OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Large-scale UAV Route Planing with Global and Local Features via Reinforcement Graph Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Numerous remarkable advancements have been made in accuracy, speed, and parallelism for solving the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Route Planing (UAVRP). However, existing UAVRP solvers face challenges when attempting to scale effectively and efficiently for larger instances. In this paper, we present a generalization framework that enables current UAVRP solvers to robustly extend their capabilities to larger instances, accommodating up to 10,000 points, using widely recognized test sets. The UAVRP under a large number of patrol points is a typical large-scale TSP problem.Our proposed framework comprises three distinct steps. Firstly, we employ Delaunay triangulation to extract subgraphs from large instances while preserving global features. Secondly, we utilize an embedded TSP solver to obtain sub-results, followed by graph fusion. Finally, we implement a decoding strategy customizable to the user's requirements, resulting in high-quality solutions, complemented by a warming-up process for the heatmap. To demonstrate the flexibility of our approach, we integrate two representative TSP solvers into our framework and conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis against existing algorithms using large TSP benchmark datasets. The results unequivocally demonstrate that our framework efficiently scales existing TSP solvers to handle large instances and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, since our proposed framework does not necessitate additional training or fine-tuning, we believe that its generality can significantly advance research on end-to-end UAVRP solvers, enabling the application of a broader range of methods to real-world scenarios.
Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Satellite Assignment Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Assignment problems are a classic combinatorial optimization problem in which a group of agents must be assigned to a group of tasks such that maximum utility is achieved while satisfying assignment constraints. Given the utility of each agent completing each task, polynomial-time algorithms exist to solve a single assignment problem in its simplest form. However, in many modern-day applications such as satellite constellations, power grids, and mobile robot scheduling, assignment problems unfold over time, with the utility for a given assignment depending heavily on the state of the system. We apply multi-agent reinforcement learning to this problem, learning the value of assignments by bootstrapping from a known polynomial-time greedy solver and then learning from further experience. We then choose assignments using a distributed optimal assignment mechanism rather than by selecting them directly. We demonstrate that this algorithm is theoretically justified and avoids pitfalls experienced by other RL algorithms in this setting. Finally, we show that our algorithm significantly outperforms other methods in the literature, even while scaling to realistic scenarios with hundreds of agents and tasks.
A Deep Probabilistic Framework for Continuous Time Dynamic Graph Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in graph representation learning have shifted attention towards dynamic graphs, which exhibit evolving topologies and features over time. The increased use of such graphs creates a paramount need for generative models suitable for applications such as data augmentation, obfuscation, and anomaly detection. However, there are few generative techniques that handle continuously changing temporal graph data; existing work largely relies on augmenting static graphs with additional temporal information to model dynamic interactions between nodes. In this work, we propose a fundamentally different approach: We instead directly model interactions as a joint probability of an edge forming between two nodes at a given time. This allows us to autoregressively generate new synthetic dynamic graphs in a largely assumption free, scalable, and inductive manner. We formalize this approach as DG-Gen, a generative framework for continuous time dynamic graphs, and demonstrate its effectiveness over five datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that DG-Gen not only generates higher fidelity graphs compared to traditional methods but also significantly advances link prediction tasks.
NeSyCoCo: A Neuro-Symbolic Concept Composer for Compositional Generalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Compositional generalization is crucial for artificial intelligence agents to solve complex vision-language reasoning tasks. Neuro-symbolic approaches have demonstrated promise in capturing compositional structures, but they face critical challenges: (a) reliance on predefined predicates for symbolic representations that limit adaptability, (b) difficulty in extracting predicates from raw data, and (c) using non-differentiable operations for combining primitive concepts. To address these issues, we propose NeSyCoCo, a neuro-symbolic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate symbolic representations and map them to differentiable neural computations. NeSyCoCo introduces three innovations: (a) augmenting natural language inputs with dependency structures to enhance the alignment with symbolic representations, (b) employing distributed word representations to link diverse, linguistically motivated logical predicates to neural modules, and (c) using the soft composition of normalized predicate scores to align symbolic and differentiable reasoning. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results on the ReaSCAN and CLEVR-CoGenT compositional generalization benchmarks and demonstrates robust performance with novel concepts in the CLEVR-SYN benchmark.
