OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Value of Labeled Data and Symbolic Methods for Hidden Neuron Activation Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

A major challenge in Explainable AI is in correctly interpreting activations of hidden neurons: accurate interpretations would help answer the question of what a deep learning system internally detects as relevant in the input, demystifying the otherwise black-box nature of deep learning systems. The state of the art indicates that hidden node activations can, in some cases, be interpretable in a way that makes sense to humans, but systematic automated methods that would be able to hypothesize and verify interpretations of hidden neuron activations are underexplored. This is particularly the case for approaches that can both draw explanations from substantial background knowledge, and that are based on inherently explainable (symbolic) methods. In this paper, we introduce a novel model-agnostic post-hoc Explainable AI method demonstrating that it provides meaningful interpretations. Our approach is based on using a Wikipedia-derived concept hierarchy with approximately 2 million classes as background knowledge, and utilizes OWL-reasoning-based Concept Induction for explanation generation. Additionally, we explore and compare the capabilities of off-the-shelf pre-trained multimodal-based explainable methods. Our results indicate that our approach can automatically attach meaningful class expressions as explanations to individual neurons in the dense layer of a Convolutional Neural Network. Evaluation through statistical analysis and degree of concept activation in the hidden layer show that our method provides a competitive edge in both quantitative and qualitative aspects compared to prior work.
Test-Time Training on Graphs with Large Language Models (LLMs)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph Neural Networks have demonstrated great success in various fields of multimedia. However, the distribution shift between the training and test data challenges the effectiveness of GNNs. To mitigate this challenge, Test-Time Training (TTT) has been proposed as a promising approach. Traditional TTT methods require a demanding unsupervised training strategy to capture the information from test to benefit the main task. Inspired by the great annotation ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), we propose to enhance the test-time training on graphs with LLMs as annotators. In this paper, we design a novel Test-Time Training pipeline, LLMTTT, which conducts the test-time adaptation under the annotations by LLMs on a carefully-selected node set. Specifically, LLMTTT introduces a hybrid active node selection strategy that considers not only node diversity and representativeness, but also prediction signals from the pre-trained model. Given annotations from LLMs, a two-stage training strategy is designed to tailor the test-time model with the limited and noisy labels. A theoretical analysis ensures the validity of our method and extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LLMTTT can achieve a significant performance improvement compared to existing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization methods.
I2CANSAY:Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation and Intra-Class Significance Analysis for Non-Exemplar Online Task-Free Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Online task-free continual learning (OTFCL) is a more challenging variant of continual learning which emphasizes the gradual shift of task boundaries and learns in an online mode. Existing methods rely on a memory buffer composed of old samples to prevent forgetting. However,the use of memory buffers not only raises privacy concerns but also hinders the efficient learning of new samples. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework called I2CANSAY that gets rid of the dependence on memory buffers and efficiently learns the knowledge of new data from one-shot samples. Concretely, our framework comprises two main modules. Firstly, the Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation (ICAN) module generates diverse pseudo-features for old classes based on the inter-class analogy of feature distributions for different new classes, serving as a substitute for the memory buffer. Secondly, the Intra-Class Significance Analysis (ISAY) module analyzes the significance of attributes for each class via its distribution standard deviation, and generates the importance vector as a correction bias for the linear classifier, thereby enhancing the capability of learning from new samples. We run our experiments on four popular image classification datasets: CoRe50, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200, our approach outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Are We Ready for Planetary Exploration Robots? The TAIL-Plus Dataset for SLAM in Granular Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

So far, planetary surface exploration depends on various mobile robot platforms. The autonomous navigation and decision-making of these mobile robots in complex terrains largely rely on their terrain-aware perception, localization and mapping capabilities. In this paper we release the TAIL-Plus dataset, a new challenging dataset in deformable granular environments for planetary exploration robots, which is an extension to our previous work, TAIL (Terrain-Aware multI-modaL) dataset. We conducted field experiments on beaches that are considered as planetary surface analog environments for diverse sandy terrains. In TAIL-Plus dataset, we provide more sequences with multiple loops and expand the scene from day to night. Benefit from our sensor suite with modular design, we use both wheeled and quadruped robots for data collection. The sensors include a 3D LiDAR, three downward RGB-D cameras, a pair of global-shutter color cameras that can be used as a forward-looking stereo camera, an RTK-GPS device and an extra IMU. Our datasets are intended to help researchers developing multi-sensor simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms for robots in unstructured, deformable granular terrains. Our datasets and supplementary materials will be available at \url{https://tailrobot.github.io/}.
