OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PainSeeker: An Automated Method for Assessing Pain in Rats Through Facial Expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this letter, we aim to investigate whether laboratory rats' pain can be automatically assessed through their facial expressions. To this end, we began by presenting a publicly available dataset called RatsPain, consisting of 1,138 facial images captured from six rats that underwent an orthodontic treatment operation. Each rat' facial images in RatsPain were carefully selected from videos recorded either before or after the operation and well labeled by eight annotators according to the Rat Grimace Scale (RGS). We then proposed a novel deep learning method called PainSeeker for automatically assessing pain in rats via facial expressions. PainSeeker aims to seek pain-related facial local regions that facilitate learning both pain discriminative and head pose robust features from facial expression images. To evaluate the PainSeeker, we conducted extensive experiments on the RatsPain dataset. The results demonstrate the feasibility of assessing rats' pain from their facial expressions and also verify the effectiveness of the proposed PainSeeker in addressing this emerging but intriguing problem. The RasPain dataset can be freely obtained from https://github.com/xhzongyuan/RatsPain.
LDM3D-VR: Latent Diffusion Model for 3D VR
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Latent diffusion models have proven to be state-of-the-art in the creation and manipulation of visual outputs. However, as far as we know, the generation of depth maps jointly with RGB is still limited. We introduce LDM3D-VR, a suite of diffusion models targeting virtual reality development that includes LDM3D-pano and LDM3D-SR. These models enable the generation of panoramic RGBD based on textual prompts and the upscaling of low-resolution inputs to high-resolution RGBD, respectively. Our models are fine-tuned from existing pretrained models on datasets containing panoramic/high-resolution RGB images, depth maps and captions. Both models are evaluated in comparison to existing related methods.
A Reactive performance-based Shared Control Framework for Assistive Robotic Manipulators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In Physical Human--Robot Interaction (pHRI) grippers, humans and robots may contribute simultaneously to actions, so it is necessary to determine how to combine their commands. Control may be swapped from one to the other within certain limits, or input commands may be combined according to some criteria. The Assist-As-Needed (AAN) paradigm focuses on this second approach, as the controller is expected to provide the minimum required assistance to users. Some AAN systems rely on predicting human intention to adjust actions. However, if prediction is too hard, reactive AAN systems may weigh input commands into an emergent one. This paper proposes a novel AAN reactive control system for a robot gripper where input commands are weighted by their respective local performances. Thus, rather than minimizing tracking errors or differences to expected velocities, humans receive more help depending on their needs. The system has been tested using a gripper attached to a sensitive robot arm, which provides evaluation parameters. Tests consisted of completing an on-air planar path with both arms. After the robot gripped a person's forearm, the path and current position of the robot were displayed on a screen to provide feedback to the human. The proposed control has been compared to results without assistance and to impedance control for benchmarking. A statistical analysis of the results proves that global performance improved and tracking errors decreased for ten volunteers with the proposed controller. Besides, unlike impedance control, the proposed one does not significantly affect exerted forces, command variation, or disagreement, measured as the angular difference between human and output command. Results support that the proposed control scheme fits the AAN paradigm, although future work will require further tests for more complex environments and tasks.
Nibbling at Long Cycles: Dynamic (and Static) Edge Coloring in Optimal Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of maintaining a $(1+ε)Δ$-edge coloring in a dynamic graph $G$ with $n$ nodes and maximum degree at most $Δ$. The state-of-the-art update time is $O_ε(\text{polylog}(n))$, by Duan, He and Zhang [SODA'19] and by Christiansen [STOC'23], and more precisely $O(\log^7 n/ε^2)$, where $Δ= Ω(\log^2 n / ε^2)$. The following natural question arises: What is the best possible update time of an algorithm for this task? More specifically, \textbf{ can we bring it all the way down to some constant} (for constant $ε$)? This question coincides with the \emph{static} time barrier for the problem: Even for $(2Δ-1)$-coloring, there is only a naive $O(m \log Δ)$-time algorithm. We answer this fundamental question in the affirmative, by presenting a dynamic $(1+ε)Δ$-edge coloring algorithm with $O(\log^4 (1/ε)/ε^9)$ update time, provided $Δ= Ω_ε(\text{polylog}(n))$. As a corollary, we also get the first linear time (for constant $ε$) \emph{static} algorithm for $(1+ε)Δ$-edge coloring; in particular, we achieve a running time of $O(m \log (1/ε)/ε^2)$. We obtain our results by carefully combining a variant of the \textsc{Nibble} algorithm from Bhattacharya, Grandoni and Wajc [SODA'21] with the subsampling technique of Kulkarni, Liu, Sah, Sawhney and Tarnawski [STOC'22].
