OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
UIT-Saviors at MEDVQA-GI 2023: Improving Multimodal Learning with Image Enhancement for Gastrointestinal Visual Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, artificial intelligence has played an important role in medicine and disease diagnosis, with many applications to be mentioned, one of which is Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA). By combining computer vision and natural language processing, MedVQA systems can assist experts in extracting relevant information from medical image based on a given question and providing precise diagnostic answers. The ImageCLEFmed-MEDVQA-GI-2023 challenge carried out visual question answering task in the gastrointestinal domain, which includes gastroscopy and colonoscopy images. Our team approached Task 1 of the challenge by proposing a multimodal learning method with image enhancement to improve the VQA performance on gastrointestinal images. The multimodal architecture is set up with BERT encoder and different pre-trained vision models based on convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer architecture for features extraction from question and endoscopy image. The result of this study highlights the dominance of Transformer-based vision models over the CNNs and demonstrates the effectiveness of the image enhancement process, with six out of the eight vision models achieving better F1-Score. Our best method, which takes advantages of BERT+BEiT fusion and image enhancement, achieves up to 87.25% accuracy and 91.85% F1-Score on the development test set, while also producing good result on the private test set with accuracy of 82.01%.
What Should Data Science Education Do with Large Language Models?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The rapid advances of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are revolutionizing data science and statistics. These state-of-the-art tools can streamline complex processes. As a result, it reshapes the role of data scientists. We argue that LLMs are transforming the responsibilities of data scientists, shifting their focus from hands-on coding, data-wrangling and conducting standard analyses to assessing and managing analyses performed by these automated AIs. This evolution of roles is reminiscent of the transition from a software engineer to a product manager. We illustrate this transition with concrete data science case studies using LLMs in this paper. These developments necessitate a meaningful evolution in data science education. Pedagogy must now place greater emphasis on cultivating diverse skillsets among students, such as LLM-informed creativity, critical thinking, AI-guided programming. LLMs can also play a significant role in the classroom as interactive teaching and learning tools, contributing to personalized education. This paper discusses the opportunities, resources and open challenges for each of these directions. As with any transformative technology, integrating LLMs into education calls for careful consideration. While LLMs can perform repetitive tasks efficiently, it's crucial to remember that their role is to supplement human intelligence and creativity, not to replace it. Therefore, the new era of data science education should balance the benefits of LLMs while fostering complementary human expertise and innovations. In conclusion, the rise of LLMs heralds a transformative period for data science and its education. This paper seeks to shed light on the emerging trends, potential opportunities, and challenges accompanying this paradigm shift, hoping to spark further discourse and investigation into this exciting, uncharted territory.
Semi-supervised Domain Adaptive Medical Image Segmentation through Consistency Regularized Disentangled Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Although unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is a promising direction to alleviate domain shift, they fall short of their supervised counterparts. In this work, we investigate relatively less explored semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) for medical image segmentation, where access to a few labeled target samples can improve the adaptation performance substantially. Specifically, we propose a two-stage training process. First, an encoder is pre-trained in a self-learning paradigm using a novel domain-content disentangled contrastive learning (CL) along with a pixel-level feature consistency constraint. The proposed CL enforces the encoder to learn discriminative content-specific but domain-invariant semantics on a global scale from the source and target images, whereas consistency regularization enforces the mining of local pixel-level information by maintaining spatial sensitivity. This pre-trained encoder, along with a decoder, is further fine-tuned for the downstream task, (i.e. pixel-level segmentation) using a semi-supervised setting. Furthermore, we experimentally validate that our proposed method can easily be extended for UDA settings, adding to the superiority of the proposed strategy. Upon evaluation on two domain adaptive image segmentation tasks, our proposed method outperforms the SoTA methods, both in SSDA and UDA settings. Code is available at https://github.com/hritam-98/GFDA-disentangled
Age-of-Information Dependent Random Access for Periodic Updating
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper considers an uplink Internet of Things system with synchronous periodic traffic, where multiple devices generate their status updates at the beginning of each global frame and attempt to send them to a common access point. To achieve a low network-wide age of information (AoI) in an easily implementable manner, we require each device to adopt an age-dependent random access protocol, i.e., to transmit with a certain probability only when its corresponding AoI reaches a certain threshold. We analyze the time-average expected AoI by a multi-layer Markov model where an external infinite-horizon Markov chain manages the jumps between the beginnings of frames, while two internal finite-horizon Markov chains manage the evolution during an arbitrary frame for different cases. Simulation results verify the accuracy of the modeling and the AoI advantage over age-independent schemes.
