OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Data-Efficient Energy-Aware Participant Selection for UAV-Enabled Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled edge federated learning (FL) has sparked a rise in research interest as a result of the massive and heterogeneous data collected by UAVs, as well as the privacy concerns related to UAV data transmissions to edge servers. However, due to the redundancy of UAV collected data, e.g., imaging data, and non-rigorous FL participant selection, the convergence time of the FL learning process and bias of the FL model may increase. Consequently, we investigate in this paper the problem of selecting UAV participants for edge FL, aiming to improve the FL model's accuracy, under UAV constraints of energy consumption, communication quality, and local datasets' heterogeneity. We propose a novel UAV participant selection scheme, called data-efficient energy-aware participant selection strategy (DEEPS), which consists of selecting the best FL participant in each sub-region based on the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) average score of its local dataset and its power consumption profile. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed selection scheme is superior to the benchmark random selection method, in terms of model accuracy, training time, and UAV energy consumption.
DiffSED: Sound Event Detection with Denoising Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Sound Event Detection (SED) aims to predict the temporal boundaries of all the events of interest and their class labels, given an unconstrained audio sample. Taking either the splitand-classify (i.e., frame-level) strategy or the more principled event-level modeling approach, all existing methods consider the SED problem from the discriminative learning perspective. In this work, we reformulate the SED problem by taking a generative learning perspective. Specifically, we aim to generate sound temporal boundaries from noisy proposals in a denoising diffusion process, conditioned on a target audio sample. During training, our model learns to reverse the noising process by converting noisy latent queries to the groundtruth versions in the elegant Transformer decoder framework. Doing so enables the model generate accurate event boundaries from even noisy queries during inference. Extensive experiments on the Urban-SED and EPIC-Sounds datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing alternatives, with 40+% faster convergence in training.
Neural Authorship Attribution: Stylometric Analysis on Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, PaLM, and Llama have significantly propelled the generation of AI-crafted text. With rising concerns about their potential misuse, there is a pressing need for AI-generated-text forensics. Neural authorship attribution is a forensic effort, seeking to trace AI-generated text back to its originating LLM. The LLM landscape can be divided into two primary categories: proprietary and open-source. In this work, we delve into these emerging categories of LLMs, focusing on the nuances of neural authorship attribution. To enrich our understanding, we carry out an empirical analysis of LLM writing signatures, highlighting the contrasts between proprietary and open-source models, and scrutinizing variations within each group. By integrating stylometric features across lexical, syntactic, and structural aspects of language, we explore their potential to yield interpretable results and augment pre-trained language model-based classifiers utilized in neural authorship attribution. Our findings, based on a range of state-of-the-art LLMs, provide empirical insights into neural authorship attribution, paving the way for future investigations aimed at mitigating the threats posed by AI-generated misinformation.
Jurassic World Remake: Bringing Ancient Fossils Back to Life via Zero-Shot Long Image-to-Image Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With a strong understanding of the target domain from natural language, we produce promising results in translating across large domain gaps and bringing skeletons back to life. In this work, we use text-guided latent diffusion models for zero-shot image-to-image translation (I2I) across large domain gaps (longI2I), where large amounts of new visual features and new geometry need to be generated to enter the target domain. Being able to perform translations across large domain gaps has a wide variety of real-world applications in criminology, astrology, environmental conservation, and paleontology. In this work, we introduce a new task Skull2Animal for translating between skulls and living animals. On this task, we find that unguided Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are not capable of translating across large domain gaps. Instead of these traditional I2I methods, we explore the use of guided diffusion and image editing models and provide a new benchmark model, Revive-2I, capable of performing zero-shot I2I via text-prompting latent diffusion models. We find that guidance is necessary for longI2I because, to bridge the large domain gap, prior knowledge about the target domain is needed. In addition, we find that prompting provides the best and most scalable information about the target domain as classifier-guided diffusion models require retraining for specific use cases and lack stronger constraints on the target domain because of the wide variety of images they are trained on.
