OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Greek2MathTex: A Greek Speech-to-Text Framework for LaTeX Equations Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the vast majority of the academic and scientific domains, LaTeX has established itself as the de facto standard for typesetting complex mathematical equations and formulae. However, LaTeX's complex syntax and code-like appearance present accessibility barriers for individuals with disabilities, as well as those unfamiliar with coding conventions. In this paper, we present a novel solution to this challenge through the development of a novel speech-to-LaTeX equations system specifically designed for the Greek language. We propose an end-to-end system that harnesses the power of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to enable users to verbally dictate mathematical expressions and equations in natural language, which are subsequently converted into LaTeX format. We present the architecture and design principles of our system, highlighting key components such as the ASR engine, the LLM-based prompt-driven equations generation mechanism, as well as the application of a custom evaluation metric employed throughout the development process. We have made our system open source and available at https://github.com/magcil/greek-speech-to-math.
Multi-Surrogate-Teacher Assistance for Representation Alignment in Fingerprint-based Indoor Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite remarkable progress in knowledge transfer across visual and textual domains, extending these achievements to indoor localization, particularly for learning transferable representations among Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint datasets, remains a challenge. This is due to inherent discrepancies among these RSS datasets, largely including variations in building structure, the input number and disposition of WiFi anchors. Accordingly, specialized networks, which were deprived of the ability to discern transferable representations, readily incorporate environment-sensitive clues into the learning process, hence limiting their potential when applied to specific RSS datasets. In this work, we propose a plug-and-play (PnP) framework of knowledge transfer, facilitating the exploitation of transferable representations for specialized networks directly on target RSS datasets through two main phases. Initially, we design an Expert Training phase, which features multiple surrogate generative teachers, all serving as a global adapter that homogenizes the input disparities among independent source RSS datasets while preserving their unique characteristics. In a subsequent Expert Distilling phase, we continue introducing a triplet of underlying constraints that requires minimizing the differences in essential knowledge between the specialized network and surrogate teachers through refining its representation learning on the target dataset. This process implicitly fosters a representational alignment in such a way that is less sensitive to specific environmental dynamics. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark WiFi RSS fingerprint datasets underscore the effectiveness of the framework that significantly exerts the full potential of specialized networks in localization.
Finding a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing: Combating Adversarial Text-To-Image Prompts with Text Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Text-to-image models are vulnerable to the stepwise "Divide-and-Conquer Attack" (DACA) that utilize a large language model to obfuscate inappropriate content in prompts by wrapping sensitive text in a benign narrative. To mitigate stepwise DACA attacks, we propose a two-layer method involving text summarization followed by binary classification. We assembled the Adversarial Text-to-Image Prompt (ATTIP) dataset ($N=940$), which contained DACA-obfuscated and non-obfuscated prompts. From the ATTIP dataset, we created two summarized versions: one generated by a small encoder model and the other by a large language model. Then, we used an encoder classifier and a GPT-4o classifier to perform content moderation on the summarized and unsummarized prompts. When compared with a classifier that operated over the unsummarized data, our method improved F1 score performance by 31%. Further, the highest recorded F1 score achieved (98%) was produced by the encoder classifier on a summarized ATTIP variant. This study indicates that pre-classification text summarization can inoculate content detection models against stepwise DACA obfuscations.
Imagined Speech State Classification for Robust Brain-Computer Interface
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This study examines the effectiveness of traditional machine learning classifiers versus deep learning models for detecting the imagined speech using electroencephalogram data. Specifically, we evaluated conventional machine learning techniques such as CSP-SVM and LDA-SVM classifiers alongside deep learning architectures such as EEGNet, ShallowConvNet, and DeepConvNet. Machine learning classifiers exhibited significantly lower precision and recall, indicating limited feature extraction capabilities and poor generalization between imagined speech and idle states. In contrast, deep learning models, particularly EEGNet, achieved the highest accuracy of 0.7080 and an F1 score of 0.6718, demonstrating their enhanced ability in automatic feature extraction and representation learning, essential for capturing complex neurophysiological patterns. These findings highlight the limitations of conventional machine learning approaches in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications and advocate for adopting deep learning methodologies to achieve more precise and reliable classification of detecting imagined speech. This foundational research contributes to the development of imagined speech-based BCI systems.
