OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Erasing Radio Frequency Fingerprints via Active Adversarial Perturbation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting is to identify a wireless device from its uniqueness of the analog circuitry or hardware imperfections. However, unlike the MAC address which can be modified, such hardware feature is inevitable for the signal emitted to air, which can possibly reveal device whereabouts, e.g., a sniffer can use a pre-trained model to identify a nearby device when receiving its signal. Such fingerprint may expose critical private information, e.g., the associated upper-layer applications or the end-user. In this paper, we propose to erase such RF feature for wireless devices, which can prevent fingerprinting by actively perturbation from the signal perspective. Specifically, we consider a common RF fingerprinting scenario, where machine learning models are trained from pilot signal data for identification. A novel adversarial attack solution is designed to generate proper perturbations, whereby the perturbed pilot signal can hide the hardware feature and misclassify the model. We theoretically show that the perturbation would not affect the communication function within a tolerable perturbation threshold. We also implement the pilot signal fingerprinting and the proposed perturbation process in a practical LTE system. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that the RF fingerprints can be effectively erased to protect the user privacy.
Stochastic Analysis of Homogeneous Wireless Networks Assisted by Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we study the impact of the existence of multiple IRSs in a homogeneous wireless network, in which all BSs, users (U), and IRSs are spatially distributed by an independent homogeneous PPP, with density $λ_{\rm BS}\rm{[BS/m^2]}$, $λ_{\rm U}\rm{[U/m^2]}$, and $λ_{\rm IRS}\rm{[IRS/m^2]}$, respectively. We utilize a uniformly random serving strategy for BS and IRS to create stochastic symmetry in the network. We analyze the performance of the network and study the effect of the existence of the IRS on the network performance. To this end, for a typical user in the system, we derive analytical upper and lower bounds on the expectation of the power (second statistical moment) of the desired signal and the interference caused by BSs and other users. After that, we obtain analytical upper bounds on the decay of the probability of the power of the desired signal and the interference for the typical user (which results in a lower bound for the cumulative distribution function (CDF)). Moreover, we derive upper bounds on the decay of the probability of the capacity of one typical user, which results in a lower bound for the outage probability. In the numerical results, we observe that the numerical calculation of the power of the desired signal and the interference is near the derived lower bounds and we show that the increment of the parameter ${(λ_{\rm IRS})}$ causes increment in powers of both the desired and interference signals. We also observe that the increment of the parameter ${λ_{\rm IRS}}$ causes the decrement of outage probability.
Addressing Sustainability-IN Software Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In this position paper we address the Software Sustainability from the IN perspective, so that the Software Engineering (SE) community is aware of the need to contribute towards sustainable software companies, which need to adopt a holistic approach to sustainability considering all its dimensions (human, economic and environmental). A series of important challenges to be considered in the coming years are presented, in order that advances in involved SE communities on the subject can be harmonised and used to contribute more effectively to this field of great interest and impact on society.
Enhanced Gene Selection in Single-Cell Genomics: Pre-Filtering Synergy and Reinforced Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in single-cell genomics necessitate precision in gene panel selection to interpret complex biological data effectively. Those methods aim to streamline the analysis of scRNA-seq data by focusing on the most informative genes that contribute significantly to the specific analysis task. Traditional selection methods, which often rely on expert domain knowledge, embedded machine learning models, or heuristic-based iterative optimization, are prone to biases and inefficiencies that may obscure critical genomic signals. Recognizing the limitations of traditional methods, we aim to transcend these constraints with a refined strategy. In this study, we introduce an iterative gene panel selection strategy that is applicable to clustering tasks in single-cell genomics. Our method uniquely integrates results from other gene selection algorithms, providing valuable preliminary boundaries or prior knowledge as initial guides in the search space to enhance the efficiency of our framework. Furthermore, we incorporate the stochastic nature of the exploration process in reinforcement learning (RL) and its capability for continuous optimization through reward-based feedback. This combination mitigates the biases inherent in the initial boundaries and harnesses RL's adaptability to refine and target gene panel selection dynamically. To illustrate the effectiveness of our method, we conducted detailed comparative experiments, case studies, and visualization analysis.