Fermi-Bose Machine achieves both generalization and adversarial robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Distinct from human cognitive processing, deep neural networks trained by backpropagation can be easily fooled by adversarial examples. To design a semantically meaningful representation learning, we discard backpropagation, and instead, propose a local contrastive learning, where the representation for the inputs bearing the same label shrink (akin to boson) in hidden layers, while those of different labels repel (akin to fermion). This layer-wise learning is local in nature, being biological plausible. A statistical mechanics analysis shows that the target fermion-pair-distance is a key parameter. Moreover, the application of this local contrastive learning to MNIST benchmark dataset demonstrates that the adversarial vulnerability of standard perceptron can be greatly mitigated by tuning the target distance, i.e., controlling the geometric separation of prototype manifolds.
Bt-GAN: Generating Fair Synthetic Healthdata via Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Synthetic data generation offers a promising solution to enhance the usefulness of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) by generating realistic de-identified data. However, the existing literature primarily focuses on the quality of synthetic health data, neglecting the crucial aspect of fairness in downstream predictions. Consequently, models trained on synthetic EHR have faced criticism for producing biased outcomes in target tasks. These biases can arise from either spurious correlations between features or the failure of models to accurately represent sub-groups. To address these concerns, we present Bias-transforming Generative Adversarial Networks (Bt-GAN), a GAN-based synthetic data generator specifically designed for the healthcare domain. In order to tackle spurious correlations (i), we propose an information-constrained Data Generation Process that enables the generator to learn a fair deterministic transformation based on a well-defined notion of algorithmic fairness. To overcome the challenge of capturing exact sub-group representations (ii), we incentivize the generator to preserve sub-group densities through score-based weighted sampling. This approach compels the generator to learn from underrepresented regions of the data manifold. We conduct extensive experiments using the MIMIC-III database. Our results demonstrate that Bt-GAN achieves SOTA accuracy while significantly improving fairness and minimizing bias amplification. We also perform an in-depth explainability analysis to provide additional evidence supporting the validity of our study. In conclusion, our research introduces a novel and professional approach to addressing the limitations of synthetic data generation in the healthcare domain. By incorporating fairness considerations and leveraging advanced techniques such as GANs, we pave the way for more reliable and unbiased predictions in healthcare applications.
Mean Aggregator is More Robust than Robust Aggregators under Label Poisoning Attacks on Distributed Heterogeneous Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Robustness to malicious attacks is of paramount importance for distributed learning. Existing works usually consider the classical Byzantine attacks model, which assumes that some workers can send arbitrarily malicious messages to the server and disturb the aggregation steps of the distributed learning process. To defend against such worst-case Byzantine attacks, various robust aggregators have been proposed. They are proven to be effective and much superior to the often-used mean aggregator. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that the robust aggregators are too conservative for a class of weak but practical malicious attacks, as known as label poisoning attacks, where the sample labels of some workers are poisoned. Surprisingly, we are able to show that the mean aggregator is more robust than the state-of-the-art robust aggregators in theory, given that the distributed data are sufficiently heterogeneous. In fact, the learning error of the mean aggregator is proven to be order-optimal in this case. Experimental results corroborate our theoretical findings, showing the superiority of the mean aggregator under label poisoning attacks.
Trojan Detection in Large Language Models: Insights from The Trojan Detection Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various domains, but their vulnerability to trojan or backdoor attacks poses significant security risks. This paper explores the challenges and insights gained from the Trojan Detection Competition 2023 (TDC2023), which focused on identifying and evaluating trojan attacks on LLMs. We investigate the difficulty of distinguishing between intended and unintended triggers, as well as the feasibility of reverse engineering trojans in real-world scenarios. Our comparative analysis of various trojan detection methods reveals that achieving high Recall scores is significantly more challenging than obtaining high Reverse-Engineering Attack Success Rate (REASR) scores. The top-performing methods in the competition achieved Recall scores around 0.16, comparable to a simple baseline of randomly sampling sentences from a distribution similar to the given training prefixes. This finding raises questions about the detectability and recoverability of trojans inserted into the model, given only the harmful targets. Despite the inability to fully solve the problem, the competition has led to interesting observations about the viability of trojan detection and improved techniques for optimizing LLM input prompts. The phenomenon of unintended triggers and the difficulty in distinguishing them from intended triggers highlights the need for further research into the robustness and interpretability of LLMs. The TDC2023 has provided valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with trojan detection in LLMs, laying the groundwork for future research in this area to ensure their safety and reliability in real-world applications.
