OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Foundational guidelines for enhancing neurotechnology research and development through end-user involvement
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Neurotechnologies are increasingly becoming integrated with our everyday lives, our bodies and our mental states. As the popularity and impact of neurotechnology grows, so does our responsibility to ensure we understand its particular implications on its end users, as well as broader ethical and societal implications. Enabling end-users and stakeholders to participate in the development of neurotechnology, from its earliest stages of conception, will help us better navigate our design around these considerations and deliver more impactful technologies. There are many terms and frameworks to articulate the concept of involving end users in the technology development lifecycle, for example: 'Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement' (PPIE), 'lived experience' and 'co-design'. Here we utilise the PPIE framework to develop clear guidelines for implementing a robust involvement process of current and future end-users in neurotechnology. We present best practice guidance for researchers and engineers who are interested in developing and conducting a PPI strategy for their neurotechnology. We provide advice from various online sources to orient individual teams (and funders) to carve up their own approach to meaningful involvement. After an introduction that coveys the tangible and conceptual benefits of user involvement, we guide the reader to develop a general strategy towards setting up their own process. We then help the reader map out their relevant stakeholders and provide advice on how to consider user diversity and representation. We also provide advice on how to quantify the outcomes of the engagement, as well as a check-list to ensure transparency and accountability at various stages. The aim is the establishment of gold-standard methodologies for ensuring that patient and public insights are at the forefront of our scientific inquiry and product development.
SLIMBRAIN: Augmented Reality Real-Time Acquisition and Processing System For Hyperspectral Classification Mapping with Depth Information for In-Vivo Surgical Procedures
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Over the last two decades, augmented reality (AR) has led to the rapid development of new interfaces in various fields of social and technological application domains. One such domain is medicine, and to a higher extent surgery, where these visualization techniques help to improve the effectiveness of preoperative and intraoperative procedures. Following this trend, this paper presents SLIMBRAIN, a real-time acquisition and processing AR system suitable to classify and display brain tumor tissue from hyperspectral (HS) information. This system captures and processes HS images at 14 frames per second (FPS) during the course of a tumor resection operation to detect and delimit cancer tissue at the same time the neurosurgeon operates. The result is represented in an AR visualization where the classification results are overlapped with the RGB point cloud captured by a LiDAR camera. This representation allows natural navigation of the scene at the same time it is captured and processed, improving the visualization and hence effectiveness of the HS technology to delimit tumors. The whole system has been verified in real brain tumor resection operations.
Choreographing the Digital Canvas: A Machine Learning Approach to Artistic Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces the concept of a design tool for artistic performances based on attribute descriptions. To do so, we used a specific performance of falling actions. The platform integrates a novel machine-learning (ML) model with an interactive interface to generate and visualize artistic movements. Our approach's core is a cyclic Attribute-Conditioned Variational Autoencoder (AC-VAE) model developed to address the challenge of capturing and generating realistic 3D human body motions from motion capture (MoCap) data. We created a unique dataset focused on the dynamics of falling movements, characterized by a new ontology that divides motion into three distinct phases: Impact, Glitch, and Fall. The ML model's innovation lies in its ability to learn these phases separately. It is achieved by applying comprehensive data augmentation techniques and an initial pose loss function to generate natural and plausible motion. Our web-based interface provides an intuitive platform for artists to engage with this technology, offering fine-grained control over motion attributes and interactive visualization tools, including a 360-degree view and a dynamic timeline for playback manipulation. Our research paves the way for a future where technology amplifies the creative potential of human expression, making sophisticated motion generation accessible to a wider artistic community.
Robust Ensemble Person Re-Identification via Orthogonal Fusion with Occlusion Handling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Occlusion remains one of the major challenges in person reidentification (ReID) as a result of the diversity of poses and the variation of appearances. Developing novel architectures to improve the robustness of occlusion-aware person Re-ID requires new insights, especially on low-resolution edge cameras. We propose a deep ensemble model that harnesses both CNN and Transformer architectures to generate robust feature representations. To achieve robust Re-ID without the need to manually label occluded regions, we propose to take an ensemble learning-based approach derived from the analogy between arbitrarily shaped occluded regions and robust feature representation. Using the orthogonality principle, our developed deep CNN model makes use of masked autoencoder (MAE) and global-local feature fusion for robust person identification. Furthermore, we present a part occlusion-aware transformer capable of learning feature space that is robust to occluded regions. Experimental results are reported on several Re-ID datasets to show the effectiveness of our developed ensemble model named orthogonal fusion with occlusion handling (OFOH). Compared to competing methods, the proposed OFOH approach has achieved competent rank-1 and mAP performance.
