OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Faster Matroid Partition Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

In the matroid partitioning problem, we are given $k$ matroids $\mathcal{M}_1 = (V, \mathcal{I}_1), \dots , \mathcal{M}_k = (V, \mathcal{I}_k)$ defined over a common ground set $V$ of $n$ elements, and we need to find a partitionable set $S \subseteq V$ of largest possible cardinality, denoted by $p$. Here, a set $S \subseteq V$ is called partitionable if there exists a partition $(S_1, \dots , S_k)$ of $S$ with $S_i \in \mathcal{I}_i$ for $i = 1, \ldots, k$. In 1986, Cunningham [SICOMP 1986] presented a matroid partition algorithm that uses $O(n p^{3/2} + k n)$ independence oracle queries, which was the previously known best algorithm. This query complexity is $O(n^{5/2})$ when $k \leq n$. Our main result is to present a matroid partition algorithm that uses $\tilde{O}(k'^{1/3} n p + k n)$ independence oracle queries, where $k' = \min\{k, p\}$. This query complexity is $\tilde{O}(n^{7/3})$ when $k \leq n$, and this improves upon the one of previous Cunningham's algorithm. To obtain this, we present a new approach \emph{edge recycling augmentation}, which can be attained through new ideas: an efficient utilization of the binary search technique by Nguyen [2019] and Chakrabarty-Lee-Sidford-Singla-Wong [FOCS 2019] and a careful analysis of the independence oracle query complexity. Our analysis differs significantly from the one for matroid intersection algorithms, because of the parameter $k$. We also present a matroid partition algorithm that uses $\tilde{O}((n + k) \sqrt{p})$ rank oracle queries.
Estimating friction coefficient using generative modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

It is common to utilise dynamic models to measure the tyre-road friction in real-time. Alternatively, predictive approaches estimate the tyre-road friction by identifying the environmental factors affecting it. This work aims to formulate the problem of friction estimation as a visual perceptual learning task. The problem is broken down into detecting surface characteristics by applying semantic segmentation and using the extracted features to predict the frictional force. This work for the first time formulates the friction estimation problem as a regression from the latent space of a semantic segmentation model. The preliminary results indicate that this approach can estimate frictional force.
LGBTQIA+ (In)Visibility in Computer Science and Software Engineering Education
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Modern society is diverse, multicultural, and multifaceted. Because of these characteristics, we are currently observing an increase in the debates about equity, diversity, and inclusion in different areas, especially because several groups of individuals are underrepresented in many environments. In computer science and software engineering, it seems counter-intuitive that these areas, which are responsible for creating technological solutions and systems for billions of users around the world, do not reflect the diversity of the society to which it serves. In trying to solve this diversity crisis in the software industry, researchers started to investigate strategies that can be applied to increase diversity and improve inclusion in academia and the software industry. However, the lack of diversity in computer science and related courses, including software engineering, is still a problem, in particular when some specific groups are considered. LGBTQIA+ students, for instance, face several challenges to fit into technology courses, even though most students in universities right now belong to Generation Z, which is described as open-minded to aspects of gender and sexuality. In this study, we aimed to discuss the state-of-art of publications about the inclusion of LGBTQIA+ students in computer science education. Using a mapping study, we identified eight studies published in the past six years that focused on this public. We present strategies developed to adapt curricula and lectures to be more inclusive to LGBTQIA+ students and discuss challenges and opportunities for future research
Open-Ended Medical Visual Question Answering Through Prefix Tuning of Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important challenge, as it would lead to faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. Most existing methods approach it as a multi-class classification problem, which restricts the outcome to a predefined closed-set of curated answers. We focus on open-ended VQA and motivated by the recent advances in language models consider it as a generative task. Leveraging pre-trained language models, we introduce a novel method particularly suited for small, domain-specific, medical datasets. To properly communicate the medical images to the language model, we develop a network that maps the extracted visual features to a set of learnable tokens. Then, alongside the question, these learnable tokens directly prompt the language model. We explore recent parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for language models, which allow for resource- and data-efficient fine-tuning. We evaluate our approach on the prime medical VQA benchmarks, namely, Slake, OVQA and PathVQA. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods across various training settings while also being computationally efficient.