GScream: Learning 3D Geometry and Feature Consistent Gaussian Splatting for Object Removal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper tackles the intricate challenge of object removal to update the radiance field using the 3D Gaussian Splatting. The main challenges of this task lie in the preservation of geometric consistency and the maintenance of texture coherence in the presence of the substantial discrete nature of Gaussian primitives. We introduce a robust framework specifically designed to overcome these obstacles. The key insight of our approach is the enhancement of information exchange among visible and invisible areas, facilitating content restoration in terms of both geometry and texture. Our methodology begins with optimizing the positioning of Gaussian primitives to improve geometric consistency across both removed and visible areas, guided by an online registration process informed by monocular depth estimation. Following this, we employ a novel feature propagation mechanism to bolster texture coherence, leveraging a cross-attention design that bridges sampling Gaussians from both uncertain and certain areas. This innovative approach significantly refines the texture coherence within the final radiance field. Extensive experiments validate that our method not only elevates the quality of novel view synthesis for scenes undergoing object removal but also showcases notable efficiency gains in training and rendering speeds.
A Complete System for Automated 3D Semantic-Geometric Mapping of Corrosion in Industrial Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Corrosion, a naturally occurring process leading to the deterioration of metallic materials, demands diligent detection for quality control and the preservation of metal-based objects, especially within industrial contexts. Traditional techniques for corrosion identification, including ultrasonic testing, radio-graphic testing, and magnetic flux leakage, necessitate the deployment of expensive and bulky equipment on-site for effective data acquisition. An unexplored alternative involves employing lightweight, conventional camera systems, and state-of-the-art computer vision methods for its identification. In this work, we propose a complete system for semi-automated corrosion identification and mapping in industrial environments. We leverage recent advances in LiDAR-based methods for localization and mapping, with vision-based semantic segmentation deep learning techniques, in order to build semantic-geometric maps of industrial environments. Unlike previous corrosion identification systems available in the literature, our designed multi-modal system is low-cost, portable, semi-autonomous and allows collecting large datasets by untrained personnel. A set of experiments in an indoor laboratory environment, demonstrate quantitatively the high accuracy of the employed LiDAR based 3D mapping and localization system, with less then $0.05m$ and 0.02m average absolute and relative pose errors. Also, our data-driven semantic segmentation model, achieves around 70\% precision when trained with our pixel-wise manually annotated dataset.
Combining and Decoupling Rigid and Soft Grippers to Enhance Robotic Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

For robot arms to perform everyday tasks in unstructured environments, these robots must be able to manipulate a diverse range of objects. Today's robots often grasp objects with either soft grippers or rigid end-effectors. However, purely rigid or purely soft grippers have fundamental limitations: soft grippers struggle with irregular, heavy objects, while rigid grippers often cannot grasp small, numerous items. In this paper we therefore introduce RISOs, a mechanics and controls approach for unifying traditional RIgid end-effectors with a novel class of SOft adhesives. When grasping an object, RISOs can use either the rigid end-effector (pinching the item between non-deformable fingers) and/or the soft materials (attaching and releasing items with switchable adhesives). This enhances manipulation capabilities by combining and decoupling rigid and soft mechanisms. With RISOs robots can perform grasps along a spectrum from fully rigid, to fully soft, to rigid-soft, enabling real time object manipulation across a 1 million times range in weight (from 2 mg to 2 kg). To develop RISOs we first model and characterize the soft switchable adhesives. We then mount sheets of these soft adhesives on the surfaces of rigid end-effectors, and develop control strategies that make it easier for robot arms and human operators to utilize RISOs. The resulting RISO grippers were able to pick-up, carry, and release a larger set of objects than existing grippers, and participants also preferred using RISO. Overall, our experimental and user study results suggest that RISOs provide an exceptional gripper range in both capacity and object diversity. See videos of our user studies here: https://youtu.be/du085R0gPFI
Explainable Interfaces for Rapid Gaze-Based Interactions in Mixed Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Gaze-based interactions offer a potential way for users to naturally engage with mixed reality (XR) interfaces. Black-box machine learning models enabled higher accuracy for gaze-based interactions. However, due to the black-box nature of the model, users might not be able to understand and effectively adapt their gaze behaviour to achieve high quality interaction. We posit that explainable AI (XAI) techniques can facilitate understanding of and interaction with gaze-based model-driven system in XR. To study this, we built a real-time, multi-level XAI interface for gaze-based interaction using a deep learning model, and evaluated it during a visual search task in XR. A between-subjects study revealed that participants who interacted with XAI made more accurate selections compared to those who did not use the XAI system (i.e., F1 score increase of 10.8%). Additionally, participants who used the XAI system adapted their gaze behavior over time to make more effective selections. These findings suggest that XAI can potentially be used to assist users in more effective collaboration with model-driven interactions in XR.