OLR-WA Online Regression with Weighted Average
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine Learning requires a large amount of training data in order to build accurate models. Sometimes the data arrives over time, requiring significant storage space and recalculating the model to account for the new data. On-line learning addresses these issues by incrementally modifying the model as data is encountered, and then discarding the data. In this study we introduce a new online linear regression approach. Our approach combines newly arriving data with a previously existing model to create a new model. The introduced model, named OLR-WA (OnLine Regression with Weighted Average) uses user-defined weights to provide flexibility in the face of changing data to bias the results in favor of old or new data. We have conducted 2-D and 3-D experiments comparing OLR-WA to a static model using the entire data set. The results show that for consistent data, OLR-WA and the static batch model perform similarly and for varying data, the user can set the OLR-WA to adapt more quickly or to resist change.
TDLE: 2-D LiDAR Exploration With Hierarchical Planning Using Regional Division
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Exploration systems are critical for enhancing the autonomy of robots. Due to the unpredictability of the future planning space, existing methods either adopt an inefficient greedy strategy or require a lot of resources to obtain a global solution. In this work, we address the challenge of obtaining global exploration routes with minimal computing resources. A hierarchical planning framework dynamically divides the planning space into subregions and arranges their orders to provide global guidance for exploration. Indicators that are compatible with the subregion order are used to choose specific exploration targets, thereby considering estimates of spatial structure and extending the planning space to unknown regions. Extensive simulations and field tests demonstrate the efficacy of our method in comparison to existing 2D LiDAR-based approaches. Our code has been made public for further investigation.
PLIERS: a Popularity-Based Recommender System for Content Dissemination in Online Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose a novel tag-based recommender system called PLIERS, which relies on the assumption that users are mainly interested in items and tags with similar popularity to those they already own. PLIERS is aimed at reaching a good tradeoff between algorithmic complexity and the level of personalization of recommended items. To evaluate PLIERS, we performed a set of experiments on real OSN datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in terms of personalization, relevance, and novelty of recommendations.
A Real-time Human Pose Estimation Approach for Optimal Sensor Placement in Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition facilitates unobtrusive monitoring of human movements. However, determining the most effective sensor placement for optimal classification performance remains challenging. This paper introduces a novel methodology to resolve this issue, using real-time 2D pose estimations derived from video recordings of target activities. The derived skeleton data provides a unique strategy for identifying the optimal sensor location. We validate our approach through a feasibility study, applying inertial sensors to monitor 13 different activities across ten subjects. Our findings indicate that the vision-based method for sensor placement offers comparable results to the conventional deep learning approach, demonstrating its efficacy. This research significantly advances the field of Human Activity Recognition by providing a lightweight, on-device solution for determining the optimal sensor placement, thereby enhancing data anonymization and supporting a multimodal classification approach.
Smartphones in a Microwave: Formal and Experimental Feasibility Study on Fingerprinting the Corona-Warn-App
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Contact Tracing Apps (CTAs) have been developed to contain the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) spread. By design, such apps invade their users' privacy by recording data about their health, contacts, and partially location. Many CTAs frequently broadcast pseudorandom numbers via Bluetooth to detect encounters. These numbers are changed regularly to prevent individual smartphones from being trivially trackable. However, the effectiveness of this procedure has been little studied. We measured real smartphones and observed that the German Corona-Warn-App (CWA) exhibits a device-specific latency between two subsequent broadcasts. These timing differences provide a potential attack vector for fingerprinting smartphones by passively recording Bluetooth messages. This could conceivably lead to the tracking of users' trajectories and, ultimately, the re-identification of users.
A Meta-Evaluation of C/W/L/A Metrics: System Ranking Similarity, System Ranking Consistency and Discriminative Power
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, Moffat et al. proposed an analytic framework, namely C/W/L/A, for offline evaluation metrics. This framework allows information retrieval (IR) researchers to design evaluation metrics through the flexible combination of user browsing models and user gain aggregations. However, the statistical stability of C/W/L/A metrics with different aggregations is not yet investigated. In this study, we investigate the statistical stability of C/W/L/A metrics from the perspective of: (1) the system ranking similarity among aggregations, (2) the system ranking consistency of aggregations and (3) the discriminative power of aggregations. More specifically, we combined various aggregation functions with the browsing model of Precision, Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG), Rank-Biased Precision (RBP), INST, Average Precision (AP) and Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR), examing their performances in terms of system ranking similarity, system ranking consistency and discriminative power on two offline test collections. Our experimental result suggests that, in terms of system ranking consistency and discriminative power, the aggregation function of expected rate of gain (ERG) has an outstanding performance while the aggregation function of maximum relevance usually has an insufficient performance. The result also suggests that Precision, DCG, RBP, INST and AP with their canonical aggregation all have favourable performances in system ranking consistency and discriminative power; but for ERR, replacing its canonical aggregation with ERG can further strengthen the discriminative power while obtaining a system ranking list similar to the canonical version at the same time.