The Efficacy of Utility Functions for Multicriteria Hospital Case-Mix Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

A new approach to perform hospital case-mix planning (CMP) is introduced in this article. Our multi-criteria approach utilises utility functions (UF) to articulate the preferences and standpoint of independent decision makers regarding outputs. The primary aim of this article is to test whether a utility functions method (UFM) based upon the scalarization of aforesaid UF is an appropriate quantitative technique to, i) distribute hospital resources to different operating units, and ii) provide a better capacity allocation and case mix. Our approach is motivated by the need to provide a method able to evaluate the trade-off between different stakeholders and objectives of hospitals. To the best of our knowledge, no such approach has been considered before in the literature. As we will later show, this idea addresses various technical limitations, weaknesses, and flaws in current CMP. The efficacy of the aforesaid approach is tested on a case study of a large tertiary hospital. Currently UF are not used by hospital managers, and real functions are unavailable, hence, 14 rational options are tested. Our exploratory analysis has provided important guidelines for the application of these UF. It indicates that these UF provide a valuable starting point for planners, managers, and executives of hospitals to impose their goals and aspirations. In conclusion, our approach may be better at identifying case mix that users want to treat and seems more capable of modelling the varying importance of different levels of output. Apart from finding desirable case mixes to consider, the approach can provide important insights via a sensitivity analysis of the parameters of each UF.
Wide-Area Geolocalization with a Limited Field of View Camera in Challenging Urban Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Cross-view geolocalization, a supplement or replacement for GPS, localizes an agent within a search area by matching ground-view images to overhead images. Significant progress has been made assuming a panoramic ground camera. Panoramic cameras' high complexity and cost make non-panoramic cameras more widely applicable, but also more challenging since they yield less scene overlap between ground and overhead images. This paper presents Restricted FOV Wide-Area Geolocalization (ReWAG), a cross-view geolocalization approach that combines a neural network and particle filter to globally localize a mobile agent with only odometry and a non-panoramic camera. ReWAG creates pose-aware embeddings and provides a strategy to incorporate particle pose into the Siamese network, improving localization accuracy by a factor of 100 compared to a vision transformer baseline. This extended work also presents ReWAG*, which improves upon ReWAG's generalization ability in previously unseen environments. ReWAG* repeatedly converges accurately on a dataset of images we have collected in Boston with a 72 degree field of view (FOV) camera, a location and FOV that ReWAG* was not trained on.
Reducing Training Demands for 3D Gait Recognition with Deep Koopman Operator Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning research has made many biometric recognition solution viable, but it requires vast training data to achieve real-world generalization. Unlike other biometric traits, such as face and ear, gait samples cannot be easily crawled from the web to form massive unconstrained datasets. As the human body has been extensively studied for different digital applications, one can rely on prior shape knowledge to overcome data scarcity. This work follows the recent trend of fitting a 3D deformable body model into gait videos using deep neural networks to obtain disentangled shape and pose representations for each frame. To enforce temporal consistency in the network, we introduce a new Linear Dynamical Systems (LDS) module and loss based on Koopman operator theory, which provides an unsupervised motion regularization for the periodic nature of gait, as well as a predictive capacity for extending gait sequences. We compare LDS to the traditional adversarial training approach and use the USF HumanID and CASIA-B datasets to show that LDS can obtain better accuracy with less training data. Finally, we also show that our 3D modeling approach is much better than other 3D gait approaches in overcoming viewpoint variation under normal, bag-carrying and clothing change conditions.
On Supermodular Contracts and Dense Subgraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We study the combinatorial contract design problem, introduced and studied by Dutting et. al. (2021, 2022), in both the single and multi-agent settings. Prior work has examined the problem when the principal's utility function is submodular in the actions chosen by the agent(s). We complement this emerging literature with an examination of the problem when the principal's utility is supermodular. In the single-agent setting, we obtain a strongly polynomial time algorithm for the optimal contract. This stands in contrast to the NP-hardness of the problem with submodular principal utility due to Dutting et. al. (2021). This result has two technical components, the first of which applies beyond supermodular or submodular utilities. This result strengthens and simplifies analogous enumeration algorithms from Dutting et. al. (2021), and applies to any nondecreasing valuation function for the principal. Second, we show that supermodular valuations lead to a polynomial number of breakpoints, analogous to a similar result by Dutting et. al. (2021) for gross substitutes valuations. In the multi-agent setting, we obtain a mixed bag of positive and negative results. First, we show that it is NP-hard to obtain any finite multiplicative approximation, or an additive FPTAS. This stands in contrast to the submodular case, where efficient computation of approximately optimal contracts was shown by Dutting et. al. (2022). Second, we derive an additive PTAS for the problem in the instructive special case of graph-based supermodular valuations, and equal costs. En-route to this result, we discover an intimate connection between the multi-agent contract problem and the notorious k-densest subgraph problem. We build on and combine techniques from the literature on dense subgraph problems to obtain our additive PTAS.