Graph-based multi-Feature fusion method for speech emotion recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Exploring proper way to conduct multi-speech feature fusion for cross-corpus speech emotion recognition is crucial as different speech features could provide complementary cues reflecting human emotion status. While most previous approaches only extract a single speech feature for emotion recognition, existing fusion methods such as concatenation, parallel connection, and splicing ignore heterogeneous patterns in the interaction between features and features, resulting in performance of existing systems. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based fusion method to explicitly model the relationships between every pair of speech features. Specifically, we propose a multi-dimensional edge features learning strategy called Graph-based multi-Feature fusion method for speech emotion recognition. It represents each speech feature as a node and learns multi-dimensional edge features to explicitly describe the relationship between each feature-feature pair in the context of emotion recognition. This way, the learned multi-dimensional edge features encode speech feature-level information from both the vertex and edge dimensions. Our Approach consists of three modules: an Audio Feature Generation(AFG)module, an Audio-Feature Multi-dimensional Edge Feature(AMEF) module and a Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) module. The proposed methodology yielded satisfactory outcomes on the SEWA dataset. Furthermore, the method demonstrated enhanced performance compared to the baseline in the AVEC 2019 Workshop and Challenge. We used data from two cultures as our training and validation sets: two cultures containing German and Hungarian on the SEWA dataset, the CCC scores for German are improved by 17.28% for arousal and 7.93% for liking. The outcomes of our methodology demonstrate a 13% improvement over alternative fusion techniques, including those employing one dimensional edge-based feature fusion approach.
The end of multiple choice tests: using AI to enhance assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Effective teaching relies on knowing what students know-or think they know. Revealing student thinking is challenging. Often used because of their ease of grading, even the best multiple choice (MC) tests, those using research based distractors (wrong answers) are intrinsically limited in the insights they provide due to two factors. When distractors do not reflect student beliefs they can be ignored, increasing the likelihood that the correct answer will be chosen by chance. Moreover, making the correct choice does not guarantee that the student understands why it is correct. To address these limitations, we recommend asking students to explain why they chose their answer, and why "wrong" choices are wrong. Using a discipline-trained artificial intelligence-based bot it is possible to analyze their explanations, identifying the concepts and scientific principles that maybe missing or misapplied. The bot also makes suggestions for how instructors can use these data to better guide student thinking. In a small "proof of concept" study, we tested this approach using questions from the Biology Concepts Instrument (BCI). The result was rapid, informative, and provided actionable feedback on student thinking. It appears that the use of AI addresses the weaknesses of conventional MC test. It seems likely that incorporating AI-analyzed formative assessments will lead to improved overall learning outcomes.
Advancing Annotation of Stance in Social Media Posts: A Comparative Analysis of Large Language Models and Crowd Sourcing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated text annotation in social media posts has garnered significant interest. Despite the impressive innovations in developing LLMs like ChatGPT, their efficacy, and accuracy as annotation tools are not well understood. In this paper, we analyze the performance of eight open-source and proprietary LLMs for annotating the stance expressed in social media posts, benchmarking their performance against human annotators' (i.e., crowd-sourced) judgments. Additionally, we investigate the conditions under which LLMs are likely to disagree with human judgment. A significant finding of our study is that the explicitness of text expressing a stance plays a critical role in how faithfully LLMs' stance judgments match humans'. We argue that LLMs perform well when human annotators do, and when LLMs fail, it often corresponds to situations in which human annotators struggle to reach an agreement. We conclude with recommendations for a comprehensive approach that combines the precision of human expertise with the scalability of LLM predictions. This study highlights the importance of improving the accuracy and comprehensiveness of automated stance detection, aiming to advance these technologies for more efficient and unbiased analysis of social media.
PITCH: Productivity and Mental Well-being Coaching through Daily Conversational Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Efficient task planning is essential for productivity and mental well-being, yet individuals often struggle to create realistic plans and reflect upon their productivity. Leveraging the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), conversational agents have emerged as a promising tool for enhancing productivity. Our work focuses on externalizing plans through conversation, aiming to solidify intentions and foster focused action, thereby positively impacting their productivity and mental well-being. We share our plan of designing a conversational agent to offer insightful questions and reflective prompts for increasing plan adherence by leveraging the social interactivity of natural conversations. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of such agents, but many interventions remain static, leading to decreased user engagement over time. To address this limitation, we propose a novel rotation and context-aware prompting strategy, providing users with varied interventions daily. Our system, PITCH, utilizes large language models (LLMs) to facilitate externalization and reflection on daily plans. Through this study, we investigate the impact of externalizing tasks with conversational agents on productivity and mental well-being, and the effectiveness of a rotation strategy in maintaining user engagement.
