OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Location Privacy and Spectrum Efficiency Enhancement in Spectrum Sharing Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we investigate the benefits of secondary user (SU) network beamforming on improving primary user (PU) location privacy in spectrum sharing systems, where the beamformer in the SU network is designed to suppress the aggregate interference to improve the location privacy of PUs. We consider two problems: improving SU network communication throughput subject to the specified PU location privacy requirements, and enhancing PU location privacy given the quality of service (QoS) requirements of SU networks. In the first problem, we provide an algorithm to achieve high data rates with the constrained PU location privacy level. Numerical results show that for a given PU location privacy requirement, the proposed scheme is able to interfere/exclude only a few SU nodes from the PU band and the network throughput can be greatly improved. In the second problem, to fully explore the potential of SU network beamforming for enhancing PU location privacy, we propose a two-step scheme to decouple the beamforming and privacy zone design so that the PU location privacy can be improved while satisfying the SU network throughput requirement. According to numerical evaluations, the proposed scheme can maintain/achieve higher PU location privacy than the benchmark beamforming schemes while satisfying a QoS requirement for the SU network.
Transfer Learning for Microstructure Segmentation with CS-UNet: A Hybrid Algorithm with Transformer and CNN Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Transfer learning improves the performance of deep learning models by initializing them with parameters pre-trained on larger datasets. Intuitively, transfer learning is more effective when pre-training is on the in-domain datasets. A recent study by NASA has demonstrated that the microstructure segmentation with encoder-decoder algorithms benefits more from CNN encoders pre-trained on microscopy images than from those pre-trained on natural images. However, CNN models only capture the local spatial relations in images. In recent years, attention networks such as Transformers are increasingly used in image analysis to capture the long-range relations between pixels. In this study, we compare the segmentation performance of Transformer and CNN models pre-trained on microscopy images with those pre-trained on natural images. Our result partially confirms the NASA study that the segmentation performance of out-of-distribution images (taken under different imaging and sample conditions) is significantly improved when pre-training on microscopy images. However, the performance gain for one-shot and few-shot learning is more modest with Transformers. We also find that for image segmentation, the combination of pre-trained Transformers and CNN encoders are consistently better than pre-trained CNN encoders alone. Our dataset (of about 50,000 images) combines the public portion of the NASA dataset with additional images we collected. Even with much less training data, our pre-trained models have significantly better performance for image segmentation. This result suggests that Transformers and CNN complement each other and when pre-trained on microscopy images, they are more beneficial to the downstream tasks.
PaperToPlace: Transforming Instruction Documents into Spatialized and Context-Aware Mixed Reality Experiences
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

While paper instructions are one of the mainstream medium for sharing knowledge, consuming such instructions and translating them into activities are inefficient due to the lack of connectivity with physical environment. We present PaperToPlace, a novel workflow comprising an authoring pipeline, which allows the authors to rapidly transform and spatialize existing paper instructions into MR experience, and a consumption pipeline, which computationally place each instruction step at an optimal location that is easy to read and do not occlude key interaction areas. Our evaluations of the authoring pipeline with 12 participants demonstrated the usability of our workflow and the effectiveness of using a machine learning based approach to help extracting the spatial locations associated with each steps. A second within-subject study with another 12 participants demonstrates the merits of our consumption pipeline by reducing efforts of context switching, delivering the segmented instruction steps and offering the hands-free affordances.
Quantifying the Influence of User Behaviors on the Dissemination of Fake News on Twitter with Multivariate Hawkes Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Fake news has emerged as a pervasive problem within Online Social Networks, leading to a surge of research interest in this area. Understanding the dissemination mechanisms of fake news is crucial in comprehending the propagation of disinformation/misinformation and its impact on users in Online Social Networks. This knowledge can facilitate the development of interventions to curtail the spread of false information and inform affected users to remain vigilant against fraudulent/malicious content. In this paper, we specifically target the Twitter platform and propose a Multivariate Hawkes Point Processes model that incorporates essential factors such as user networks, response tweet types, and user stances as model parameters. Our objective is to investigate and quantify their influence on the dissemination process of fake news. We derive parameter estimation expressions using an Expectation Maximization algorithm and validate them on a simulated dataset. Furthermore, we conduct a case study using a real dataset of fake news collected from Twitter to explore the impact of user stances and tweet types on dissemination patterns. This analysis provides valuable insights into how users are influenced by or influence the dissemination process of disinformation/misinformation, and demonstrates how our model can aid in intervening in this process.