ST-MLP: A Cascaded Spatio-Temporal Linear Framework with Channel-Independence Strategy for Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The criticality of prompt and precise traffic forecasting in optimizing traffic flow management in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has drawn substantial scholarly focus. Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have been lauded for their adaptability to road graph structures. Yet, current research on STGNNs architectures often prioritizes complex designs, leading to elevated computational burdens with only minor enhancements in accuracy. To address this issue, we propose ST-MLP, a concise spatio-temporal model solely based on cascaded Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) modules and linear layers. Specifically, we incorporate temporal information, spatial information and predefined graph structure with a successful implementation of the channel-independence strategy - an effective technique in time series forecasting. Empirical results demonstrate that ST-MLP outperforms state-of-the-art STGNNs and other models in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. Our finding encourages further exploration of more concise and effective neural network architectures in the field of traffic forecasting.
Semi-Supervised Learning with Multiple Imputations on Non-Random Missing Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) is implemented when algorithms are trained on both labeled and unlabeled data. This is a very common application of ML as it is unrealistic to obtain a fully labeled dataset. Researchers have tackled three main issues: missing at random (MAR), missing completely at random (MCAR), and missing not at random (MNAR). The MNAR problem is the most challenging of the three as one cannot safely assume that all class distributions are equal. Existing methods, including Class-Aware Imputation (CAI) and Class-Aware Propensity (CAP), mostly overlook the non-randomness in the unlabeled data. This paper proposes two new methods of combining multiple imputation models to achieve higher accuracy and less bias. 1) We use multiple imputation models, create confidence intervals, and apply a threshold to ignore pseudo-labels with low confidence. 2) Our new method, SSL with De-biased Imputations (SSL-DI), aims to reduce bias by filtering out inaccurate data and finding a subset that is accurate and reliable. This subset of the larger dataset could be imputed into another SSL model, which will be less biased. The proposed models have been shown to be effective in both MCAR and MNAR situations, and experimental results show that our methodology outperforms existing methods in terms of classification accuracy and reducing bias.
Generating Personas for Games with Multimodal Adversarial Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement learning has been widely successful in producing agents capable of playing games at a human level. However, this requires complex reward engineering, and the agent's resulting policy is often unpredictable. Going beyond reinforcement learning is necessary to model a wide range of human playstyles, which can be difficult to represent with a reward function. This paper presents a novel imitation learning approach to generate multiple persona policies for playtesting. Multimodal Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (MultiGAIL) uses an auxiliary input parameter to learn distinct personas using a single-agent model. MultiGAIL is based on generative adversarial imitation learning and uses multiple discriminators as reward models, inferring the environment reward by comparing the agent and distinct expert policies. The reward from each discriminator is weighted according to the auxiliary input. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of our technique in two environments with continuous and discrete action spaces.
LLM-Mini-CEX: Automatic Evaluation of Large Language Model for Diagnostic Conversation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

There is an increasing interest in developing LLMs for medical diagnosis to improve diagnosis efficiency. Despite their alluring technological potential, there is no unified and comprehensive evaluation criterion, leading to the inability to evaluate the quality and potential risks of medical LLMs, further hindering the application of LLMs in medical treatment scenarios. Besides, current evaluations heavily rely on labor-intensive interactions with LLMs to obtain diagnostic dialogues and human evaluation on the quality of diagnosis dialogue. To tackle the lack of unified and comprehensive evaluation criterion, we first initially establish an evaluation criterion, termed LLM-specific Mini-CEX to assess the diagnostic capabilities of LLMs effectively, based on original Mini-CEX. To address the labor-intensive interaction problem, we develop a patient simulator to engage in automatic conversations with LLMs, and utilize ChatGPT for evaluating diagnosis dialogues automatically. Experimental results show that the LLM-specific Mini-CEX is adequate and necessary to evaluate medical diagnosis dialogue. Besides, ChatGPT can replace manual evaluation on the metrics of humanistic qualities and provides reproducible and automated comparisons between different LLMs.