Image Textualization: An Automatic Framework for Creating Accurate and Detailed Image Descriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image description datasets play a crucial role in the advancement of various applications such as image understanding, text-to-image generation, and text-image retrieval. Currently, image description datasets primarily originate from two sources. One source is the scraping of image-text pairs from the web. Despite their abundance, these descriptions are often of low quality and noisy. Another is through human labeling. Datasets such as COCO are generally very short and lack details. Although detailed image descriptions can be annotated by humans, the high annotation cost limits the feasibility. These limitations underscore the need for more efficient and scalable methods to generate accurate and detailed image descriptions. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework termed Image Textualization (IT), which automatically produces high-quality image descriptions by leveraging existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and multiple vision expert models in a collaborative manner, which maximally convert the visual information into text. To address the current lack of benchmarks for detailed descriptions, we propose several benchmarks for comprehensive evaluation, which verifies the quality of image descriptions created by our framework. Furthermore, we show that LLaVA-7B, benefiting from training on IT-curated descriptions, acquire improved capability to generate richer image descriptions, substantially increasing the length and detail of their output with less hallucination.
Beyond Model Collapse: Scaling Up with Synthesized Data Requires Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly trained on data generated by other LLM, either because generated text and images become part of the pre-training corpus, or because synthetized data is used as a replacement for expensive human-annotation. This raises concerns about \emph{model collapse}, a drop in model performance when their training sets include generated data. Considering that it is easier for both humans and machines to tell between good and bad examples than to generate high-quality samples, we investigate the use of verification on synthesized data to prevent model collapse. We provide a theoretical characterization using Gaussian mixtures, linear classifiers, and linear verifiers to derive conditions with measurable proxies to assess whether the verifier can effectively select synthesized data that leads to optimal performance. We experiment with two practical tasks -- computing matrix eigenvalues with transformers and news summarization with LLMs -- which both exhibit model collapse when trained on generated data, and show that verifiers, even imperfect ones, can indeed be harnessed to prevent model collapse and that our proposed proxy measure strongly correlates with performance.
An AI-Enabled Framework Within Reach for Enhancing Healthcare Sustainability and Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Good health and well-being is among key issues in the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The rising prevalence of large-scale infectious diseases and the accelerated aging of the global population are driving the transformation of healthcare technologies. In this context, establishing large-scale public health datasets, developing medical models, and creating decision-making systems with a human-centric approach are of strategic significance. Recently, by leveraging the extraordinary number of accessible cameras, groundbreaking advancements have emerged in AI methods for physiological signal monitoring and disease diagnosis using camera sensors. These approaches, requiring no specialized medical equipment, offer convenient manners of collecting large-scale medical data in response to public health events. Therefore, we outline a prospective framework and heuristic vision for a camera-based public health (CBPH) framework utilizing visual physiological monitoring technology. The CBPH can be considered as a convenient and universal framework for public health, advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in promoting the universality, sustainability, and equity of healthcare in low- and middle-income countries or regions. Furthermore, CBPH provides a comprehensive solution for building a large-scale and human-centric medical database, and a multi-task large medical model for public health and medical scientific discoveries. It has a significant potential to revolutionize personal monitoring technologies, digital medicine, telemedicine, and primary health care in public health. Therefore, it can be deemed that the outcomes of this paper will contribute to the establishment of a sustainable and fair framework for public health, which serves as a crucial bridge for advancing scientific discoveries in the realm of AI for medicine (AI4Medicine).
Individual Packet Features are a Risk to Model Generalisation in ML-Based Intrusion Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning is increasingly used for intrusion detection in IoT networks. This paper explores the effectiveness of using individual packet features (IPF), which are attributes extracted from a single network packet, such as timing, size, and source-destination information. Through literature review and experiments, we identify the limitations of IPF, showing they can produce misleadingly high detection rates. Our findings emphasize the need for approaches that consider packet interactions for robust intrusion detection. Additionally, we demonstrate that models based on IPF often fail to generalize across datasets, compromising their reliability in diverse IoT environments.