Are Large Language Models Useful for Time Series Data Analysis?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Time series data plays a critical role across diverse domains such as healthcare, energy, and finance, where tasks like classification, anomaly detection, and forecasting are essential for informed decision-making. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence for their ability to handle complex data and extract meaningful insights. This study investigates whether LLMs are effective for time series data analysis by comparing their performance with non-LLM-based approaches across three tasks: classification, anomaly detection, and forecasting. Through a series of experiments using GPT4TS and autoregressive models, we evaluate their performance on benchmark datasets and assess their accuracy, precision, and ability to generalize. Our findings indicate that while LLM-based methods excel in specific tasks like anomaly detection, their benefits are less pronounced in others, such as forecasting, where simpler models sometimes perform comparably or better. This research highlights the role of LLMs in time series analysis and lays the groundwork for future studies to systematically explore their applications and limitations in handling temporal data.
Parallel Motif-Based Community Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Community detection is a central task in graph analytics. Given the substantial growth in graph size, scalability in community detection continues to be an unresolved challenge. Recently, alongside established methods like Louvain and Infomap, motif-based community detection has emerged. Techniques like Tectonic are notable for their advanced ability to identify communities by pruning edges based on motif similarity scores and analyzing the resulting connected components. In this study, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of community detection methods, focusing on both the quality of their output and their scalability. Specifically, we contribute an open-source parallel framework for motif-based community detection based on a shared memory architecture. We conduct a thorough comparative analysis of community detection techniques from various families among state-of-the-art methods, including Tectonic, label propagation, spectral clustering, Louvain, LambdaCC, and Infomap on graphs with up to billions of edges. A key finding of our analysis is that motif-based graph clustering provides a good balance between performance and efficiency. Our work provides several novel insights. Interestingly, we pinpoint biases in prior works in evaluating community detection methods using the top 5K groundtruth communities from SNAP only, as these are frequently near-cliques. Our empirical studies lead to rules of thumb threshold picking strategies that can be critical for real applications. Finally, we show that Tectonic can fail to recover two well-separated clusters. To address this, we suggest a new similarity measure based on counts of triangles and wedges (TW) that prevents the over-segmentation of communities by Tectonic.
Sound Classification of Four Insect Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

The goal of this project is to classify four different insect sounds: cicada, beetle, termite, and cricket. One application of this project is for pest control to monitor and protect our ecosystem. Our project leverages data augmentation, including pitch shifting and speed changing, to improve model generalization. This project will test the performance of Decision Tree, Random Forest, SVM RBF, XGBoost, and k-NN models, combined with MFCC feature. A potential novelty of this project is that various data augmentation techniques are used and created 6 data along with the original sound. The dataset consists of the sound recordings of these four insects. This project aims to achieve a high classification accuracy and to reduce the over-fitting problem.
Automated Generation of Massive Reasonable Empirical Theorems by Forward Reasoning Based on Strong Relevant Logics -- A Solution to the Problem of LLM Pre-training Data Exhaustion
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, it is often said that the data used for the pre-training of large language models (LLMs) have been exhausted. This paper proposes a solution to the problem: Automated generation of massive reasonable empirical theorems by forward reasoning based on strong relevant logics. In fact, this can be regarded as a part of our approach to the problems of ATF (Automated Theorem Finding) and AKA (Automated Knowledge Appreciation).
Three Things to Know about Deep Metric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses supervised deep metric learning for open-set image retrieval, focusing on three key aspects: the loss function, mixup regularization, and model initialization. In deep metric learning, optimizing the retrieval evaluation metric, recall@k, via gradient descent is desirable but challenging due to its non-differentiable nature. To overcome this, we propose a differentiable surrogate loss that is computed on large batches, nearly equivalent to the entire training set. This computationally intensive process is made feasible through an implementation that bypasses the GPU memory limitations. Additionally, we introduce an efficient mixup regularization technique that operates on pairwise scalar similarities, effectively increasing the batch size even further. The training process is further enhanced by initializing the vision encoder using foundational models, which are pre-trained on large-scale datasets. Through a systematic study of these components, we demonstrate that their synergy enables large models to nearly solve popular benchmarks.