Multivariate to Bivariate Reduction for Noncommutative Polynomial Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

Based on a theorem of Bergman we show that multivariate noncommutative polynomial factorization is deterministic polynomial-time reducible to the factorization of bivariate noncommutative polynomials. More precisely, we show the following: (1) In the white-box setting, given an n-variate noncommutative polynomial f in F<X> over a field F (either a finite field or the rationals) as an arithmetic circuit (or algebraic branching program), computing a complete factorization of f is deterministic polynomial-time reducible to white-box factorization of a noncommutative bivariate polynomial g in F<x,y>; the reduction transforms f into a circuit for g (resp. ABP for g), and given a complete factorization of g the reduction recovers a complete factorization of f in polynomial time. We also obtain a similar deterministic polynomial-time reduction in the black-box setting. (2) Additionally, we show over the field of rationals that bivariate linear matrix factorization of 4 x 4 matrices is at least as hard as factoring square-free integers. This indicates that reducing noncommutative polynomial factorization to linear matrix factorization (as done in our recent work [AJ22]) is unlikely to succeed over the field of rationals even in the bivariate case. In contrast, multivariate linear matrix factorization for 3 x 3 matrices over rationals is in polynomial time.
Use of blockchain in the internet of things: a survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper provides a comprehensive and high level technical overview of BC technology by creating a common language through business and technology about BC. Then an overview of a BC technology, its architectures, classification, challenges, etc. is presented. Finally, some recommendations are provided to re-searchers that will have to be tackled before deploying the next generation of IoT applications based on BC technology.
Modeling Events and Interactions through Temporal Processes -- A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In real-world scenario, many phenomena produce a collection of events that occur in continuous time. Point Processes provide a natural mathematical framework for modeling these sequences of events. In this survey, we investigate probabilistic models for modeling event sequences through temporal processes. We revise the notion of event modeling and provide the mathematical foundations that characterize the literature on the topic. We define an ontology to categorize the existing approaches in terms of three families: simple, marked, and spatio-temporal point processes. For each family, we systematically review the existing approaches based based on deep learning. Finally, we analyze the scenarios where the proposed techniques can be used for addressing prediction and modeling aspects.
Rewarding Chatbots for Real-World Engagement with Millions of Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The emergence of pretrained large language models has led to the deployment of a range of social chatbots for chitchat. Although these chatbots demonstrate language ability and fluency, they are not guaranteed to be engaging and can struggle to retain users. This work investigates the development of social chatbots that prioritize user engagement to enhance retention, specifically examining the use of human feedback to efficiently develop highly engaging chatbots. The proposed approach uses automatic pseudo-labels collected from user interactions to train a reward model that can be used to reject low-scoring sample responses generated by the chatbot model at inference time. Intuitive evaluation metrics, such as mean conversation length (MCL), are introduced as proxies to measure the level of engagement of deployed chatbots. A/B testing on groups of 10,000 new daily chatbot users on the Chai Research platform shows that this approach increases the MCL by up to 70%, which translates to a more than 30% increase in user retention for a GPT-J 6B model. Future work aims to use the reward model to realise a data fly-wheel, where the latest user conversations can be used to alternately fine-tune the language model and the reward model.
Learning to Select Camera Views: Efficient Multiview Understanding at Few Glances
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multiview camera setups have proven useful in many computer vision applications for reducing ambiguities, mitigating occlusions, and increasing field-of-view coverage. However, the high computational cost associated with multiple views poses a significant challenge for end devices with limited computational resources. To address this issue, we propose a view selection approach that analyzes the target object or scenario from given views and selects the next best view for processing. Our approach features a reinforcement learning based camera selection module, MVSelect, that not only selects views but also facilitates joint training with the task network. Experimental results on multiview classification and detection tasks show that our approach achieves promising performance while using only 2 or 3 out of N available views, significantly reducing computational costs. Furthermore, analysis on the selected views reveals that certain cameras can be shut off with minimal performance impact, shedding light on future camera layout optimization for multiview systems. Code is available at https://github.com/hou-yz/MVSelect.