Investigating Psychological Ownership in a Shared AR Space: Effects of Human and Object Reality and Object Controllability
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Augmented reality (AR) provides users with a unique social space where virtual objects are natural parts of the real world. The users can interact with 3D virtual objects and virtual humans projected onto the physical environment. This work examines perceived ownership based on the reality of objects and partners, as well as object controllability in a shared AR setting. Our formal user study with 28 participants shows a sense of possession, control, separation, and partner presence affect their perceived ownership of a shared object. Finally, we discuss the findings and present a conclusion.
Evaluating 3D User Interaction Techniques on Spatial Working Memory for 3D Scatter Plot Exploration in Immersive Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

This work evaluates three 3D user interaction techniques to investigate their visuo-spatial working memory support for users' data exploration in immersive analytics. Two techniques are the common VR locomotion technique, Walking and Teleportation, while the other one is Grab, an object manipulation technique. We present two formal user studies in VR and AR. Our study is designed based on the Corsi block-tapping Task, a psychological test for assessing visuo-spatial working memory. Our study results show that Walking supports spatial memory best, and Grab follows. Though Teleportation is found to support it the least, participants rated Teleportation as the easiest way to move in the VR study. We also compare the Walking and Grab results in the VR and AR studies and discuss differences. At last, we discuss our limitations and future work.
Sparse Models for Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The sparse modeling is an evident manifestation capturing the parsimony principle just described, and sparse models are widespread in statistics, physics, information sciences, neuroscience, computational mathematics, and so on. In statistics the many applications of sparse modeling span regression, classification tasks, graphical model selection, sparse M-estimators and sparse dimensionality reduction. It is also particularly effective in many statistical and machine learning areas where the primary goal is to discover predictive patterns from data which would enhance our understanding and control of underlying physical, biological, and other natural processes, beyond just building accurate outcome black-box predictors. Common examples include selecting biomarkers in biological procedures, finding relevant brain activity locations which are predictive about brain states and processes based on fMRI data, and identifying network bottlenecks best explaining end-to-end performance. Moreover, the research and applications of efficient recovery of high-dimensional sparse signals from a relatively small number of observations, which is the main focus of compressed sensing or compressive sensing, have rapidly grown and became an extremely intense area of study beyond classical signal processing. Likewise interestingly, sparse modeling is directly related to various artificial vision tasks, such as image denoising, segmentation, restoration and superresolution, object or face detection and recognition in visual scenes, and action recognition. In this manuscript, we provide a brief introduction of the basic theory underlying sparse representation and compressive sensing, and then discuss some methods for recovering sparse solutions to optimization problems in effective way, together with some applications of sparse recovery in a machine learning problem known as sparse dictionary learning.
Enhancing Bloodstain Analysis Through AI-Based Segmentation: Leveraging Segment Anything Model for Crime Scene Investigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Bloodstain pattern analysis plays a crucial role in crime scene investigations by providing valuable information through the study of unique blood patterns. Conventional image analysis methods, like Thresholding and Contrast, impose stringent requirements on the image background and is labor-intensive in the context of droplet image segmentation. The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a recently proposed method for extensive image recognition, is yet to be adequately assessed for its accuracy and efficiency on bloodstain image segmentation. This paper explores the application of pre-trained SAM and fine-tuned SAM on bloodstain image segmentation with diverse image backgrounds. Experiment results indicate that both pre-trained and fine-tuned SAM perform the bloodstain image segmentation task with satisfactory accuracy and efficiency, while fine-tuned SAM achieves an overall 2.2\% accuracy improvement than pre-trained SAM and 4.70\% acceleration in terms of speed for image recognition. Analysis of factors that influence bloodstain recognition is carried out. This research demonstrates the potential application of SAM on bloodstain image segmentation, showcasing the effectiveness of Artificial Intelligence application in criminology research. We release all code and demos at \url{https://github.com/Zdong104/Bloodstain_Analysis_Ai_Tool}
Testing Junta Truncation
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the basic statistical problem of detecting truncation of the uniform distribution on the Boolean hypercube by juntas. More concretely, we give upper and lower bounds on the problem of distinguishing between i.i.d. sample access to either (a) the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$, or (b) the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$ conditioned on the satisfying assignments of a $k$-junta $f: \{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$. We show that (up to constant factors) $\min\{2^k + \log{n\choose k}, {2^{k/2}\log^{1/2}{n\choose k}}\}$ samples suffice for this task and also show that a $\log{n\choose k}$ dependence on sample complexity is unavoidable. Our results suggest that testing junta truncation requires learning the set of relevant variables of the junta.
