OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Identification over Permutation Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We study message identification over a q-ary uniform permutation channel, where the transmitted vector is permuted by a permutation chosen uniformly at random. For discrete memoryless channels(DMCs), the number of identifiable messages grows doubly exponentially. Identification capacity, the maximum second-order exponent, is known to be the same as the Shannon capacity of the DMC. Permutation channels support reliable communication of only polynomially many messages. A simple achievability result shows that message sizes growing as 2^{ε_nn^{q-1}} are identifiable for any ε_n\rightarrow0. We prove two converse results. A ``soft'' converse shows that for any R>0, there is no sequence of identification codes with message size growing as 2^{Rn^{q-1}} with a power-law decay (n^{-μ}) of the error probability. We also prove a ``strong" converse showing that for any sequence of identification codes with message size 2^{R_n n^{q-1}}, where R_n\rightarrow\infty, the sum of type I and type II error probabilities approaches at least 1 as n\rightarrow\infty. To prove the soft converse, we use a sequence of steps to construct a new identification code with a simpler structure which relates to a set system, and then use a lower bound on the normalized maximum pairwise intersection of a set system. To prove the strong converse, we use results on approximation of distributions. The achievability and converse results are generalized to the case of coding over multiple blocks. We finally study message identification over a q-ary uniform permutation channel in the presence of causal block-wise feedback from the receiver, where the encoder receives an entire n-length received block after the transmission of the block is complete. We show that in the presence of feedback, the maximum number of identifiable messages grows doubly exponentially, and we present a two-phase achievability scheme.
Themis: Automatic and Efficient Deep Learning System Testing with Strong Fault Detection Capability
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Learning Systems (DLSs) have been widely applied in safety-critical tasks such as autopilot. However, when a perturbed input is fed into a DLS for inference, the DLS often has incorrect outputs (i.e., faults). DLS testing techniques (e.g., DeepXplore) detect such faults by generating perturbed inputs to explore data flows that induce faults. Since a DLS often has infinitely many data flows, existing techniques require developers to manually specify a set of activation values in a DLS's neurons for exploring fault-inducing data flows. Unfortunately, recent studies show that such manual effort is tedious and can detect only a tiny proportion of fault-inducing data flows. In this paper, we present Themis, the first automatic DLS testing system, which attains strong fault detection capability by ensuring a full coverage of fault-inducing data flows at a high probability. Themis carries a new workflow for automatically and systematically revealing data flows whose internal neurons' outputs vary substantially when the inputs are slightly perturbed, as these data flows are likely fault-inducing. We evaluated Themis on ten different DLSs and found that on average the number of faults detected by Themis was 3.78X more than four notable DLS testing techniques. By retraining all evaluated DLSs with the detected faults, Themis also increased (regained) these DLSs' accuracies on average 14.7X higher than all baselines.
Application of Gated Recurrent Units for CT Trajectory Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in computed tomography (CT) imaging, especially with dual-robot systems, have introduced new challenges for scan trajectory optimization. This paper presents a novel approach using Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to optimize CT scan trajectories. Our approach exploits the flexibility of robotic CT systems to select projections that enhance image quality by improving resolution and contrast while reducing scan time. We focus on cone-beam CT and employ several projection-based metrics, including absorption, pixel intensities, contrast-to-noise ratio, and data completeness. The GRU network aims to minimize data redundancy and maximize completeness with a limited number of projections. We validate our method using simulated data of a test specimen, focusing on a specific voxel of interest. The results show that the GRU-optimized scan trajectories can outperform traditional circular CT trajectories in terms of image quality metrics. For the used specimen, SSIM improves from 0.38 to 0.49 and CNR increases from 6.97 to 9.08. This finding suggests that the application of GRU in CT scan trajectory optimization can lead to more efficient, cost-effective, and high-quality imaging solutions.
A universal optimization framework based on cycle ranking for influence maximization in complex networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Influence maximization aims to identify a set of influential individuals, referred to as influencers, as information sources to maximize the spread of information within networks, constituting a vital combinatorial optimization problem with extensive practical applications and sustained interdisciplinary interest. Diverse approaches have been devised to efficiently address this issue, one of which involves selecting the influencers from a given centrality ranking. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization framework based on ranking basic cycles in networks, capable of selecting the influencers from diverse centrality measures. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared to directly selecting the top-k nodes from centrality sequences and other state-of-the-art optimization approaches, the new framework can expand the dissemination range by 1.5 to 3 times. Counterintuitively, it exhibits minimal hub property, with the average distance between influencers being only one-third of alternative approaches, regardless of the centrality metrics or network types. Our study not only paves the way for novel strategies in influence maximization but also underscores the unique potential of underappreciated cycle structures.