Learning Reusable Manipulation Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Humans demonstrate an impressive ability to acquire and generalize manipulation "tricks." Even from a single demonstration, such as using soup ladles to reach for distant objects, we can apply this skill to new scenarios involving different object positions, sizes, and categories (e.g., forks and hammers). Additionally, we can flexibly combine various skills to devise long-term plans. In this paper, we present a framework that enables machines to acquire such manipulation skills, referred to as "mechanisms," through a single demonstration and self-play. Our key insight lies in interpreting each demonstration as a sequence of changes in robot-object and object-object contact modes, which provides a scaffold for learning detailed samplers for continuous parameters. These learned mechanisms and samplers can be seamlessly integrated into standard task and motion planners, enabling their compositional use.
Exact Shortest Paths with Rational Weights on the Word RAM
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Exact computation of shortest paths in weighted graphs has been traditionally studied in one of two settings. First, one can assume that the edge weights are real numbers and all the performed operations on reals (typically comparisons and additions) take constant time. Classical Dijkstra's and Bellman-Ford algorithms have been described in this setting. More efficient exact shortest paths algorithms have been obtained for integer-weighted graphs. Integrality assumption not only enables faster algorithms but also allows implementing the aforementioned algorithms in a much more realistic word RAM model where only arithmetic operations on $O(\log{n})$-bit integers are performed in constant time. On the word RAM one can as efficiently exactly encode even \emph{rational-weighted} instances with $O(\log{n})$-bit numerators and denominators. However, the known exact real-weighted shortest paths algorithms, run on such a rational input, can easily encounter intermediate values of $Θ(n)$ bits if represented exactly. This leads to a factor-$Ω(n)$ slowdown on the word RAM. At the same time, the scaling algorithms suited for integer weights do not produce exact solutions for rational inputs without dramatically increasing their accuracy. In this paper, we design randomized exact single-source shortest paths algorithms for rational-weighted graphs on the word RAM. Most importantly, in the non-negative case, we obtain a near-linear time algorithm matching Dijkstra's algorithm running time up to polylogarithmic factors. In presence of negative weights, we give an $\tilde{O}(n^{2.5})$-time algorithm breaking through the best known strongly polynomial bound attained by Bellman-Ford for sufficiently dense graphs.
FLOGA: A machine learning ready dataset, a benchmark and a novel deep learning model for burnt area mapping with Sentinel-2
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Over the last decade there has been an increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires across the globe, posing significant threats to human and animal lives, ecosystems, and socio-economic stability. Therefore urgent action is required to mitigate their devastating impact and safeguard Earth's natural resources. Robust Machine Learning methods combined with the abundance of high-resolution satellite imagery can provide accurate and timely mappings of the affected area in order to assess the scale of the event, identify the impacted assets and prioritize and allocate resources effectively for the proper restoration of the damaged region. In this work, we create and introduce a machine-learning ready dataset we name FLOGA (Forest wiLdfire Observations for the Greek Area). This dataset is unique as it comprises of satellite imagery acquired before and after a wildfire event, it contains information from Sentinel-2 and MODIS modalities with variable spatial and spectral resolution, and contains a large number of events where the corresponding burnt area ground truth has been annotated by domain experts. FLOGA covers the wider region of Greece, which is characterized by a Mediterranean landscape and climatic conditions. We use FLOGA to provide a thorough comparison of multiple Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms for the automatic extraction of burnt areas, approached as a change detection task. We also compare the results to those obtained using standard specialized spectral indices for burnt area mapping. Finally, we propose a novel Deep Learning model, namely BAM-CD. Our benchmark results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique in the automatic extraction of burnt areas, outperforming all other methods in terms of accuracy and robustness. Our dataset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/Orion-AI-Lab/FLOGA.
Long-Term Invariant Local Features via Implicit Cross-Domain Correspondences
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Modern learning-based visual feature extraction networks perform well in intra-domain localization, however, their performance significantly declines when image pairs are captured across long-term visual domain variations, such as different seasonal and daytime variations. In this paper, our first contribution is a benchmark to investigate the performance impact of long-term variations on visual localization. We conduct a thorough analysis of the performance of current state-of-the-art feature extraction networks under various domain changes and find a significant performance gap between intra- and cross-domain localization. We investigate different methods to close this gap by improving the supervision of modern feature extractor networks. We propose a novel data-centric method, Implicit Cross-Domain Correspondences (iCDC). iCDC represents the same environment with multiple Neural Radiance Fields, each fitting the scene under individual visual domains. It utilizes the underlying 3D representations to generate accurate correspondences across different long-term visual conditions. Our proposed method enhances cross-domain localization performance, significantly reducing the performance gap. When evaluated on popular long-term localization benchmarks, our trained networks consistently outperform existing methods. This work serves as a substantial stride toward more robust visual localization pipelines for long-term deployments, and opens up research avenues in the development of long-term invariant descriptors.