Swarm Intelligence in Collision-free Formation Control for Multi-UAV Systems with 3D Obstacle Avoidance Maneuvers
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in multi-agent systems manipulation have demonstrated a rising demand for the implementation of multi-UAV systems in urban areas which are always subjected to the presence of static and dynamic obstacles. The focus of the presented research is on the introduction of a nature-inspired collision-free control for a multi-UAV system considering obstacle avoidance maneuvers. Inspired by the collective behavior of tilapia fish and pigeon, the presented framework in this study uses a centralized controller for the optimal formation control/recovery, which is defined by probabilistic Lloyd's algorithm, while it uses a distributed controller for the intervehicle collision and obstacle avoidance. Further, the presented framework has been extended to the 3D space with 3D maneuvers. Finally, the presented framework has been applied to a multi-UAV system in 2D and 3D scenarios, and obtained results demonstrated the validity of the presented method in the presence of buildings and different types of obstacles.
Persona-SQ: A Personalized Suggested Question Generation Framework For Real-world Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Suggested questions (SQs) provide an effective initial interface for users to engage with their documents in AI-powered reading applications. In practical reading sessions, users have diverse backgrounds and reading goals, yet current SQ features typically ignore such user information, resulting in homogeneous or ineffective questions. We introduce a pipeline that generates personalized SQs by incorporating reader profiles (professions and reading goals) and demonstrate its utility in two ways: 1) as an improved SQ generation pipeline that produces higher quality and more diverse questions compared to current baselines, and 2) as a data generator to fine-tune extremely small models that perform competitively with much larger models on SQ generation. Our approach can not only serve as a drop-in replacement in current SQ systems to immediately improve their performance but also help develop on-device SQ models that can run locally to deliver fast and private SQ experience.
AutoSGNN: Automatic Propagation Mechanism Discovery for Spectral Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In real-world applications, spectral Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for processing diverse types of graphs. However, a single GNN often struggles to handle different graph types-such as homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs-simultaneously. This challenge has led to the manual design of GNNs tailored to specific graph types, but these approaches are limited by the high cost of labor and the constraints of expert knowledge, which cannot keep up with the rapid growth of graph data. To overcome these challenges, we propose AutoSGNN, an automated framework for discovering propagation mechanisms in spectral GNNs. AutoSGNN unifies the search space for spectral GNNs by integrating large language models with evolutionary strategies to automatically generate architectures that adapt to various graph types. Extensive experiments on nine widely-used datasets, encompassing both homophilic and heterophilic graphs, demonstrate that AutoSGNN outperforms state-of-the-art spectral GNNs and graph neural architecture search methods in both performance and efficiency.
DuSSS: Dual Semantic Similarity-Supervised Vision-Language Model for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation (SSMIS) uses consistency learning to regularize model training, which alleviates the burden of pixel-wise manual annotations. However, it often suffers from error supervision from low-quality pseudo labels. Vision-Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance pseudo labels by introducing text prompt guided multimodal supervision information. It nevertheless faces the cross-modal problem: the obtained messages tend to correspond to multiple targets. To address aforementioned problems, we propose a Dual Semantic Similarity-Supervised VLM (DuSSS) for SSMIS. Specifically, 1) a Dual Contrastive Learning (DCL) is designed to improve cross-modal semantic consistency by capturing intrinsic representations within each modality and semantic correlations across modalities. 2) To encourage the learning of multiple semantic correspondences, a Semantic Similarity-Supervision strategy (SSS) is proposed and injected into each contrastive learning process in DCL, supervising semantic similarity via the distribution-based uncertainty levels. Furthermore, a novel VLM-based SSMIS network is designed to compensate for the quality deficiencies of pseudo-labels. It utilizes the pretrained VLM to generate text prompt guided supervision information, refining the pseudo label for better consistency regularization. Experimental results demonstrate that our DuSSS achieves outstanding performance with Dice of 82.52%, 74.61% and 78.03% on three public datasets (QaTa-COV19, BM-Seg and MoNuSeg).