Investigating the Effect of Operation Mode and Manifestation on Physicalizations of Dynamic Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

We conducted a study to systematically investigate the communication of complex dynamic processes along a two-dimensional design space, where the axes represent a representation's manifestation (physical or virtual) and operation (manual or automatic). We exemplify the design space on a model embodying cardiovascular pathologies, represented by a mechanism where a liquid is pumped into a draining vessel, with complications illustrated through modifications to the model. The results of a mixed-methods lab study with 28 participants show that both physical manifestation and manual operation have a strong positive impact on the audience's engagement. The study does not show a measurable knowledge increase with respect to cardiovascular pathologies using manually operated physical representations. However, subjectively, participants report a better understanding of the process-mainly through non-visual cues like haptics, but also auditory cues. The study also indicates an increased task load when interacting with the process, which, however, seems to play a minor role for the participants. Overall, the study shows a clear potential of physicalization for the communication of complex dynamic processes, which only fully unfold if observers have to chance to interact with the process.
$O_2$ is a multiple context-free grammar: an implementation-, formalisation-friendly proof
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

Classifying formal languages according to the expressiveness of grammars able to generate them is a fundamental problem in computational linguistics and, therefore, in the theory of computation. Furthermore, such kind of analysis can give insight into the classification of abstract algebraic structure such as groups, for example through the correspondence given by the word problem. While many such classification problems remain open, others have been settled. Recently, it was proved that $n$-balanced languages (i.e., whose strings contain the same occurrences of letters $a_i$ and $A_i$ with $1\leq i \leq n$) can be generated by multiple context-free grammars (MCFGs), which are one of the several slight extensions of context free grammars added to the classical Chomsky hierarchy to make the mentioned classification more precise. This paper analyses the existing proofs from the computational and the proof-theoretical point of views, systematically studying whether each proof can lead to a verified (i.e., checked by a proof assistant) algorithm parsing balanced languages via MCFGs. We conclude that none of the existing proofs is realistically suitable against this practical goal, and proceed to provide a radically new, elementary, extremely short proof for the crucial case $n \leq 2$. A comparative analysis with respect to the existing proofs is finally performed to justify why the proposed proof is a substantial step towards concretely obtaining a verified parsing algorithm for $O_2$.
Desk-AId: Humanitarian Aid Desk Assessment with Geospatial AI for Predicting Landmine Areas
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The process of clearing areas, namely demining, starts by assessing and prioritizing potential hazardous areas (i.e., desk assessment) to go under thorough investigation of experts, who confirm the risk and proceed with the mines clearance operations. This paper presents Desk-AId that supports the desk assessment phase by estimating landmine risks using geospatial data and socioeconomic information. Desk-AId uses a Geospatial AI approach specialized to landmines. The approach includes mixed data sampling strategies and context-enrichment by historical conflicts and key multi-domain facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, health sites). The proposed system addresses the issue of having only ground-truth for confirmed hazardous areas by implementing a new hard-negative data sampling strategy, where negative points are sampled in the vicinity of hazardous areas. Experiments validate Desk-Aid in two domains for landmine risk assessment: 1) country-wide, and 2) uncharted study areas). The proposed approach increases the estimation accuracies up to 92%, for different classification models such as RandomForest (RF), Feedforward Neural Networks (FNN), and Graph Neural Networks (GNN).
Tell Me Why: Explainable Public Health Fact-Checking with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of explainable fact-checking through a series of experiments, focusing on the ability of large language models to verify public health claims and provide explanations or justifications for their veracity assessments. We examine the effectiveness of zero/few-shot prompting and parameter-efficient fine-tuning across various open and closed-source models, examining their performance in both isolated and joint tasks of veracity prediction and explanation generation. Importantly, we employ a dual evaluation approach comprising previously established automatic metrics and a novel set of criteria through human evaluation. Our automatic evaluation indicates that, within the zero-shot scenario, GPT-4 emerges as the standout performer, but in few-shot and parameter-efficient fine-tuning contexts, open-source models demonstrate their capacity to not only bridge the performance gap but, in some instances, surpass GPT-4. Human evaluation reveals yet more nuance as well as indicating potential problems with the gold explanations.