Efficient Data-Free Model Stealing with Label Diversity
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning as a Service (MLaaS) allows users to query the machine learning model in an API manner, which provides an opportunity for users to enjoy the benefits brought by the high-performance model trained on valuable data. This interface boosts the proliferation of machine learning based applications, while on the other hand, it introduces the attack surface for model stealing attacks. Existing model stealing attacks have relaxed their attack assumptions to the data-free setting, while keeping the effectiveness. However, these methods are complex and consist of several components, which obscure the core on which the attack really depends. In this paper, we revisit the model stealing problem from a diversity perspective and demonstrate that keeping the generated data samples more diverse across all the classes is the critical point for improving the attack performance. Based on this conjecture, we provide a simplified attack framework. We empirically signify our conjecture by evaluating the effectiveness of our attack, and experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve comparable or even better performance compared with the state-of-the-art method. Furthermore, benefiting from the absence of redundant components, our method demonstrates its advantages in attack efficiency and query budget.
Deepfake Sentry: Harnessing Ensemble Intelligence for Resilient Detection and Generalisation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have enabled photorealistic image generation with high quality. However, the malicious use of such generated media has raised concerns regarding visual misinformation. Although deepfake detection research has demonstrated high accuracy, it is vulnerable to advances in generation techniques and adversarial iterations on detection countermeasures. To address this, we propose a proactive and sustainable deepfake training augmentation solution that introduces artificial fingerprints into models. We achieve this by employing an ensemble learning approach that incorporates a pool of autoencoders that mimic the effect of the artefacts introduced by the deepfake generator models. Experiments on three datasets reveal that our proposed ensemble autoencoder-based data augmentation learning approach offers improvements in terms of generalisation, resistance against basic data perturbations such as noise, blurring, sharpness enhancement, and affine transforms, resilience to commonly used lossy compression algorithms such as JPEG, and enhanced resistance against adversarial attacks.
AgileFormer: Spatially Agile Transformer UNet for Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the past decades, deep neural networks, particularly convolutional neural networks, have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of medical image segmentation tasks. Recently, the introduction of the vision transformer (ViT) has significantly altered the landscape of deep segmentation models. There has been a growing focus on ViTs, driven by their excellent performance and scalability. However, we argue that the current design of the vision transformer-based UNet (ViT-UNet) segmentation models may not effectively handle the heterogeneous appearance (e.g., varying shapes and sizes) of objects of interest in medical image segmentation tasks. To tackle this challenge, we present a structured approach to introduce spatially dynamic components to the ViT-UNet. This adaptation enables the model to effectively capture features of target objects with diverse appearances. This is achieved by three main components: \textbf{(i)} deformable patch embedding; \textbf{(ii)} spatially dynamic multi-head attention; \textbf{(iii)} deformable positional encoding. These components were integrated into a novel architecture, termed AgileFormer. AgileFormer is a spatially agile ViT-UNet designed for medical image segmentation. Experiments in three segmentation tasks using publicly available datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/sotiraslab/AgileFormer}{https://github.com/sotiraslab/AgileFormer}.
On-the-fly Definition Augmentation of LLMs for Biomedical NER
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite their general capabilities, LLMs still struggle on biomedical NER tasks, which are difficult due to the presence of specialized terminology and lack of training data. In this work we set out to improve LLM performance on biomedical NER in limited data settings via a new knowledge augmentation approach which incorporates definitions of relevant concepts on-the-fly. During this process, to provide a test bed for knowledge augmentation, we perform a comprehensive exploration of prompting strategies. Our experiments show that definition augmentation is useful for both open source and closed LLMs. For example, it leads to a relative improvement of 15\% (on average) in GPT-4 performance (F1) across all (six) of our test datasets. We conduct extensive ablations and analyses to demonstrate that our performance improvements stem from adding relevant definitional knowledge. We find that careful prompting strategies also improve LLM performance, allowing them to outperform fine-tuned language models in few-shot settings. To facilitate future research in this direction, we release our code at https://github.com/allenai/beacon.