Improve in-situ life prediction and classification performance by capturing both the present state and evolution rate of battery aging
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This study develops a methodology by capturing both the battery aging state and degradation rate for improved life prediction performance. The aging state is indicated by six physical features of an equivalent circuit model that are extracted from the voltage relaxation data. And the degradation rate is captured by two features extracted from the differences between the voltage relaxation curves within a moving window (for life prediction), or the differences between the capacity vs. voltage curves at different cycles (for life classification). Two machine learning models, which are constructed based on Gaussian Processes, are used to describe the relationships between these physical features and battery lifetimes for the life prediction and classification, respectively. The methodology is validated with the aging data of 74 battery cells of three different types. Experimental results show that based on only 3-12 minutes' sampling data, the method with novel features predicts accurate battery lifetimes, with the prediction accuracy improved by up to 67.09% compared with the benchmark method. And the batteries are classified into three groups (long, medium, and short) with an overall accuracy larger than 90% based on only two adjacent cycles' information, enabling the highly efficient regrouping of retired batteries.
Towards Fast and Accurate Image-Text Retrieval with Self-Supervised Fine-Grained Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image-text retrieval requires the system to bridge the heterogenous gap between vision and language for accurate retrieval while keeping the network lightweight-enough for efficient retrieval. Existing trade-off solutions mainly study from the view of incorporating cross-modal interactions with the independent-embedding framework or leveraging stronger pretrained encoders, which still demand time-consuming similarity measurement or heavyweight model structure in the retrieval stage. In this work, we propose an image-text alignment module SelfAlign on top of the independent-embedding framework, which improves the retrieval accuracy while maintains the retrieval efficiency without extra supervision. SelfAlign contains two collaborative sub-modules that force image-text alignment at both concept level and context level by self-supervised contrastive learning. It does not require cross-modal embedding interactions during training while maintaining independent image and text encoders during retrieval. With comparable time cost, SelfAlign consistently boosts the accuracy of state-of-the-art non-pretraining independent-embedding models respectively by 9.1%, 4.2% and 6.6% in terms of R@sum score on Flickr30K, MSCOCO 1K and MS-COCO 5K datasets. The retrieval accuracy also outperforms most existing interactive-embedding models with orders of magnitude decrease in retrieval time. The source code is available at: https://github.com/Zjamie813/SelfAlign.
Confucius: Iterative Tool Learning from Introspection Feedback by Easy-to-Difficult Curriculum
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to extending the capability of LLMs. Although some works employ open-source LLMs for the tool learning task, most of them are trained in a controlled environment in which LLMs only learn to execute the human-provided tools. However, selecting proper tools from the large toolset is also a crucial ability for the tool learning model to be applied in real-world applications. Existing methods usually directly employ self-instruction methods to train the model, which ignores differences in tool complexity. In this paper, we propose the Confucius, a novel tool learning framework to train LLM to use complicated tools in real-world scenarios, which contains two main phases: (1) We first propose a multi-stage learning method to teach the LLM to use various tools from an easy-to-difficult curriculum; (2) thenceforth, we propose the Iterative Self-instruct from Introspective Feedback (ISIF) to dynamically construct the dataset to improve the ability to use the complicated tool. Extensive experiments conducted on both controlled and real-world settings demonstrate the superiority of our tool learning framework in the real-world application scenarios compared to both tuning-free (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) and tuning-based baselines (e.g. GPT4Tools).
Multi-agent Coordination Under Temporal Logic Tasks and Team-Wise Intermittent Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-agent systems outperform single agent in complex collaborative tasks. However, in large-scale scenarios, ensuring timely information exchange during decentralized task execution remains a challenge. This work presents an online decentralized coordination scheme for multi-agent systems under complex local tasks and intermittent communication constraints. Unlike existing strategies that enforce all-time or intermittent connectivity, our approach allows agents to join or leave communication networks at aperiodic intervals, as deemed optimal by their online task execution. This scheme concurrently determines local plans and refines the communication strategy, i.e., where and when to communicate as a team. A decentralized potential game is modeled among agents, for which a Nash equilibrium is generated iteratively through online local search. It guarantees local task completion and intermittent communication constraints. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted against several strong baselines.