PersonaMagic: Stage-Regulated High-Fidelity Face Customization with Tandem Equilibrium
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Personalized image generation has made significant strides in adapting content to novel concepts. However, a persistent challenge remains: balancing the accurate reconstruction of unseen concepts with the need for editability according to the prompt, especially when dealing with the complex nuances of facial features. In this study, we delve into the temporal dynamics of the text-to-image conditioning process, emphasizing the crucial role of stage partitioning in introducing new concepts. We present PersonaMagic, a stage-regulated generative technique designed for high-fidelity face customization. Using a simple MLP network, our method learns a series of embeddings within a specific timestep interval to capture face concepts. Additionally, we develop a Tandem Equilibrium mechanism that adjusts self-attention responses in the text encoder, balancing text description and identity preservation, improving both areas. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of PersonaMagic over state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Moreover, its robustness and flexibility are validated in non-facial domains, and it can also serve as a valuable plug-in for enhancing the performance of pretrained personalization models.
Variability Need Not Imply Error: The Case of Adequate but Semantically Distinct Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the broader use of language models (LMs) comes the need to estimate their ability to respond reliably to prompts (e.g., are generated responses likely to be correct?). Uncertainty quantification tools (notions of confidence and entropy, i.a.) can be used to that end (e.g., to reject a response when the model is `uncertain'). For example, Kuhn et al. (semantic entropy; 2022b) regard semantic variation amongst sampled responses as evidence that the model `struggles' with the prompt and that the LM is likely to err. We argue that semantic variability need not imply error--this being especially intuitive in open-ended settings, where prompts elicit multiple adequate but semantically distinct responses. Hence, we propose to annotate sampled responses for their adequacy to the prompt (e.g., using a classifier) and estimate the Probability the model assigns to Adequate Responses (PROBAR), which we then regard as an indicator of the model's reliability at the instance level. We evaluate PROBAR as a measure of confidence in selective prediction with OPT models (in two QA datasets and in next-word prediction, for English) and find PROBAR to outperform semantic entropy across prompts with varying degrees of ambiguity/open-endedness.
MacLight: Multi-scene Aggregation Convolutional Learning for Traffic Signal Control
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning methods have proposed promising traffic signal control policy that can be trained on large road networks. Current SOTA methods model road networks as topological graph structures, incorporate graph attention into deep Q-learning, and merge local and global embeddings to improve policy. However, graph-based methods are difficult to parallelize, resulting in huge time overhead. Moreover, none of the current peer studies have deployed dynamic traffic systems for experiments, which is far from the actual situation. In this context, we propose Multi-Scene Aggregation Convolutional Learning for traffic signal control (MacLight), which offers faster training speeds and more stable performance. Our approach consists of two main components. The first is the global representation, where we utilize variational autoencoders to compactly compress and extract the global representation. The second component employs the proximal policy optimization algorithm as the backbone, allowing value evaluation to consider both local features and global embedding representations. This backbone model significantly reduces time overhead and ensures stability in policy updates. We validated our method across multiple traffic scenarios under both static and dynamic traffic systems. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to general and domian SOTA methods, our approach achieves superior stability, optimized convergence levels and the highest time efficiency. The code is under https://github.com/Aegis1863/MacLight.
fluke: Federated Learning Utility frameworK for Experimentation and research
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Since its inception in 2016, Federated Learning (FL) has been gaining tremendous popularity in the machine learning community. Several frameworks have been proposed to facilitate the development of FL algorithms, but researchers often resort to implementing their algorithms from scratch, including all baselines and experiments. This is because existing frameworks are not flexible enough to support their needs or the learning curve to extend them is too steep. In this paper, we present \fluke, a Python package designed to simplify the development of new FL algorithms. fluke is specifically designed for prototyping purposes and is meant for researchers or practitioners focusing on the learning components of a federated system. fluke is open-source, and it can be either used out of the box or extended with new algorithms with minimal overhead.