A Neuromorphic Architecture for Reinforcement Learning from Real-Valued Observations
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a powerful framework for decision-making in complex environments. However, implementing RL in hardware-efficient and bio-inspired ways remains a challenge. This paper presents a novel Spiking Neural Network (SNN) architecture for solving RL problems with real-valued observations. The proposed model incorporates multi-layered event-based clustering, with the addition of Temporal Difference (TD)-error modulation and eligibility traces, building upon prior work. An ablation study confirms the significant impact of these components on the proposed model's performance. A tabular actor-critic algorithm with eligibility traces and a state-of-the-art Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm are used as benchmarks. Our network consistently outperforms the tabular approach and successfully discovers stable control policies on classic RL environments: mountain car, cart-pole, and acrobot. The proposed model offers an appealing trade-off in terms of computational and hardware implementation requirements. The model does not require an external memory buffer nor a global error gradient computation, and synaptic updates occur online, driven by local learning rules and a broadcasted TD-error signal. Thus, this work contributes to the development of more hardware-efficient RL solutions.
Cross-Spatial Pixel Integration and Cross-Stage Feature Fusion Based Transformer Network for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Remote sensing image super-resolution (RSISR) plays a vital role in enhancing spatial detials and improving the quality of satellite imagery. Recently, Transformer-based models have shown competitive performance in RSISR. To mitigate the quadratic computational complexity resulting from global self-attention, various methods constrain attention to a local window, enhancing its efficiency. Consequently, the receptive fields in a single attention layer are inadequate, leading to insufficient context modeling. Furthermore, while most transform-based approaches reuse shallow features through skip connections, relying solely on these connections treats shallow and deep features equally, impeding the model's ability to characterize them. To address these issues, we propose a novel transformer architecture called Cross-Spatial Pixel Integration and Cross-Stage Feature Fusion Based Transformer Network (SPIFFNet) for RSISR. Our proposed model effectively enhances global cognition and understanding of the entire image, facilitating efficient integration of features cross-stages. The model incorporates cross-spatial pixel integration attention (CSPIA) to introduce contextual information into a local window, while cross-stage feature fusion attention (CSFFA) adaptively fuses features from the previous stage to improve feature expression in line with the requirements of the current stage. We conducted comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, demonstrating the superior performance of our proposed SPIFFNet in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Efficient Semiring-Weighted Earley Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper provides a reference description, in the form of a deduction system, of Earley's (1970) context-free parsing algorithm with various speed-ups. Our presentation includes a known worst-case runtime improvement from Earley's $O (N^3|G||R|)$, which is unworkable for the large grammars that arise in natural language processing, to $O (N^3|G|)$, which matches the runtime of CKY on a binarized version of the grammar $G$. Here $N$ is the length of the sentence, $|R|$ is the number of productions in $G$, and $|G|$ is the total length of those productions. We also provide a version that achieves runtime of $O (N^3|M|)$ with $|M| \leq |G|$ when the grammar is represented compactly as a single finite-state automaton $M$ (this is partly novel). We carefully treat the generalization to semiring-weighted deduction, preprocessing the grammar like Stolcke (1995) to eliminate deduction cycles, and further generalize Stolcke's method to compute the weights of sentence prefixes. We also provide implementation details for efficient execution, ensuring that on a preprocessed grammar, the semiring-weighted versions of our methods have the same asymptotic runtime and space requirements as the unweighted methods, including sub-cubic runtime on some grammars.
