OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
'Intelligence Studies Network': A human-curated database for indexing resources with open-source tools
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

The Intelligence Studies Network is a comprehensive resource database for publications, events, conferences, and calls for papers in the field of intelligence studies. It offers a novel solution for monitoring, indexing, and visualising resources. Sources are automatically monitored and added to a manually curated database, ensuring the relevance of items to intelligence studies. Curated outputs are stored in a group library on Zotero, an open-source reference management tool. The metadata of items in Zotero is enriched with OpenAlex, an open access bibliographic database. Finally, outputs are listed and visualised on a Streamlit app, an open-source Python framework for building apps. This paper aims to explain the Intelligence Studies Network database and provide a detailed guide on data sources and the workflow. This study demonstrates that it is possible to create a specialised academic database by using open source tools.
The State of Reproducibility Stamps for Visualization Research Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

I analyze the evolution of papers certified by the Graphics Replicability Stamp Initiative (GRSI) to be reproducible, with a specific focus on the subset of publications that address visualization-related topics. With this analysis I show that, while the number of papers is increasing overall and within the visualization field, we still have to improve quite a bit to escape the replication crisis. I base my analysis on the data published by the GRSI as well as publication data for the different venues in visualization and lists of journal papers that have been presented at visualization-focused conferences. I also analyze the differences between the involved journals as well as the percentage of reproducible papers in the different presentation venues. Furthermore, I look at the authors of the publications and, in particular, their affiliation countries to see where most reproducible papers come from. Finally, I discuss potential reasons for the low reproducibility numbers and suggest possible ways to overcome these obstacles. This paper is reproducible itself, with source code and data available from github.com/tobiasisenberg/Visualization-Reproducibility as well as a free paper copy and all supplemental materials at osf.io/mvnbj.
CodexGraph: Bridging Large Language Models and Code Repositories via Code Graph Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in stand-alone code tasks like HumanEval and MBPP, but struggle with handling entire code repositories. This challenge has prompted research on enhancing LLM-codebase interaction at a repository scale. Current solutions rely on similarity-based retrieval or manual tools and APIs, each with notable drawbacks. Similarity-based retrieval often has low recall in complex tasks, while manual tools and APIs are typically task-specific and require expert knowledge, reducing their generalizability across diverse code tasks and real-world applications. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce CodexGraph, a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. By leveraging the structural properties of graph databases and the flexibility of the graph query language, CodexGraph enables the LLM agent to construct and execute queries, allowing for precise, code structure-aware context retrieval and code navigation. We assess CodexGraph using three benchmarks: CrossCodeEval, SWE-bench, and EvoCodeBench. Additionally, we develop five real-world coding applications. With a unified graph database schema, CodexGraph demonstrates competitive performance and potential in both academic and real-world environments, showcasing its versatility and efficacy in software engineering. Our application demo: https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent/tree/master/apps/codexgraph_agent.
Hard to Explain: On the Computational Hardness of In-Distribution Model Interpretation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The ability to interpret Machine Learning (ML) models is becoming increasingly essential. However, despite significant progress in the field, there remains a lack of rigorous characterization regarding the innate interpretability of different models. In an attempt to bridge this gap, recent work has demonstrated that it is possible to formally assess interpretability by studying the computational complexity of explaining the decisions of various models. In this setting, if explanations for a particular model can be obtained efficiently, the model is considered interpretable (since it can be explained ``easily''). However, if generating explanations over an ML model is computationally intractable, it is considered uninterpretable. Prior research identified two key factors that influence the complexity of interpreting an ML model: (i) the type of the model (e.g., neural networks, decision trees, etc.); and (ii) the form of explanation (e.g., contrastive explanations, Shapley values, etc.). In this work, we claim that a third, important factor must also be considered for this analysis -- the underlying distribution over which the explanation is obtained. Considering the underlying distribution is key in avoiding explanations that are socially misaligned, i.e., convey information that is biased and unhelpful to users. We demonstrate the significant influence of the underlying distribution on the resulting overall interpretation complexity, in two settings: (i) prediction models paired with an external out-of-distribution (OOD) detector; and (ii) prediction models designed to inherently generate socially aligned explanations. Our findings prove that the expressiveness of the distribution can significantly influence the overall complexity of interpretation, and identify essential prerequisites that a model must possess to generate socially aligned explanations.