Fourier Boundary Features Network with Wider Catchers for Glass Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Glass largely blurs the boundary between the real world and the reflection. The special transmittance and reflectance quality have confused the semantic tasks related to machine vision. Therefore, how to clear the boundary built by glass, and avoid over-capturing features as false positive information in deep structure, matters for constraining the segmentation of reflection surface and penetrating glass. We proposed the Fourier Boundary Features Network with Wider Catchers (FBWC), which might be the first attempt to utilize sufficiently wide horizontal shallow branches without vertical deepening for guiding the fine granularity segmentation boundary through primary glass semantic information. Specifically, we designed the Wider Coarse-Catchers (WCC) for anchoring large area segmentation and reducing excessive extraction from a structural perspective. We embed fine-grained features by Cross Transpose Attention (CTA), which is introduced to avoid the incomplete area within the boundary caused by reflection noise. For excavating glass features and balancing high-low layers context, a learnable Fourier Convolution Controller (FCC) is proposed to regulate information integration robustly. The proposed method has been validated on three different public glass segmentation datasets. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method yields better segmentation performance compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in glass image segmentation.
Harmonizing Human Insights and AI Precision: Hand in Hand for Advancing Knowledge Graph Task
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) has caught significant interest for its effectiveness in knowledge graph completion (KGC), specifically link prediction (LP), with recent KGE models cracking the LP benchmarks. Despite the rapidly growing literature, insufficient attention has been paid to the cooperation between humans and AI on KG. However, humans' capability to analyze graphs conceptually may further improve the efficacy of KGE models with semantic information. To this effect, we carefully designed a human-AI team (HAIT) system dubbed KG-HAIT, which harnesses the human insights on KG by leveraging fully human-designed ad-hoc dynamic programming (DP) on KG to produce human insightful feature (HIF) vectors that capture the subgraph structural feature and semantic similarities. By integrating HIF vectors into the training of KGE models, notable improvements are observed across various benchmarks and metrics, accompanied by accelerated model convergence. Our results underscore the effectiveness of human-designed DP in the task of LP, emphasizing the pivotal role of collaboration between humans and AI on KG. We open avenues for further exploration and innovation through KG-HAIT, paving the way towards more effective and insightful KG analysis techniques.
A Comprehensive Survey on SmartNICs: Architectures, Development Models, Applications, and Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The end of Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling has slowed processor improvements in the past decade. While multi-core processors have improved performance, they are limited by the application's level of parallelism, as prescribed by Amdahl's Law. This has led to the emergence of domain-specific processors that specialize in a narrow range of functions. Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) can be seen as an evolutionary technology that combines heterogeneous domain-specific processors and general-purpose cores to offload infrastructure tasks. Despite the impressive advantages of SmartNICs and their importance in modern networks, the literature has been missing a comprehensive survey. To this end, this paper provides a background encompassing an overview of the evolution of NICs from basic to SmartNICs, describing their architectures, development environments, and advantages over legacy NICs. The paper then presents a comprehensive taxonomy of applications offloaded to SmartNICs, covering network, security, storage, and machine learning functions. Challenges associated with SmartNIC development and deployment are discussed, along with current initiatives and open research issues.
Modeling Bilingual Sentence Processing: Evaluating RNN and Transformer Architectures for Cross-Language Structural Priming
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study evaluates the performance of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Transformer models in replicating cross-language structural priming, a key indicator of abstract grammatical representations in human language processing. Focusing on Chinese-English priming, which involves two typologically distinct languages, we examine how these models handle the robust phenomenon of structural priming, where exposure to a particular sentence structure increases the likelihood of selecting a similar structure subsequently. Our findings indicate that transformers outperform RNNs in generating primed sentence structures, with accuracy rates that exceed 25.84\% to 33. 33\%. This challenges the conventional belief that human sentence processing primarily involves recurrent and immediate processing and suggests a role for cue-based retrieval mechanisms. This work contributes to our understanding of how computational models may reflect human cognitive processes across diverse language families.