Universal Bovine Identification via Depth Data and Deep Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes and evaluates, for the first time, a top-down (dorsal view), depth-only deep learning system for accurately identifying individual cattle and provides associated code, datasets, and training weights for immediate reproducibility. An increase in herd size skews the cow-to-human ratio at the farm and makes the manual monitoring of individuals more challenging. Therefore, real-time cattle identification is essential for the farms and a crucial step towards precision livestock farming. Underpinned by our previous work, this paper introduces a deep-metric learning method for cattle identification using depth data from an off-the-shelf 3D camera. The method relies on CNN and MLP backbones that learn well-generalised embedding spaces from the body shape to differentiate individuals -- requiring neither species-specific coat patterns nor close-up muzzle prints for operation. The network embeddings are clustered using a simple algorithm such as $k$-NN for highly accurate identification, thus eliminating the need to retrain the network for enrolling new individuals. We evaluate two backbone architectures, ResNet, as previously used to identify Holstein Friesians using RGB images, and PointNet, which is specialised to operate on 3D point clouds. We also present CowDepth2023, a new dataset containing 21,490 synchronised colour-depth image pairs of 99 cows, to evaluate the backbones. Both ResNet and PointNet architectures, which consume depth maps and point clouds, respectively, led to high accuracy that is on par with the coat pattern-based backbone.
Latent Watermark: Inject and Detect Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Watermarking is a tool for actively identifying and attributing the images generated by latent diffusion models. Existing methods face the dilemma of image quality and watermark robustness. Watermarks with superior image quality usually have inferior robustness against attacks such as blurring and JPEG compression, while watermarks with superior robustness usually significantly damage image quality. This dilemma stems from the traditional paradigm where watermarks are injected and detected in pixel space, relying on pixel perturbation for watermark detection and resilience against attacks. In this paper, we highlight that an effective solution to the problem is to both inject and detect watermarks in the latent diffusion space, and propose Latent Watermark with a progressive training strategy. It weakens the direct connection between quality and robustness and thus alleviates their contradiction. We conduct evaluations on two datasets and against 10 watermark attacks. Six metrics measure the image quality and watermark robustness. Results show that compared to the recently proposed methods such as StableSignature, StegaStamp, RoSteALS, LaWa, TreeRing, and DiffuseTrace, LW not only surpasses them in terms of robustness but also offers superior image quality. Our code will be available at https://github.com/RichardSunnyMeng/LatentWatermark.
Aligning Large Language Models with Recommendation Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been used as backbones for recommender systems. However, their performance often lags behind conventional methods in standard tasks like retrieval. We attribute this to a mismatch between LLMs' knowledge and the knowledge crucial for effective recommendations. While LLMs excel at natural language reasoning, they cannot model complex user-item interactions inherent in recommendation tasks. We propose bridging the knowledge gap and equipping LLMs with recommendation-specific knowledge to address this. Operations such as Masked Item Modeling (MIM) and Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) have found success in conventional recommender systems. Inspired by this, we simulate these operations through natural language to generate auxiliary-task data samples that encode item correlations and user preferences. Fine-tuning LLMs on such auxiliary-task data samples and incorporating more informative recommendation-task data samples facilitates the injection of recommendation-specific knowledge into LLMs. Extensive experiments across retrieval, ranking, and rating prediction tasks on LLMs such as FLAN-T5-Base and FLAN-T5-XL show the effectiveness of our technique in domains such as Amazon Toys & Games, Beauty, and Sports & Outdoors. Notably, our method outperforms conventional and LLM-based baselines, including the current SOTA, by significant margins in retrieval, showcasing its potential for enhancing recommendation quality.
A Unified Framework for Adaptive Representation Enhancement and Inversed Learning in Cross-Domain Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR), aiming to extract and transfer knowledge across domains, has attracted wide attention for its efficacy in addressing data sparsity and cold-start problems. Despite significant advances in representation disentanglement to capture diverse user preferences, existing methods usually neglect representation enhancement and lack rigorous decoupling constraints, thereby limiting the transfer of relevant information. To this end, we propose a Unified Framework for Adaptive Representation Enhancement and Inversed Learning in Cross-Domain Recommendation (AREIL). Specifically, we first divide user embeddings into domain-shared and domain-specific components to disentangle mixed user preferences. Then, we incorporate intra-domain and inter-domain information to adaptively enhance the ability of user representations. In particular, we propose a graph convolution module to capture high-order information, and a self-attention module to reveal inter-domain correlations and accomplish adaptive fusion. Next, we adopt domain classifiers and gradient reversal layers to achieve inversed representation learning in a unified framework. Finally, we employ a cross-entropy loss for measuring recommendation performance and jointly optimize the entire framework via multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the substantial improvement in the recommendation performance of AREIL. Moreover, ablation studies and representation visualizations further illustrate the effectiveness of adaptive enhancement and inversed learning in CDR.