Automated Text Mining of Experimental Methodologies from Biomedical Literature
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Biomedical literature is a rapidly expanding field of science and technology. Classification of biomedical texts is an essential part of biomedicine research, especially in the field of biology. This work proposes the fine-tuned DistilBERT, a methodology-specific, pre-trained generative classification language model for mining biomedicine texts. The model has proven its effectiveness in linguistic understanding capabilities and has reduced the size of BERT models by 40\% but by 60\% faster. The main objective of this project is to improve the model and assess the performance of the model compared to the non-fine-tuned model. We used DistilBert as a support model and pre-trained on a corpus of 32,000 abstracts and complete text articles; our results were impressive and surpassed those of traditional literature classification methods by using RNN or LSTM. Our aim is to integrate this highly specialised and specific model into different research industries.
The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

As more algorithmic systems have come under scrutiny for their potential to inflict societal harms, an increasing number of organizations that hold power over harmful algorithms have chosen (or were required under the law) to abandon them. While social movements and calls to abandon harmful algorithms have emerged across application domains, little academic attention has been paid to studying abandonment as a means to mitigate algorithmic harms. In this paper, we take a first step towards conceptualizing "algorithm abandonment" as an organization's decision to stop designing, developing, or using an algorithmic system due to its (potential) harms. We conduct a thematic analysis of real-world cases of algorithm abandonment to characterize the dynamics leading to this outcome. Our analysis of 40 cases reveals that campaigns to abandon an algorithm follow a common process of six iterative phases: discovery, diagnosis, dissemination, dialogue, decision, and death, which we term the "6 D's of abandonment". In addition, we highlight key factors that facilitate (or prohibit) abandonment, which include characteristics of both the technical and social systems that the algorithm is embedded within. We discuss implications for several stakeholders, including proprietors and technologists who have the power to influence an algorithm's (dis)continued use, FAccT researchers, and policymakers.
Robotic Blended Sonification: Consequential Robot Sound as Creative Material for Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Current research in robotic sounds generally focuses on either masking the consequential sound produced by the robot or on sonifying data about the robot to create a synthetic robot sound. We propose to capture, modify, and utilise rather than mask the sounds that robots are already producing. In short, this approach relies on capturing a robot's sounds, processing them according to contextual information (e.g., collaborators' proximity or particular work sequences), and playing back the modified sound. Previous research indicates the usefulness of non-semantic, and even mechanical, sounds as a communication tool for conveying robotic affect and function. Adding to this, this paper presents a novel approach which makes two key contributions: (1) a technique for real-time capture and processing of consequential robot sounds, and (2) an approach to explore these sounds through direct human-robot interaction. Drawing on methodologies from design, human-robot interaction, and creative practice, the resulting 'Robotic Blended Sonification' is a concept which transforms the consequential robot sounds into a creative material that can be explored artistically and within application-based studies.
EventLens: Leveraging Event-Aware Pretraining and Cross-modal Linking Enhances Visual Commonsense Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) is a cognitive task, challenging models to answer visual questions requiring human commonsense, and to provide rationales explaining why the answers are correct. With emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is natural and imperative to explore their applicability to VCR. However, VCR task demands more external knowledge to tackle its challenging questions, necessitating special designs to activate LLMs' commonsense reasoning abilities. Also, most existing Multimodal LLMs adopted an abstraction of entire input image, which makes it difficult to comprehend VCR's unique co-reference tags between image regions and text, posing challenges for fine-grained alignment. To address these issues, we propose EventLens that leverages Event-Aware Pretraining and Cross-modal Linking and EnhanceS VCR. First, by emulating the cognitive process of human reasoning, an Event-Aware Pretraining auxiliary task is introduced to better activate LLM's global comprehension of intricate scenarios. Second, during fine-tuning, we further utilize reference tags to bridge RoI features with texts, while preserving both modality semantics. Finally, we use instruct-style prompts to narrow the gap between pretraining and fine-tuning, and task-specific adapters to better integrate LLM's inherent knowledge with new commonsense. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed auxiliary task and fine-grained linking strategy.