An Analysis of On-the-fly Determinization of Finite-state Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we establish an abstraction of on-the-fly determinization of finite-state automata using transition monoids and demonstrate how it can be applied to bound the asymptotics. We present algebraic and combinatorial properties that are sufficient for a polynomial state complexity of the deterministic automaton constructed on-the-fly. A special case of our findings is that automata with many non-deterministic transitions almost always admit a determinization of polynomial complexity. Furthermore, we extend our ideas to weighted finite-state automata.
The inverse problem for neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study the problem of computing the preimage of a set under a neural network with piecewise-affine activation functions. We recall an old result that the preimage of a polyhedral set is again a union of polyhedral sets and can be effectively computed. We show several applications of computing the preimage for analysis and interpretability of neural networks.
Semantic-aware Consistency Network for Cloth-changing Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Cloth-changing Person Re-Identification (CC-ReID) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve the target person across multiple surveillance cameras when clothing changes might happen. Despite recent progress in CC-ReID, existing approaches are still hindered by the interference of clothing variations since they lack effective constraints to keep the model consistently focused on clothing-irrelevant regions. To address this issue, we present a Semantic-aware Consistency Network (SCNet) to learn identity-related semantic features by proposing effective consistency constraints. Specifically, we generate the black-clothing image by erasing pixels in the clothing area, which explicitly mitigates the interference from clothing variations. In addition, to fully exploit the fine-grained identity information, a head-enhanced attention module is introduced, which learns soft attention maps by utilizing the proposed part-based matching loss to highlight head information. We further design a semantic consistency loss to facilitate the learning of high-level identity-related semantic features, forcing the model to focus on semantically consistent cloth-irrelevant regions. By using the consistency constraint, our model does not require any extra auxiliary segmentation module to generate the black-clothing image or locate the head region during the inference stage. Extensive experiments on four cloth-changing person Re-ID datasets (LTCC, PRCC, Vc-Clothes, and DeepChange) demonstrate that our proposed SCNet makes significant improvements over prior state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Gpn-star/SCNet.
Preparing Reproducible Scientific Artifacts using Docker
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

The pursuit of scientific knowledge strongly depends on the ability to reproduce and validate research results. It is a well-known fact that the scientific community faces challenges related to transparency, reliability, and the reproducibility of empirical published results. Consequently, the design and preparation of reproducible artifacts has a fundamental role in the development of science. Reproducible artifacts comprise comprehensive documentation, data, and code that enable replication and validation of research findings by others. In this work, we discuss a methodology to construct reproducible artifacts based on Docker. Our presentation centers around the preparation of an artifact to be submitted to scientific venues that encourage or require this process. This report's primary audience are scientists working with empirical computer science; however, we believe that the presented methodology can be extended to other technology-oriented empirical disciplines.
SPEED: Streaming Partition and Parallel Acceleration for Temporal Interaction Graph Embedding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal Interaction Graphs (TIGs) are widely employed to model intricate real-world systems such as financial systems and social networks. To capture the dynamism and interdependencies of nodes, existing TIG embedding models need to process edges sequentially and chronologically. However, this requirement prevents it from being processed in parallel and struggle to accommodate burgeoning data volumes to GPU. Consequently, many large-scale temporal interaction graphs are confined to CPU processing. Furthermore, a generalized GPU scaling and acceleration approach remains unavailable. To facilitate large-scale TIGs' implementation on GPUs for acceleration, we introduce a novel training approach namely Streaming Edge Partitioning and Parallel Acceleration for Temporal Interaction Graph Embedding (SPEED). The SPEED is comprised of a Streaming Edge Partitioning Component (SEP) which addresses space overhead issue by assigning fewer nodes to each GPU, and a Parallel Acceleration Component (PAC) which enables simultaneous training of different sub-graphs, addressing time overhead issue. Our method can achieve a good balance in computing resources, computing time, and downstream task performance. Empirical validation across 7 real-world datasets demonstrates the potential to expedite training speeds by a factor of up to 19.29x. Simultaneously, resource consumption of a single-GPU can be diminished by up to 69%, thus enabling the multiple GPU-based training and acceleration encompassing millions of nodes and billions of edges. Furthermore, our approach also maintains its competitiveness in downstream tasks.