SEER: Super-Optimization Explorer for HLS using E-graph Rewriting with MLIR
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

High-level synthesis (HLS) is a process that automatically translates a software program in a high-level language into a low-level hardware description. However, the hardware designs produced by HLS tools still suffer from a significant performance gap compared to manual implementations. This is because the input HLS programs must still be written using hardware design principles. Existing techniques either leave the program source unchanged or perform a fixed sequence of source transformation passes, potentially missing opportunities to find the optimal design. We propose a super-optimization approach for HLS that automatically rewrites an arbitrary software program into efficient HLS code that can be used to generate an optimized hardware design. We developed a toolflow named SEER, based on the e-graph data structure, to efficiently explore equivalent implementations of a program at scale. SEER provides an extensible framework, orchestrating existing software compiler passes and hardware synthesis optimizers. Our work is the first attempt to exploit e-graph rewriting for large software compiler frameworks, such as MLIR. Across a set of open-source benchmarks, we show that SEER achieves up to 38x the performance within 1.4x the area of the original program. Via an Intel-provided case study, SEER demonstrates the potential to outperform manually optimized designs produced by hardware experts.
Attention Is Not All You Need Anymore
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, the popular Transformer architecture has achieved great success in many application areas, including natural language processing and computer vision. Many existing works aim to reduce the computational and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism in the Transformer by trading off performance. However, performance is key for the continuing success of the Transformer. In this paper, a family of drop-in replacements for the self-attention mechanism in the Transformer, called the Extractors, is proposed. Four types of the Extractors, namely the super high-performance Extractor (SHE), the higher-performance Extractor (HE), the worthwhile Extractor (WE), and the minimalist Extractor (ME), are proposed as examples. Experimental results show that replacing the self-attention mechanism with the SHE evidently improves the performance of the Transformer, whereas the simplified versions of the SHE, i.e., the HE, the WE, and the ME, perform close to or better than the self-attention mechanism with less computational and memory complexity. Furthermore, the proposed Extractors have the potential or are able to run faster than the self-attention mechanism since their critical paths of computation are much shorter. Additionally, the sequence prediction problem in the context of text generation is formulated using variable-length discrete-time Markov chains, and the Transformer is reviewed based on our understanding.
A Review of Adversarial Attacks in Computer Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks have been widely used in various downstream tasks, especially those safety-critical scenario such as autonomous driving, but deep networks are often threatened by adversarial samples. Such adversarial attacks can be invisible to human eyes, but can lead to DNN misclassification, and often exhibits transferability between deep learning and machine learning models and real-world achievability. Adversarial attacks can be divided into white-box attacks, for which the attacker knows the parameters and gradient of the model, and black-box attacks, for the latter, the attacker can only obtain the input and output of the model. In terms of the attacker's purpose, it can be divided into targeted attacks and non-targeted attacks, which means that the attacker wants the model to misclassify the original sample into the specified class, which is more practical, while the non-targeted attack just needs to make the model misclassify the sample. The black box setting is a scenario we will encounter in practice.
Fast Machine Unlearning Without Retraining Through Selective Synaptic Dampening
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine unlearning, the ability for a machine learning model to forget, is becoming increasingly important to comply with data privacy regulations, as well as to remove harmful, manipulated, or outdated information. The key challenge lies in forgetting specific information while protecting model performance on the remaining data. While current state-of-the-art methods perform well, they typically require some level of retraining over the retained data, in order to protect or restore model performance. This adds computational overhead and mandates that the training data remain available and accessible, which may not be feasible. In contrast, other methods employ a retrain-free paradigm, however, these approaches are prohibitively computationally expensive and do not perform on par with their retrain-based counterparts. We present Selective Synaptic Dampening (SSD), a novel two-step, post hoc, retrain-free approach to machine unlearning which is fast, performant, and does not require long-term storage of the training data. First, SSD uses the Fisher information matrix of the training and forgetting data to select parameters that are disproportionately important to the forget set. Second, SSD induces forgetting by dampening these parameters proportional to their relative importance to the forget set with respect to the wider training data. We evaluate our method against several existing unlearning methods in a range of experiments using ResNet18 and Vision Transformer. Results show that the performance of SSD is competitive with retrain-based post hoc methods, demonstrating the viability of retrain-free post hoc unlearning approaches.