SLIM-RAFT: A Novel Fine-Tuning Approach to Improve Cross-Linguistic Performance for Mercosur Common Nomenclature
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Natural language processing (NLP) has seen significant advancements with the advent of large language models (LLMs). However, substantial improvements are still needed for languages other than English, especially for specific domains like the applications of Mercosur Common Nomenclature (NCM), a Brazilian Harmonized System (HS). To address this gap, this study uses TeenyTineLLaMA, a foundational Portuguese LLM, as an LLM source to implement the NCM application processing. Additionally, a simplified Retrieval-Augmented Fine-Tuning (RAFT) technique, termed SLIM-RAFT, is proposed for task-specific fine-tuning of LLMs. This approach retains the chain-of-thought (CoT) methodology for prompt development in a more concise and streamlined manner, utilizing brief and focused documents for training. The proposed model demonstrates an efficient and cost-effective alternative for fine-tuning smaller LLMs, significantly outperforming TeenyTineLLaMA and ChatGPT-4 in the same task. Although the research focuses on NCM applications, the methodology can be easily adapted for HS applications worldwide.
Building Machines that Learn and Think with People
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

What do we want from machine intelligence? We envision machines that are not just tools for thought, but partners in thought: reasonable, insightful, knowledgeable, reliable, and trustworthy systems that think with us. Current artificial intelligence (AI) systems satisfy some of these criteria, some of the time. In this Perspective, we show how the science of collaborative cognition can be put to work to engineer systems that really can be called ``thought partners,'' systems built to meet our expectations and complement our limitations. We lay out several modes of collaborative thought in which humans and AI thought partners can engage and propose desiderata for human-compatible thought partnerships. Drawing on motifs from computational cognitive science, we motivate an alternative scaling path for the design of thought partners and ecosystems around their use through a Bayesian lens, whereby the partners we construct actively build and reason over models of the human and world.
Left-Right Swapping and Upper-Lower Limb Pairing for Robust Multi-Wearable Workout Activity Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This work presents the solution of the Signal Sleuths team for the 2024 HASCA WEAR challenge. The challenge focuses on detecting 18 workout activities (and the null class) using accelerometer data from 4 wearables - one worn on each limb. Data analysis revealed inconsistencies in wearable orientation within and across participants, leading to exploring novel multi-wearable data augmentation techniques. We investigate three models using a fixed feature set: (i) "raw": using all data as is, (ii) "left-right swapping": augmenting data by swapping left and right limb pairs, and (iii) "upper-lower limb paring": stacking data by using upper-lower limb pair combinations (2 wearables). Our experiments utilize traditional machine learning with multi-window feature extraction and temporal smoothing. Using 3-fold cross-validation, the raw model achieves a macro F1-score of 90.01%, whereas left-right swapping and upper-lower limb paring improve the scores to 91.30% and 91.87% respectively.
GNN-Based Joint Channel and Power Allocation in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The optimal allocation of channels and power resources plays a crucial role in ensuring minimal interference, maximal data rates, and efficient energy utilisation. As a successful approach for tackling resource management problems in wireless networks, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have attracted a lot of attention. This article proposes a GNN-based algorithm to address the joint resource allocation problem in heterogeneous wireless networks. Concretely, we model the heterogeneous wireless network as a heterogeneous graph and then propose a graph neural network structure intending to allocate the available channels and transmit power to maximise the network throughput. Our proposed joint channel and power allocation graph neural network (JCPGNN) comprises a shared message computation layer and two task-specific layers, with a dedicated focus on channel and power allocation tasks, respectively. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves satisfactory performance but with higher computational efficiency compared to traditional optimisation algorithms.
A self-adaptive system of systems architecture to enable its ad-hoc scalability: Unmanned Vehicle Fleet -- Mission Control Center Case study
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

A System of Systems (SoS) comprises Constituent Systems (CSs) that interact to provide unique capabilities beyond any single CS. A key challenge in SoS is ad-hoc scalability, meaning the system size changes during operation by adding or removing CSs. This research focuses on an Unmanned Vehicle Fleet (UVF) as a practical SoS example, addressing uncertainties like mission changes, range extensions, and UV failures. The proposed solution involves a self-adaptive system that dynamically adjusts UVF architecture, allowing the Mission Control Center (MCC) to scale UVF size automatically based on performance criteria or manually by operator decision. A multi-agent environment and rule management engine were implemented to simulate and verify this approach.