Distribution-Free Normal Modal Logics
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

This article initiates the semantic study of distribution-free normal modal logic systems, laying the semantic foundations and anticipating further research in the area. The article explores roughly the same area, though taking a different approach, with a recent article by Bezhanishvili, de Groot, Dmitrieva and Morachini, who studied a distribution-free version of Dunn's Positive Modal Logic (PML). Unlike PML, we consider logics that may drop distribution and which are equipped with both an implication connective and modal operators. We adopt a uniform relational semantics approach, relying on recent results on representation and duality for normal lattice expansions. We prove canonicity and completeness in the relational semantics of the minimal distribution-free normal modal logic, assuming just the K-axiom, as well as of its axiomatic extensions obtained by adding any of the D, T, B, S4 or S5 axioms. Adding distribution can be easily accommodated and, as a side result, we also obtain a new semantic treatment of Intuitionistic Modal Logic.
ASPIRE: Assistive System for Performance Evaluation in IR
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Information Retrieval (IR) evaluation involves far more complexity than merely presenting performance measures in a table. Researchers often need to compare multiple models across various dimensions, such as the Precision-Recall trade-off and response time, to understand the reasons behind the varying performance of specific queries for different models. We introduce ASPIRE (Assistive System for Performance Evaluation in IR), a visual analytics tool designed to address these complexities by providing an extensive and user-friendly interface for in-depth analysis of IR experiments. ASPIRE supports four key aspects of IR experiment evaluation and analysis: single/multi-experiment comparisons, query-level analysis, query characteristics-performance interplay, and collection-based retrieval analysis. We showcase the functionality of ASPIRE using the TREC Clinical Trials collection. ASPIRE is an open-source toolkit available online: https://github.com/GiorgosPeikos/ASPIRE
Linguistic Features Extracted by GPT-4 Improve Alzheimer's Disease Detection based on Spontaneous Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a significant and growing public health concern. Investigating alterations in speech and language patterns offers a promising path towards cost-effective and non-invasive early detection of AD on a large scale. Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT, have enabled powerful new possibilities for semantic text analysis. In this study, we leverage GPT-4 to extract five semantic features from transcripts of spontaneous patient speech. The features capture known symptoms of AD, but they are difficult to quantify effectively using traditional methods of computational linguistics. We demonstrate the clinical significance of these features and further validate one of them ("Word-Finding Difficulties") against a proxy measure and human raters. When combined with established linguistic features and a Random Forest classifier, the GPT-derived features significantly improve the detection of AD. Our approach proves effective for both manually transcribed and automatically generated transcripts, representing a novel and impactful use of recent advancements in LLMs for AD speech analysis.
Learning from Impairment: Leveraging Insights from Clinical Linguistics in Language Modelling Research
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This position paper investigates the potential of integrating insights from language impairment research and its clinical treatment to develop human-inspired learning strategies and evaluation frameworks for language models (LMs). We inspect the theoretical underpinnings underlying some influential linguistically motivated training approaches derived from neurolinguistics and, particularly, aphasiology, aimed at enhancing the recovery and generalization of linguistic skills in aphasia treatment, with a primary focus on those targeting the syntactic domain. We highlight how these insights can inform the design of rigorous assessments for LMs, specifically in their handling of complex syntactic phenomena, as well as their implications for developing human-like learning strategies, aligning with efforts to create more sustainable and cognitively plausible natural language processing (NLP) models.
Enriching Social Science Research via Survey Item Linking
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Questions within surveys, called survey items, are used in the social sciences to study latent concepts, such as the factors influencing life satisfaction. Instead of using explicit citations, researchers paraphrase the content of the survey items they use in-text. However, this makes it challenging to find survey items of interest when comparing related work. Automatically parsing and linking these implicit mentions to survey items in a knowledge base can provide more fine-grained references. We model this task, called Survey Item Linking (SIL), in two stages: mention detection and entity disambiguation. Due to an imprecise definition of the task, existing datasets used for evaluating the performance for SIL are too small and of low-quality. We argue that latent concepts and survey item mentions should be differentiated. To this end, we create a high-quality and richly annotated dataset consisting of 20,454 English and German sentences. By benchmarking deep learning systems for each of the two stages independently and sequentially, we demonstrate that the task is feasible, but observe that errors propagate from the first stage, leading to a lower overall task performance. Moreover, mentions that require the context of multiple sentences are more challenging to identify for models in the first stage. Modeling the entire context of a document and combining the two stages into an end-to-end system could mitigate these problems in future work, and errors could additionally be reduced by collecting more diverse data and by improving the quality of the knowledge base. The data and code are available at https://github.com/e-tornike/SIL .