Rethinking Evaluation Metrics of Open-Vocabulary Segmentaion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we highlight a problem of evaluation metrics adopted in the open-vocabulary segmentation. That is, the evaluation process still heavily relies on closed-set metrics on zero-shot or cross-dataset pipelines without considering the similarity between predicted and ground truth categories. To tackle this issue, we first survey eleven similarity measurements between two categorical words using WordNet linguistics statistics, text embedding, and language models by comprehensive quantitative analysis and user study. Built upon those explored measurements, we designed novel evaluation metrics, namely Open mIoU, Open AP, and Open PQ, tailored for three open-vocabulary segmentation tasks. We benchmarked the proposed evaluation metrics on 12 open-vocabulary methods of three segmentation tasks. Even though the relative subjectivity of similarity distance, we demonstrate that our metrics can still well evaluate the open ability of the existing open-vocabulary segmentation methods. We hope that our work can bring with the community new thinking about how to evaluate the open ability of models. The evaluation code is released in github.
Agile, User-Centered Design and Quality in Software Processes for Mobile Application Development Teaching
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Agile methods in undergraduate courses have been explored in an effort to close the gap between industry and professional profiles. We have structured an Android application development course based on a tailored user-centered Agile process for development of educational digital tools. This process is based on Scrum and Extreme Programming in combination with User Experience (UX) approaches. The course is executed in two phases: the first half of the semester presents theory on Agile and mobile applications development, the latter half is managed as a workshop where students develop for an actual client. The introduction of UX and user-centered design exploiting the close relationship with stakeholders expected from Agile processes allows for different quality features development. Since 2019 two of the projects have been extended and one project has been developed with the described process and course alumni. Students and stakeholders have found value in the generated products and process.
A Taxonomy of Decentralized Identifier Methods for Practitioners
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

A core part of the new identity management paradigm of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) is the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) standard. The diversity of interoperable implementations encouraged by the paradigm is key for a less centralized future, and it is made possible by the concept of DIDs. However, this leads to a kind of dilemma of choices, where practitioners are faced with the difficult decision of which methods to choose and support in their applications. Due to the decentralized development of DID method specifications and the overwhelming number of different choices, it is hard to get an overview. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy of DID methods with the goal to empower practitioners to make informed decisions when selecting DID methods. To that end, our taxonomy is designed to provide an overview of the current landscape while providing adoption-relevant characteristics. For this purpose, we rely on the Nickerson et al. methodology for taxonomy creation, utilizing both conceptual-to-empirical and empirical-to-conceptual approaches. During the iterative process, we collect and survey an extensive and potentially exhaustive list of around 160 DID methods from various sources. The taxonomy we arrive at uses a total of 7 dimensions and 22 characteristics to span the contemporary design space of DID methods from the perspective of a practitioner. In addition to elaborating on these characteristics, we also discuss how a practitioner can use the taxonomy to select suitable DID methods for a specific use case.
Can We Trust the Similarity Measurement in Federated Learning?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Is it secure to measure the reliability of local models by similarity in federated learning (FL)? This paper delves into an unexplored security threat concerning applying similarity metrics, such as the L_2 norm, Euclidean distance, and cosine similarity, in protecting FL. We first uncover the deficiencies of similarity metrics that high-dimensional local models, including benign and poisoned models, may be evaluated to have the same similarity while being significantly different in the parameter values. We then leverage this finding to devise a novel untargeted model poisoning attack, Faker, which launches the attack by simultaneously maximizing the evaluated similarity of the poisoned local model and the difference in the parameter values. Experimental results based on seven datasets and eight defenses show that Faker outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmark attacks by 1.1-9.0X in reducing accuracy and 1.2-8.0X in saving time cost, which even holds for the case of a single malicious client with limited knowledge about the FL system. Moreover, Faker can degrade the performance of the global model by attacking only once. We also preliminarily explore extending Faker to other attacks, such as backdoor attacks and Sybil attacks. Lastly, we provide a model evaluation strategy, called the similarity of partial parameters (SPP), to defend against Faker. Given that numerous mechanisms in FL utilize similarity metrics to assess local models, this work suggests that we should be vigilant regarding the potential risks of using these metrics.