Situated Ground Truths: Enhancing Bias-Aware AI by Situating Data Labels with SituAnnotate
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In the contemporary world of AI and data-driven applications, supervised machines often derive their understanding, which they mimic and reproduce, through annotations--typically conveyed in the form of words or labels. However, such annotations are often divorced from or lack contextual information, and as such hold the potential to inadvertently introduce biases when subsequently used for training. This paper introduces SituAnnotate, a novel ontology explicitly crafted for 'situated grounding,' aiming to anchor the ground truth data employed in training AI systems within the contextual and culturally-bound situations from which those ground truths emerge. SituAnnotate offers an ontology-based approach to structured and context-aware data annotation, addressing potential bias issues associated with isolated annotations. Its representational power encompasses situational context, including annotator details, timing, location, remuneration schemes, annotation roles, and more, ensuring semantic richness. Aligned with the foundational Dolce Ultralight ontology, it provides a robust and consistent framework for knowledge representation. As a method to create, query, and compare label-based datasets, SituAnnotate empowers downstream AI systems to undergo training with explicit consideration of context and cultural bias, laying the groundwork for enhanced system interpretability and adaptability, and enabling AI models to align with a multitude of cultural contexts and viewpoints.
Tag and correct: high precision post-editing approach to correction of speech recognition errors
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a new approach to the problem of correcting speech recognition errors by means of post-editing. It consists of using a neural sequence tagger that learns how to correct an ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) hypothesis word by word and a corrector module that applies corrections returned by the tagger. The proposed solution is applicable to any ASR system, regardless of its architecture, and provides high-precision control over errors being corrected. This is especially crucial in production environments, where avoiding the introduction of new mistakes by the error correction model may be more important than the net gain in overall results. The results show that the performance of the proposed error correction models is comparable with previous approaches while requiring much smaller resources to train, which makes it suitable for industrial applications, where both inference latency and training times are critical factors that limit the use of other techniques.
PLT-D3: A High-fidelity Dynamic Driving Simulation Dataset for Stereo Depth and Scene Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous driving has experienced remarkable progress, bolstered by innovations in computational hardware and sophisticated deep learning methodologies. The foundation of these advancements rests on the availability and quality of datasets, which are crucial for the development and refinement of dependable and versatile autonomous driving algorithms. While numerous datasets have been developed to support the evolution of autonomous driving perception technologies, few offer the diversity required to thoroughly test and enhance system robustness under varied weather conditions. Many public datasets lack the comprehensive coverage of challenging weather scenarios and detailed, high-resolution data, which are critical for training and validating advanced autonomous-driving perception models. In this paper, we introduce PLT-D3; a Dynamic-weather Driving Dataset, designed specifically to enhance autonomous driving systems' adaptability to diverse weather conditions. PLT-D3 provides high-fidelity stereo depth and scene flow ground truth data generated using Unreal Engine 5. In particular, this dataset includes synchronized high-resolution stereo image sequences that replicate a wide array of dynamic weather scenarios including rain, snow, fog, and diverse lighting conditions, offering an unprecedented level of realism in simulation-based testing. The primary aim of PLT-D3 is to address the scarcity of comprehensive training and testing resources that can simulate real-world weather variations. Benchmarks have been established for several critical autonomous driving tasks using PLT-D3, such as depth estimation, optical flow and scene-flow to measure and enhance the performance of state-of-the-art models.
Test-Time Fairness and Robustness in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) can be socially discriminatory or sensitive to spurious features of their inputs. Because only well-resourced corporations can train frontier LLMs, we need robust test-time strategies to control such biases. Existing solutions, which instruct the LLM to be fair or robust, rely on the model's implicit understanding of bias. Causality provides a rich formalism through which we can be explicit about our debiasing requirements. Yet, as we show, a naive application of the standard causal debiasing strategy, counterfactual data augmentation, fails under standard assumptions to debias predictions at an individual level at test time. To address this, we develop a stratified notion of debiasing called stratified invariance, which can capture a range of debiasing requirements from population level to individual level through an additional measurement that stratifies the predictions. We present a complete observational test for stratified invariance. Finally, we introduce a data augmentation strategy that guarantees stratified invariance at test time under suitable assumptions, together with a prompting strategy that encourages stratified invariance in LLMs. We show that our prompting strategy, unlike implicit instructions, consistently reduces the bias of frontier LLMs across a suite of synthetic and real-world benchmarks without requiring additional data, finetuning or pre-training.