MarkovType: A Markov Decision Process Strategy for Non-Invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces Typing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) help people with severe speech and motor disabilities communicate and interact with their environment using neural activity. This work focuses on the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) paradigm of BCIs using noninvasive electroencephalography (EEG). The RSVP typing task is a recursive task with multiple sequences, where users see only a subset of symbols in each sequence. Extensive research has been conducted to improve classification in the RSVP typing task, achieving fast classification. However, these methods struggle to achieve high accuracy and do not consider the typing mechanism in the learning procedure. They apply binary target and non-target classification without including recursive training. To improve performance in the classification of symbols while controlling the classification speed, we incorporate the typing setup into training by proposing a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to formulate the RSVP typing task as a POMDP for recursive classification. Experiments show that the proposed approach, MarkovType, results in a more accurate typing system compared to competitors. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that while there is a trade-off between accuracy and speed, MarkovType achieves the optimal balance between these factors compared to other methods.
Approximate State Abstraction for Markov Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces state abstraction for two-player zero-sum Markov games (TZMGs), where the payoffs for the two players are determined by the state representing the environment and their respective actions, with state transitions following Markov decision processes. For example, in games like soccer, the value of actions changes according to the state of play, and thus such games should be described as Markov games. In TZMGs, as the number of states increases, computing equilibria becomes more difficult. Therefore, we consider state abstraction, which reduces the number of states by treating multiple different states as a single state. There is a substantial body of research on finding optimal policies for Markov decision processes using state abstraction. However, in the multi-player setting, the game with state abstraction may yield different equilibrium solutions from those of the ground game. To evaluate the equilibrium solutions of the game with state abstraction, we derived bounds on the duality gap, which represents the distance from the equilibrium solutions of the ground game. Finally, we demonstrate our state abstraction with Markov Soccer, compute equilibrium policies, and examine the results.
CCNDF: Curvature Constrained Neural Distance Fields from 3D LiDAR Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural distance fields (NDF) have emerged as a powerful tool for addressing challenges in 3D computer vision and graphics downstream problems. While significant progress has been made to learn NDF from various kind of sensor data, a crucial aspect that demands attention is the supervision of neural fields during training as the ground-truth NDFs are not available for large-scale outdoor scenes. Previous works have utilized various forms of expected signed distance to guide model learning. Yet, these approaches often need to pay more attention to critical considerations of surface geometry and are limited to small-scale implementations. To this end, we propose a novel methodology leveraging second-order derivatives of the signed distance field for improved neural field learning. Our approach addresses limitations by accurately estimating signed distance, offering a more comprehensive understanding of underlying geometry. To assess the efficacy of our methodology, we conducted comparative evaluations against prevalent methods for mapping and localization tasks, which are primary application areas of NDF. Our results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach, highlighting its potential for advancing the capabilities of neural distance fields in computer vision and graphics applications.
Feedback Regulated Opto-Mechanical Soft Robotic Actuators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge. It is believed that achieving complex feedback mechanisms in responsive materials will pave the way toward autonomous, intelligent structure and actuation without complex electronics. Inspired by living systems, we report a general principle to design and construct such feedback loops in light-responsive materials. Specifically, we design a baffle-actuator mechanism to incorporate programmed feedback into the opto-mechanical responsiveness. By simply addressing the baffle position with respect to the incident light beam, positive and negative feedback are programmed. We demonstrate the transformation of a light-bending strip into a switcher, where the intensity of light determines the energy barrier under positive feedback, realizing multi-stable shape-morphing. By leveraging the negative feedback and associated homeostasis, we demonstrate two soft robots, i.e., a locomotor and a swimmer. Furthermore, we unveil the ubiquity of feedback in light-responsive materials, which provides new insight into self-regulated robotic matters.