Adaptive Supervised PatchNCE Loss for Learning H&E-to-IHC Stain Translation with Inconsistent Groundtruth Image Pairs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining highlights the molecular information critical to diagnostics in tissue samples. However, compared to H&E staining, IHC staining can be much more expensive in terms of both labor and the laboratory equipment required. This motivates recent research that demonstrates that the correlations between the morphological information present in the H&E-stained slides and the molecular information in the IHC-stained slides can be used for H&E-to-IHC stain translation. However, due to a lack of pixel-perfect H&E-IHC groundtruth pairs, most existing methods have resorted to relying on expert annotations. To remedy this situation, we present a new loss function, Adaptive Supervised PatchNCE (ASP), to directly deal with the input to target inconsistencies in a proposed H&E-to-IHC image-to-image translation framework. The ASP loss is built upon a patch-based contrastive learning criterion, named Supervised PatchNCE (SP), and augments it further with weight scheduling to mitigate the negative impact of noisy supervision. Lastly, we introduce the Multi-IHC Stain Translation (MIST) dataset, which contains aligned H&E-IHC patches for 4 different IHC stains critical to breast cancer diagnosis. In our experiment, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing image-to-image translation methods for stain translation to multiple IHC stains. All of our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lifangda01/AdaptiveSupervisedPatchNCE.
A Quantum Outlier Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

In recent results, it has been proven that all sampling methods produce outliers. In this paper, we extend these results to quantum information theory. Projectors of large rank must contain pure quantum states in their images that are outlying states. Otherwise, the projectors are exotic, in that they have high mutual information with the halting sequence. Thus quantum coding schemes that use projections, such as Schumacher compression, must communicate using outlier quantum states.
An Interactive UI to Support Sensemaking over Collections of Parallel Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Scientists and science journalists, among others, often need to make sense of a large number of papers and how they compare with each other in scope, focus, findings, or any other important factors. However, with a large corpus of papers, it's cognitively demanding to pairwise compare and contrast them all with each other. Fully automating this review process would be infeasible, because it often requires domain-specific knowledge, as well as understanding what the context and motivations for the review are. While there are existing tools to help with the process of organizing and annotating papers for literature reviews, at the core they still rely on people to serially read through papers and manually make sense of relevant information. We present AVTALER, which combines peoples' unique skills, contextual awareness, and knowledge, together with the strength of automation. Given a set of comparable text excerpts from a paper corpus, it supports users in sensemaking and contrasting paper attributes by interactively aligning text excerpts in a table so that comparable details are presented in a shared column. AVTALER is based on a core alignment algorithm that makes use of modern NLP tools. Furthermore, AVTALER is a mixed-initiative system: users can interactively give the system constraints which are integrated into the alignment construction process.
CoNIC Challenge: Pushing the Frontiers of Nuclear Detection, Segmentation, Classification and Counting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Nuclear detection, segmentation and morphometric profiling are essential in helping us further understand the relationship between histology and patient outcome. To drive innovation in this area, we setup a community-wide challenge using the largest available dataset of its kind to assess nuclear segmentation and cellular composition. Our challenge, named CoNIC, stimulated the development of reproducible algorithms for cellular recognition with real-time result inspection on public leaderboards. We conducted an extensive post-challenge analysis based on the top-performing models using 1,658 whole-slide images of colon tissue. With around 700 million detected nuclei per model, associated features were used for dysplasia grading and survival analysis, where we demonstrated that the challenge's improvement over the previous state-of-the-art led to significant boosts in downstream performance. Our findings also suggest that eosinophils and neutrophils play an important role in the tumour microevironment. We release challenge models and WSI-level results to foster the development of further methods for biomarker discovery.
Closing the Loop for Software Remodularisation -- REARRANGE: An Effort Estimation Approach for Software Clustering-based Remodularisation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Software remodularization through clustering is a common practice to improve internal software quality. However, the true benefit of software clustering is only realized if developers follow through with the recommended refactoring suggestions, which can be complex and time-consuming. Simply producing clustering results is not enough to realize the benefits of remodularization. For the recommended refactoring operations to have an impact, developers must follow through with them. However, this is often a difficult task due to certain refactoring operations' complexity and time-consuming nature.
Machine Learning Enhanced Hankel Dynamic-Mode Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

While the acquisition of time series has become more straightforward, developing dynamical models from time series is still a challenging and evolving problem domain. Within the last several years, to address this problem, there has been a merging of machine learning tools with what is called the dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). This general approach has been shown to be an especially promising avenue for accurate model development. Building on this prior body of work, we develop a deep learning DMD based method which makes use of the fundamental insight of Takens' Embedding Theorem to build an adaptive learning scheme that better approximates higher dimensional and chaotic dynamics. We call this method the Deep Learning Hankel DMD (DLHDMD). We likewise explore how our method learns mappings which tend, after successful training, to significantly change the mutual information between dimensions in the dynamics. This appears to be a key feature in enhancing the DMD overall, and it should help provide further insight for developing other deep learning methods for time series analysis and model generation.
