-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) edge nodes. In this work, we address this need by comparing 6 different DL architectures on a novel dataset composed of IR images collected from a commercial 8x8 array, which we made openly available. With a wide architectural exploration of each model type, we obtain a rich set of Pareto-optimal solutions, spanning cross-validated balanced accuracy scores in the 55.70-82.70% range. When deployed on a commercial Microcontroller (MCU) by STMicroelectronics, the STM32L4A6ZG, these models occupy 0.41-9.28kB of memory, and require 1.10-7.74ms per inference, while consuming 17.18-120.43 $μ$J of energy. Our models are significantly more accurate than a previous deterministic method (up to +39.9%), while being up to 3.53x faster and more energy efficient. Further, our models' accuracy is comparable to state-of-the-art DL solutions on similar resolution sensors, despite a much lower complexity. All our models enable continuous, real-time inference on a MCU-based IoT node, with years of autonomous operation without battery recharging.
An Analysis of How COVID-19 Shaped the Realm of Online Gaming and Lesson Delivery
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced schools and universities to adapt to remote learning, and online gaming has emerged as a tool for education. Educational games can make learning fun and engaging, help students develop important skills like problem-solving and collaboration, and reach students who are struggling with traditional learning methods. While there are concerns about the potential drawbacks of online gaming in education, its benefits are clear. As the pandemic continues to disrupt education, online gaming is likely to become an increasingly important tool for teachers and students alike.
Generation of artificial facial drug abuse images using Deep De-identified anonymous Dataset augmentation through Genetics Algorithm (3DG-GA)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In biomedical research and artificial intelligence, access to large, well-balanced, and representative datasets is crucial for developing trustworthy applications that can be used in real-world scenarios. However, obtaining such datasets can be challenging, as they are often restricted to hospitals and specialized facilities. To address this issue, the study proposes to generate highly realistic synthetic faces exhibiting drug abuse traits through augmentation. The proposed method, called "3DG-GA", Deep De-identified anonymous Dataset Generation, uses Genetics Algorithm as a strategy for synthetic faces generation. The algorithm includes GAN artificial face generation, forgery detection, and face recognition. Initially, a dataset of 120 images of actual facial drug abuse is used. By preserving, the drug traits, the 3DG-GA provides a dataset containing 3000 synthetic facial drug abuse images. The dataset will be open to the scientific community, which can reproduce our results and benefit from the generated datasets while avoiding legal or ethical restrictions.
FollowMe: Vehicle Behaviour Prediction in Autonomous Vehicle Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

An ego vehicle following a virtual lead vehicle planned route is an essential component when autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles interact. Yet, there is a question about the driver's ability to follow the planned lead vehicle route. Thus, predicting the trajectory of the ego vehicle route given a lead vehicle route is of interest. We introduce a new dataset, the FollowMe dataset, which offers a motion and behavior prediction problem by answering the latter question of the driver's ability to follow a lead vehicle. We also introduce a deep spatio-temporal graph model FollowMe-STGCNN as a baseline for the dataset. In our experiments and analysis, we show the design benefits of FollowMe-STGCNN in capturing the interactions that lie within the dataset. We contrast the performance of FollowMe-STGCNN with prior motion prediction models showing the need to have a different design mechanism to address the lead vehicle following settings.
Analyzing ChatGPT's Aptitude in an Introductory Computer Engineering Course
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

ChatGPT has recently gathered attention from the general public and academia as a tool that is able to generate plausible and human-sounding text answers to various questions. One potential use, or abuse, of ChatGPT is in answering various questions or even generating whole essays and research papers in an academic or classroom setting. While recent works have explored the use of ChatGPT in the context of humanities, business school, or medical school, this work explores how ChatGPT performs in the context of an introductory computer engineering course. This work assesses ChatGPT's aptitude in answering quizzes, homework, exam, and laboratory questions in an introductory-level computer engineering course. This work finds that ChatGPT can do well on questions asking about generic concepts. However, predictably, as a text-only tool, it cannot handle questions with diagrams or figures, nor can it generate diagrams and figures. Further, also clearly, the tool cannot do hands-on lab experiments, breadboard assembly, etc., but can generate plausible answers to some laboratory manual questions. One of the key observations presented in this work is that the ChatGPT tool could not be used to pass all components of the course. Nevertheless, it does well on quizzes and short-answer questions. On the other hand, plausible, human-sounding answers could confuse students when generating incorrect but still plausible answers.