A Declaration of Software Independence
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

A voting system should not merely report the outcome: it should also provide sufficient evidence to convince reasonable observers that the reported outcome is correct. Many deployed systems, notably paperless DRE machines still in use in US elections, fail certainly the second, and quite possibly the first of these requirements. Rivest and Wack proposed the principle of software independence (SI) as a guiding principle and requirement for voting systems. In essence, a voting system is SI if its reliance on software is ``tamper-evident'', that is, if there is a way to detect that material changes were made to the software without inspecting that software. This important notion has so far been formulated only informally. Here, we provide more formal mathematical definitions of SI. This exposes some subtleties and gaps in the original definition, among them: what elements of a system must be trusted for an election or system to be SI, how to formalize ``detection'' of a change to an election outcome, the fact that SI is with respect to a set of detection mechanisms (which must be legal and practical), the need to limit false alarms, and how SI applies when the social choice function is not deterministic.
Edge AI Inference in Heterogeneous Constrained Computing: Feasibility and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

The network edge's role in Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference processing is rapidly expanding, driven by a plethora of applications seeking computational advantages. These applications strive for data-driven efficiency, leveraging robust AI capabilities and prioritizing real-time responsiveness. However, as demand grows, so does system complexity. The proliferation of AI inference accelerators showcases innovation but also underscores challenges, particularly the varied software and hardware configurations of these devices. This diversity, while advantageous for certain tasks, introduces hurdles in device integration and coordination. In this paper, our objectives are three-fold. Firstly, we outline the requirements and components of a framework that accommodates hardware diversity. Next, we assess the impact of device heterogeneity on AI inference performance, identifying strategies to optimize outcomes without compromising service quality. Lastly, we shed light on the prevailing challenges and opportunities in this domain, offering insights for both the research community and industry stakeholders.
Sketching Multidimensional Time Series for Fast Discord Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Time series discords are a useful primitive for time series anomaly detection, and the matrix profile is capable of capturing discord effectively. There exist many research efforts to improve the scalability of discord discovery with respect to the length of time series. However, there is surprisingly little work focused on reducing the time complexity of matrix profile computation associated with dimensionality of a multidimensional time series. In this work, we propose a sketch for discord mining among multi-dimensional time series. After an initial pre-processing of the sketch as fast as reading the data, the discord mining has runtime independent of the dimensionality of the original data. On several real world examples from water treatment and transportation, the proposed algorithm improves the throughput by at least an order of magnitude (50X) and only has minimal impact on the quality of the approximated solution. Additionally, the proposed method can handle the dynamic addition or deletion of dimensions inconsequential overhead. This allows a data analyst to consider "what-if" scenarios in real time while exploring the data.
Differentially Private Pre-Trained Model Fusion using Decentralized Federated Graph Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Model fusion is becoming a crucial component in the context of model-as-a-service scenarios, enabling the delivery of high-quality model services to local users. However, this approach introduces privacy risks and imposes certain limitations on its applications. Ensuring secure model exchange and knowledge fusion among users becomes a significant challenge in this setting. To tackle this issue, we propose PrivFusion, a novel architecture that preserves privacy while facilitating model fusion under the constraints of local differential privacy. PrivFusion leverages a graph-based structure, enabling the fusion of models from multiple parties without necessitating retraining. By employing randomized mechanisms, PrivFusion ensures privacy guarantees throughout the fusion process. To enhance model privacy, our approach incorporates a hybrid local differentially private mechanism and decentralized federated graph matching, effectively protecting both activation values and weights. Additionally, we introduce a perturbation filter adapter to alleviate the impact of randomized noise, thereby preserving the utility of the fused model. Through extensive experiments conducted on diverse image datasets and real-world healthcare applications, we provide empirical evidence showcasing the effectiveness of PrivFusion in maintaining model performance while preserving privacy. Our contributions offer valuable insights and practical solutions for secure and collaborative data analysis within the domain of privacy-preserving model fusion.
GQKVA: Efficient Pre-training of Transformers by Grouping Queries, Keys, and Values
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Massive transformer-based models face several challenges, including slow and computationally intensive pre-training and over-parametrization. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a versatile method called GQKVA, which generalizes query, key, and value grouping techniques. GQKVA is designed to speed up transformer pre-training while reducing the model size. Our experiments with various GQKVA variants highlight a clear trade-off between performance and model size, allowing for customized choices based on resource and time limitations. Our findings also indicate that the conventional multi-head attention approach is not always the best choice, as there are lighter and faster alternatives available. We tested our method on ViT, which achieved an approximate 0.3% increase in accuracy while reducing the model size by about 4% in the task of image classification. Additionally, our most aggressive model reduction experiment resulted in a reduction of approximately 15% in model size, with only around a 1% drop in accuracy.