One Neuron Saved Is One Neuron Earned: On Parametric Efficiency of Quadratic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Inspired by neuronal diversity in the biological neural system, a plethora of studies proposed to design novel types of artificial neurons and introduce neuronal diversity into artificial neural networks. Recently proposed quadratic neuron, which replaces the inner-product operation in conventional neurons with a quadratic one, have achieved great success in many essential tasks. Despite the promising results of quadratic neurons, there is still an unresolved issue: \textit{Is the superior performance of quadratic networks simply due to the increased parameters or due to the intrinsic expressive capability?} Without clarifying this issue, the performance of quadratic networks is always suspicious. Additionally, resolving this issue is reduced to finding killer applications of quadratic networks. In this paper, with theoretical and empirical studies, we show that quadratic networks enjoy parametric efficiency, thereby confirming that the superior performance of quadratic networks is due to the intrinsic expressive capability. This intrinsic expressive ability comes from that quadratic neurons can easily represent nonlinear interaction, while it is hard for conventional neurons. Theoretically, we derive the approximation efficiency of the quadratic network over conventional ones in terms of real space and manifolds. Moreover, from the perspective of the Barron space, we demonstrate that there exists a functional space whose functions can be approximated by quadratic networks in a dimension-free error, but the approximation error of conventional networks is dependent on dimensions. Empirically, experimental results on synthetic data, classic benchmarks, and real-world applications show that quadratic models broadly enjoy parametric efficiency, and the gain of efficiency depends on the task.
OCCL: a Deadlock-free Library for GPU Collective Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Various distributed deep neural network (DNN) training technologies lead to increasingly complicated use of collective communications on GPU. The deadlock-prone collectives on GPU force researchers to guarantee that collectives are enqueued in a consistent order on each GPU to prevent deadlocks. In complex distributed DNN training scenarios, manual hardcoding is the only practical way for deadlock prevention, which poses significant challenges to the development of artificial intelligence. This paper presents OCCL, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first deadlock-free collective communication library for GPU supporting dynamic decentralized preemption and gang-scheduling for collectives. Leveraging the preemption opportunity of collectives on GPU, OCCL dynamically preempts collectives in a decentralized way via the deadlock-free collective execution framework and allows dynamic decentralized gang-scheduling via the stickiness adjustment scheme. With the help of OCCL, researchers no longer have to struggle to get all GPUs to launch collectives in a consistent order to prevent deadlocks. We implement OCCL with several optimizations and integrate OCCL with a distributed deep learning framework OneFlow. Experimental results demonstrate that OCCL achieves comparable or better latency and bandwidth for collectives compared to NCCL, the state-of-the-art. When used in distributed DNN training, OCCL can improve the peak training throughput by up to 78% compared to statically sequenced NCCL, while introducing overheads of less than 6.5% across various distributed DNN training approaches.
SEM-CS: Semantic CLIPStyler for Text-Based Image Style Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

CLIPStyler demonstrated image style transfer with realistic textures using only the style text description (instead of requiring a reference style image). However, the ground semantics of objects in style transfer output is lost due to style spillover on salient and background objects (content mismatch) or over-stylization. To solve this, we propose Semantic CLIPStyler (Sem-CS) that performs semantic style transfer. Sem-CS first segments the content image into salient and non-salient objects and then transfers artistic style based on a given style text description. The semantic style transfer is achieved using global foreground loss (for salient objects) and global background loss (for non-salient objects). Our empirical results, including DISTS, NIMA and user study scores, show that our proposed framework yields superior qualitative and quantitative performance.
FedLP: Layer-wise Pruning Mechanism for Communication-Computation Efficient Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning (FL) has prevailed as an efficient and privacy-preserved scheme for distributed learning. In this work, we mainly focus on the optimization of computation and communication in FL from a view of pruning. By adopting layer-wise pruning in local training and federated updating, we formulate an explicit FL pruning framework, FedLP (Federated Layer-wise Pruning), which is model-agnostic and universal for different types of deep learning models. Two specific schemes of FedLP are designed for scenarios with homogeneous local models and heterogeneous ones. Both theoretical and experimental evaluations are developed to verify that FedLP relieves the system bottlenecks of communication and computation with marginal performance decay. To the best of our knowledge, FedLP is the first framework that formally introduces the layer-wise pruning into FL. Within the scope of federated learning, more variants and combinations can be further designed based on FedLP.