Telecom Foundation Models: Applications, Challenges, and Future Trends
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Telecom networks are becoming increasingly complex, with diversified deployment scenarios, multi-standards, and multi-vendor support. The intricate nature of the telecom network ecosystem presents challenges to effectively manage, operate, and optimize networks. To address these hurdles, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted to solve different tasks in telecom networks. However, these conventional AI models are often designed for specific tasks, rely on extensive and costly-to-collect labeled data that require specialized telecom expertise for development and maintenance. The AI models usually fail to generalize and support diverse deployment scenarios and applications. In contrast, Foundation Models (FMs) show effective generalization capabilities in various domains in language, vision, and decision-making tasks. FMs can be trained on multiple data modalities generated from the telecom ecosystem and leverage specialized domain knowledge. Moreover, FMs can be fine-tuned to solve numerous specialized tasks with minimal task-specific labeled data and, in some instances, are able to leverage context to solve previously unseen problems. At the dawn of 6G, this paper investigates the potential opportunities of using FMs to shape the future of telecom technologies and standards. In particular, the paper outlines a conceptual process for developing Telecom FMs (TFMs) and discusses emerging opportunities for orchestrating specialized TFMs for network configuration, operation, and maintenance. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations and challenges of developing and deploying TFMs.
Learning from Noisy Labels for Long-tailed Data via Optimal Transport
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Noisy labels, which are common in real-world datasets, can significantly impair the training of deep learning models. However, recent adversarial noise-combating methods overlook the long-tailed distribution of real data, which can significantly harm the effect of denoising strategies. Meanwhile, the mismanagement of noisy labels further compromises the model's ability to handle long-tailed data. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel approach to manage data characterized by both long-tailed distributions and noisy labels. First, we introduce a loss-distance cross-selection module, which integrates class predictions and feature distributions to filter clean samples, effectively addressing uncertainties introduced by noisy labels and long-tailed distributions. Subsequently, we employ optimal transport strategies to generate pseudo-labels for the noise set in a semi-supervised training manner, enhancing pseudo-label quality while mitigating the effects of sample scarcity caused by the long-tailed distribution. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, and the comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses current state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be available in the future.
MetaDragonBoat: Exploring Paddling Techniques of Virtual Dragon Boating in a Metaverse Campus
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

The preservation of cultural heritage, as mandated by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), is integral to sustainable urban development. This paper focuses on the Dragon Boat Festival, a prominent event in Chinese cultural heritage, and proposes leveraging Virtual Reality (VR), to enhance its preservation and accessibility. Traditionally, participation in the festival's dragon boat races was limited to elite athletes, excluding broader demographics. Our proposed solution, named MetaDragonBoat, enables virtual participation in dragon boat racing, offering immersive experiences that replicate physical exertion through a cultural journey. Thus, we build a digital twin of a university campus located in a region with a rich dragon boat racing tradition. Coupled with three paddling techniques that are enabled by either commercial controllers or physical paddle controllers with haptic feedback, diversified users can engage in realistic rowing experiences. Our results demonstrate that by integrating resistance into the paddle controls, users could simulate the physical effort of dragon boat racing, promoting a deeper understanding and appreciation of this cultural heritage.
Multimodal Gender Fairness in Depression Prediction: Insights on Data from the USA & China
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Social agents and robots are increasingly being used in wellbeing settings. However, a key challenge is that these agents and robots typically rely on machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect and analyse an individual's mental wellbeing. The problem of bias and fairness in ML algorithms is becoming an increasingly greater source of concern. In concurrence, existing literature has also indicated that mental health conditions can manifest differently across genders and cultures. We hypothesise that the representation of features (acoustic, textual, and visual) and their inter-modal relations would vary among subjects from different cultures and genders, thus impacting the performance and fairness of various ML models. We present the very first evaluation of multimodal gender fairness in depression manifestation by undertaking a study on two different datasets from the USA and China. We undertake thorough statistical and ML experimentation and repeat the experiments for several different algorithms to ensure that the results are not algorithm-dependent. Our findings indicate that though there are differences between both datasets, it is not conclusive whether this is due to the difference in depression manifestation as hypothesised or other external factors such as differences in data collection methodology. Our findings further motivate a call for a more consistent and culturally aware data collection process in order to address the problem of ML bias in depression detection and to promote the development of fairer agents and robots for wellbeing.