A Privacy-Preserving Walk in the Latent Space of Generative Models for Medical Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated their ability to generate synthetic samples that match a target distribution. However, from a privacy perspective, using GANs as a proxy for data sharing is not a safe solution, as they tend to embed near-duplicates of real samples in the latent space. Recent works, inspired by k-anonymity principles, address this issue through sample aggregation in the latent space, with the drawback of reducing the dataset by a factor of k. Our work aims to mitigate this problem by proposing a latent space navigation strategy able to generate diverse synthetic samples that may support effective training of deep models, while addressing privacy concerns in a principled way. Our approach leverages an auxiliary identity classifier as a guide to non-linearly walk between points in the latent space, minimizing the risk of collision with near-duplicates of real samples. We empirically demonstrate that, given any random pair of points in the latent space, our walking strategy is safer than linear interpolation. We then test our path-finding strategy combined to k-same methods and demonstrate, on two benchmarks for tuberculosis and diabetic retinopathy classification, that training a model using samples generated by our approach mitigate drops in performance, while keeping privacy preservation.
Style Over Substance: Evaluation Biases for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, accurately and comprehensively evaluating their performance becomes increasingly challenging. Ranking the relative performance of LLMs based on Elo ratings, according to human judgment, is gaining more popularity. However, the extent to which humans and LLMs are capable evaluators remains uncertain. This study investigates the behavior of crowd-sourced and expert annotators, as well as LLMs, when comparing outputs from different models. To achieve this, we curate a dataset of intentionally flawed machine-generated answers. Our findings reveal a concerning bias in the evaluation process, as answers with factual errors are rated more favorably than answers that are too short or contained grammatical errors. To address this issue, we propose independently evaluating machine-generated text across multiple dimensions, rather than merging all the evaluation aspects into a single score. We instantiate this idea with the Elo rating system, resulting in the Multi-Elo Rating System (MERS). Empirical results from our study reveal that this proposed approach significantly enhances the quality of LLM-based evaluations, particularly in terms of factual accuracy. However, there is no significant improvement in crowd-sourced-based evaluations, indicating the need for further investigation.
Performance Analysis and Approximate Message Passing Detection of Orthogonal Time Sequency Multiplexing Modulation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In orthogonal time sequency multiplexing (OTSM) modulation, the information symbols are conveyed in the delay-sequency domain upon exploiting the inverse Walsh Hadamard transform (IWHT). It has been shown that OTSM is capable of attaining a bit error ratio (BER) similar to that of orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation at a lower complexity, since the saving of multiplication operations in the IWHT. Hence we provide its BER performance analysis and characterize its detection complexity. We commence by deriving its generalized input-output relationship and its unconditional pairwise error probability (UPEP). Then, its BER upper bound is derived in closed form under both ideal and imperfect channel estimation conditions, which is shown to be tight at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Moreover, a novel approximate message passing (AMP) aided OTSM detection framework is proposed. Specifically, to circumvent the high residual BER of the conventional AMP detector, we proposed a vector AMP-based expectation-maximization (VAMP-EM) detector for performing joint data detection and noise variance estimation. The variance auto-tuning algorithm based on the EM algorithm is designed for the VAMP-EM detector to further improve the convergence performance. The simulation results illustrate that the VAMP-EM detector is capable of striking an attractive BER vs. complexity trade-off than the state-of-the-art schemes as well as providing a better convergence. Finally, we propose AMP and VAMP-EM turbo receivers for low-density parity-check (LDPC)-coded OTSM systems. It is demonstrated that our proposed VAMP-EM turbo receiver is capable of providing both BER and convergence performance improvements over the conventional AMP solution.
Multi-source imagery fusion using deep learning in a cloud computing platform
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Given the high availability of data collected by different remote sensing instruments, the data fusion of multi-spectral and hyperspectral images (HSI) is an important topic in remote sensing. In particular, super-resolution as a data fusion application using spatial and spectral domains is highly investigated because its fused images is used to improve the classification and tracking objects accuracy. On the other hand, the huge amount of data obtained by remote sensing instruments represent a key concern in terms of data storage, management and pre-processing. This paper proposes a Big Data Cloud platform using Hadoop and Spark to store, manages, and process remote sensing data. Also, a study over the parameter \textit{chunk size} is presented to suggest the appropriate value for this parameter to download imagery data from Hadoop into a Spark application, based on the format of our data. We also developed an alternative approach based on Long Short Term Memory trained with different patch sizes for super-resolution image. This approach fuse hyperspectral and multispectral images. As a result, we obtain images with high-spatial and high-spectral resolution. The experimental results show that for a chunk size of 64k, an average of 3.5s was required to download data from Hadoop into a Spark application. The proposed model for super-resolution provides a structural similarity index of 0.98 and 0.907 for the used dataset.