Intrinsic Voltage Offsets in Memcapacitive Bio-Membranes Enable High-Performance Physical Reservoir Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Reservoir computing is a brain-inspired machine learning framework for processing temporal data by mapping inputs into high-dimensional spaces. Physical reservoir computers (PRCs) leverage native fading memory and nonlinearity in physical substrates, including atomic switches, photonics, volatile memristors, and, recently, memcapacitors, to achieve efficient high-dimensional mapping. Traditional PRCs often consist of homogeneous device arrays, which rely on input encoding methods and large stochastic device-to-device variations for increased nonlinearity and high-dimensional mapping. These approaches incur high pre-processing costs and restrict real-time deployment. Here, we introduce a novel heterogeneous memcapacitor-based PRC that exploits internal voltage offsets to enable both monotonic and non-monotonic input-state correlations crucial for efficient high-dimensional transformations. We demonstrate our approach's efficacy by predicting a second-order nonlinear dynamical system with an extremely low prediction error (0.00018). Additionally, we predict a chaotic Hénon map, achieving a low normalized root mean square error (0.080). Unlike previous PRCs, such errors are achieved without input encoding methods, underscoring the power of distinct input-state correlations. Most importantly, we generalize our approach to other neuromorphic devices that lack inherent voltage offsets using externally applied offsets to realize various input-state correlations. Our approach and unprecedented performance are a major milestone towards high-performance full in-materia PRCs.
AKN_Regie: a bridge between digital and performing arts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In parallel with the dissemination of information technology, we note the persistence of frontiers within creative practices, in particular between the digital arts and the performing arts. Crossings of these frontiers brought to light the need for a common appropriation of digital issues. As a result of this appropriation, the AvatarStaging platform and its software dimension AKN_Regie will be described in their use to direct avatars on a mixed theatre stage. Developed with the Blueprint visual language within Epic Games' Unreal Engine, AKN_Regie offers a user interface accessible to non-programming artists. This feature will be used to describe two perspectives of appropriation of the tool: the Plugin perspective for these users and the Blueprint perspective for programming artists who want to improve the tool. These two perspectives are then completed by a C++ perspective that aligns AKN_Regie with the language with which the engine itself is programmed. The circulations between these three perspectives are finally studied by drawing on work on the ecology of collective intelligence.
Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of AI technologies yields numerous future impacts on individuals and society. Policymakers are tasked to react quickly and establish policies that mitigate those impacts. However, anticipating the effectiveness of policies is a difficult task, as some impacts might only be observable in the future and respective policies might not be applicable to the future development of AI. In this work we develop a method for using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the efficacy of a given piece of policy at mitigating specified negative impacts. We do so by using GPT-4 to generate scenarios both pre- and post-introduction of policy and translating these vivid stories into metrics based on human perceptions of impacts. We leverage an already established taxonomy of impacts of generative AI in the media environment to generate a set of scenario pairs both mitigated and non-mitigated by the transparency policy in Article 50 of the EU AI Act. We then run a user study (n=234) to evaluate these scenarios across four risk-assessment dimensions: severity, plausibility, magnitude, and specificity to vulnerable populations. We find that this transparency legislation is perceived to be effective at mitigating harms in areas such as labor and well-being, but largely ineffective in areas such as social cohesion and security. Through this case study we demonstrate the efficacy of our method as a tool to iterate on the effectiveness of policy for mitigating various negative impacts. We expect this method to be useful to researchers or other stakeholders who want to brainstorm the potential utility of different pieces of policy or other mitigation strategies.
Weakly Supervised Bayesian Shape Modeling from Unsegmented Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Anatomical shape analysis plays a pivotal role in clinical research and hypothesis testing, where the relationship between form and function is paramount. Correspondence-based statistical shape modeling (SSM) facilitates population-level morphometrics but requires a cumbersome, potentially bias-inducing construction pipeline. Recent advancements in deep learning have streamlined this process in inference by providing SSM prediction directly from unsegmented medical images. However, the proposed approaches are fully supervised and require utilizing a traditional SSM construction pipeline to create training data, thus inheriting the associated burdens and limitations. To address these challenges, we introduce a weakly supervised deep learning approach to predict SSM from images using point cloud supervision. Specifically, we propose reducing the supervision associated with the state-of-the-art fully Bayesian variational information bottleneck DeepSSM (BVIB-DeepSSM) model. BVIB-DeepSSM is an effective, principled framework for predicting probabilistic anatomical shapes from images with quantification of both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Whereas the original BVIB-DeepSSM method requires strong supervision in the form of ground truth correspondence points, the proposed approach utilizes weak supervision via point cloud surface representations, which are more readily obtainable. Furthermore, the proposed approach learns correspondence in a completely data-driven manner without prior assumptions about the expected variability in shape cohort. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach yields similar accuracy and uncertainty estimation to the fully supervised scenario while substantially enhancing the feasibility of model training for SSM construction.