Model-Driven Deep Learning for Distributed Detection with Binary Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Within the realm of rapidly advancing wireless sensor networks (WSNs), distributed detection assumes a significant role in various practical applications. However, critical challenge lies in maintaining robust detection performance while operating within the constraints of limited bandwidth and energy resources. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines model-driven deep learning (DL) with binary quantization to strike a balance between communication overhead and detection performance in WSNs. We begin by establishing the lower bound of detection error probability for distributed detection using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) criterion. Furthermore, we prove the global optimality of employing identical local quantizers across sensors, thereby maximizing the corresponding Chernoff information. Subsequently, the paper derives the minimum MAP detection error probability (MAPDEP) by inplementing identical binary probabilistic quantizers across the sensors. Moreover, the paper establishes the equivalence between utilizing all quantized data and their average as input to the detector at the fusion center (FC). In particular, we derive the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which measures the difference between the true posterior probability and output of the proposed detector. Leveraging the MAPDEP and KL divergence as loss functions, the paper proposes model-driven DL method to separately train the probability controller module in the quantizer and the detector module at the FC. Numerical results validate the convergence and effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves near-optimal performance with reduced complexity for Gaussian hypothesis testing.
Advancing Multimodal Data Fusion in Pain Recognition: A Strategy Leveraging Statistical Correlation and Human-Centered Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This research presents a novel multimodal data fusion methodology for pain behavior recognition, integrating statistical correlation analysis with human-centered insights. Our approach introduces two key innovations: 1) integrating data-driven statistical relevance weights into the fusion strategy to effectively utilize complementary information from heterogeneous modalities, and 2) incorporating human-centric movement characteristics into multimodal representation learning for detailed modeling of pain behaviors. Validated across various deep learning architectures, our method demonstrates superior performance and broad applicability. We propose a customizable framework that aligns each modality with a suitable classifier based on statistical significance, advancing personalized and effective multimodal fusion. Furthermore, our methodology provides explainable analysis of multimodal data, contributing to interpretable and explainable AI in healthcare. By highlighting the importance of data diversity and modality-specific representations, we enhance traditional fusion techniques and set new standards for recognizing complex pain behaviors. Our findings have significant implications for promoting patient-centered healthcare interventions and supporting explainable clinical decision-making.
CLIP-driven Outliers Synthesis for few-shot OOD detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Few-shot OOD detection focuses on recognizing out-of-distribution (OOD) images that belong to classes unseen during training, with the use of only a small number of labeled in-distribution (ID) images. Up to now, a mainstream strategy is based on large-scale vision-language models, such as CLIP. However, these methods overlook a crucial issue: the lack of reliable OOD supervision information, which can lead to biased boundaries between in-distribution (ID) and OOD. To tackle this problem, we propose CLIP-driven Outliers Synthesis~(CLIP-OS). Firstly, CLIP-OS enhances patch-level features' perception by newly proposed patch uniform convolution, and adaptively obtains the proportion of ID-relevant information by employing CLIP-surgery-discrepancy, thus achieving separation between ID-relevant and ID-irrelevant. Next, CLIP-OS synthesizes reliable OOD data by mixing up ID-relevant features from different classes to provide OOD supervision information. Afterward, CLIP-OS leverages synthetic OOD samples by unknown-aware prompt learning to enhance the separability of ID and OOD. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CLIP-OS achieves superior few-shot OOD detection capability.
CBF-Based Motion Planning for Socially Responsible Robot Navigation Guaranteeing STL Specification
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of control engineering, the connection between Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBF) has attracted considerable attention. CBFs have demonstrated notable success in ensuring the safety of critical applications by imposing constraints on system states, while STL allows for precisely specifying spatio-temporal constraints on the behavior of robotic systems. Leveraging these methodologies, this paper addresses the safety-critical navigation problem, in Socially Responsible Navigation (SRN) context, presenting a CBF-based STL motion planning methodology. This methodology enables task completion at any time within a specified time interval considering a dynamic system subject to velocity constraints. The proposed approach involves real-time computation of a smooth CBF, with the computation of a dynamically adjusted parameter based on the available path space and the maximum allowable velocity. A simulation study is conducted to validate the methodology, ensuring safety in the presence of static and dynamic obstacles and demonstrating its compliance with spatio-temporal constraints under non-linear velocity constraints.