Human Speech Perception in Noise: Can Large Language Models Paraphrase to Improve It?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate text by transferring style attributes like formality resulting in formal or informal text. However, instructing LLMs to generate text that when spoken, is more intelligible in an acoustically difficult environment, is an under-explored topic. We conduct the first study to evaluate LLMs on a novel task of generating acoustically intelligible paraphrases for better human speech perception in noise. Our experiments in English demonstrated that with standard prompting, LLMs struggle to control the non-textual attribute, i.e., acoustic intelligibility, while efficiently capturing the desired textual attributes like semantic equivalence. To remedy this issue, we propose a simple prompting approach, prompt-and-select, which generates paraphrases by decoupling the desired textual and non-textual attributes in the text generation pipeline. Our approach resulted in a 40% relative improvement in human speech perception, by paraphrasing utterances that are highly distorted in a listening condition with babble noise at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) -5 dB. This study reveals the limitation of LLMs in capturing non-textual attributes, and our proposed method showcases the potential of using LLMs for better human speech perception in noise.
Synthesizing Abstract Transformers for Reduced-Product Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, we showed how to apply program-synthesis techniques to create abstract transformers in a user-provided domain-specific language (DSL) L (i.e., ''L-transformers"). However, we found that the algorithm of Kalita et al. does not succeed when applied to reduced-product domains: the need to synthesize transformers for all of the domains simultaneously blows up the search space. Because reduced-product domains are an important device for improving the precision of abstract interpretation, in this paper, we propose an algorithm to synthesize reduced L-transformers $\langle f_1^{\sharp R}, f_2^{\sharp R},..., f_n^{\sharp R}\rangle$ for a product domain $A_1 \times A_2 \times \ldots \times A_n$ , using multiple DSLs: $\mathcal{L} = \langle \mathcal{L}_1 , \mathcal{L}_2, ... , \mathcal{L}_n \rangle$. Synthesis of reduced-product transformers is quite challenging: first, the synthesis task has to tackle an increased ''feature set" because each component transformer now has access to the abstract inputs from all component domains in the product. Second, to ensure that the product transformer is maximally precise, the synthesis task needs to arrange for the component transformers to cooperate with each other. We implemented our algorithm in a tool, Amurth2, and used it to synthesize abstract transformers for two product domains -- SAFE and JSAI -- available within the SAFEstr framework for JavaScript program analysis. For four of the six operations supported by SAFEstr, Amurth2 synthesizes more precise abstract transformers than the manually written ones available in SAFEstr.
PaveCap: The First Multimodal Framework for Comprehensive Pavement Condition Assessment with Dense Captioning and PCI Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This research introduces the first multimodal approach for pavement condition assessment, providing both quantitative Pavement Condition Index (PCI) predictions and qualitative descriptions. We introduce PaveCap, a novel framework for automated pavement condition assessment. The framework consists of two main parts: a Single-Shot PCI Estimation Network and a Dense Captioning Network. The PCI Estimation Network uses YOLOv8 for object detection, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for zero-shot segmentation, and a four-layer convolutional neural network to predict PCI. The Dense Captioning Network uses a YOLOv8 backbone, a Transformer encoder-decoder architecture, and a convolutional feed-forward module to generate detailed descriptions of pavement conditions. To train and evaluate these networks, we developed a pavement dataset with bounding box annotations, textual annotations, and PCI values. The results of our PCI Estimation Network showed a strong positive correlation (0.70) between predicted and actual PCIs, demonstrating its effectiveness in automating condition assessment. Also, the Dense Captioning Network produced accurate pavement condition descriptions, evidenced by high BLEU (0.7445), GLEU (0.5893), and METEOR (0.7252) scores. Additionally, the dense captioning model handled complex scenarios well, even correcting some errors in the ground truth data. The framework developed here can greatly improve infrastructure management and decision18 making in pavement maintenance.
Patchview: LLM-Powered Worldbuilding with Generative Dust and Magnet Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) can help writers build story worlds by generating world elements, such as factions, characters, and locations. However, making sense of many generated elements can be overwhelming. Moreover, if the user wants to precisely control aspects of generated elements that are difficult to specify verbally, prompting alone may be insufficient. We introduce Patchview, a customizable LLM-powered system that visually aids worldbuilding by allowing users to interact with story concepts and elements through the physical metaphor of magnets and dust. Elements in Patchview are visually dragged closer to concepts with high relevance, facilitating sensemaking. The user can also steer the generation with verbally elusive concepts by indicating the desired position of the element between concepts. When the user disagrees with the LLM's visualization and generation, they can correct those by repositioning the element. These corrections can be used to align the LLM's future behaviors to the user's perception. With a user study, we show that Patchview supports the sensemaking of world elements and steering of element generation, facilitating exploration during the worldbuilding process. Patchview provides insights on how customizable visual representation can help sensemake, steer, and align generative AI model behaviors with the user's intentions.