NLSR: Neuron-Level Safety Realignment of Large Language Models Against Harmful Fine-Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The emergence of finetuning-as-a-service has revealed a new vulnerability in large language models (LLMs). A mere handful of malicious data uploaded by users can subtly manipulate the finetuning process, resulting in an alignment-broken model. Existing methods to counteract fine-tuning attacks typically require substantial computational resources. Even with parameter-efficient techniques like LoRA, gradient updates remain essential. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{N}euron-\textbf{L}evel \textbf{S}afety \textbf{R}ealignment (\textbf{NLSR}), a training-free framework that restores the safety of LLMs based on the similarity difference of safety-critical neurons before and after fine-tuning. The core of our framework is first to construct a safety reference model from an initially aligned model to amplify safety-related features in neurons. We then utilize this reference model to identify safety-critical neurons, which we prepare as patches. Finally, we selectively restore only those neurons that exhibit significant similarity differences by transplanting these prepared patches, thereby minimally altering the fine-tuned model. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant safety enhancements in fine-tuned models across multiple downstream tasks, while greatly maintaining task-level accuracy. Our findings suggest regions of some safety-critical neurons show noticeable differences after fine-tuning, which can be effectively corrected by transplanting neurons from the reference model without requiring additional training. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/xinykou/NLSR}
Ambient IoT towards 6G: Standardization, Potentials, and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The Ambient Internet of Things (A-IoT) has emerged as a critical direction for achieving effective connectivity as the IoT system evolves to 6G. However, the introduction of A-IoT technologies, particularly involving backscatter modulation, poses numerous challenges for system design and network operations. This paper surveys current standardization efforts, highlights potential challenges, and explores future directions for A-IoT. It begins with a comprehensive overview of ongoing standardization initiatives by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) on A-IoT, providing a solid foundation for further technical research in both industry and academia. Building upon this groundwork, the paper conducts an analysis of critical enabling technologies for A-IoT. Moreover, a comprehensive A-IoT demonstration system is designed to showcase the practical viability and efficiency of A-IoT techniques, supported by field experiments. We finally address ongoing challenges associated with A-IoT technologies, providing valuable insights for future research endeavors.
Solid-SQL: Enhanced Schema-linking based In-context Learning for Robust Text-to-SQL
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL systems. Nevertheless, many state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches have overlooked the critical aspect of system robustness. Our experiments reveal that while LLM-driven methods excel on standard datasets, their accuracy is notably compromised when faced with adversarial perturbations. To address this challenge, we propose a robust text-to-SQL solution, called Solid-SQL, designed to integrate with various LLMs. We focus on the pre-processing stage, training a robust schema-linking model enhanced by LLM-based data augmentation. Additionally, we design a two-round, structural similarity-based example retrieval strategy for in-context learning. Our method achieves SOTA SQL execution accuracy levels of 82.1% and 58.9% on the general Spider and Bird benchmarks, respectively. Furthermore, experimental results show that Solid-SQL delivers an average improvement of 11.6% compared to baselines on the perturbed Spider-Syn, Spider-Realistic, and Dr. Spider benchmarks.
Movable Antenna Aided NOMA: Joint Antenna Positioning, Precoding, and Decoding Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates movable antenna (MA) aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for multi-user downlink communication, where the base station (BS) is equipped with a fixed-position antenna (FPA) array to serve multiple MA-enabled users. An optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum achievable rate among all the users by jointly optimizing the MA positioning of each user, the precoding matrix at the BS, and the successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding indicator matrix at the users, subject to a set of constraints including the limited movement area of the MAs, the maximum transmit power of the BS, and the SIC decoding condition. To solve this non-convex problem, we propose a two-loop iterative optimization algorithm that combines the hippopotamus optimization (HO) method with the alternating optimization (AO) method to obtain a suboptimal solution efficiently. Specifically, in the inner loop, the complex-valued precoding matrix and the binary decoding indicator matrix are optimized alternatively by the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique with customized greedy search to maximize the minimum achievable rate for the given positions of the MAs. In the outer loop, each user's antenna position is updated using the HO algorithm, following a novel nature-inspired intelligent optimization framework. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively avoid local optimum for highly coupled variables and significantly improve the rate performance of the NOMA system compared to the conventional FPA system as well as other benchmark schemes.
Bots against Bias: Critical Next Steps for Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We humans are biased - and our robotic creations are biased, too. Bias is a natural phenomenon that drives our perceptions and behavior, including when it comes to socially expressive robots that have humanlike features. Recognizing that we embed bias, knowingly or not, within the design of such robots is crucial to studying its implications for people in modern societies. In this chapter, I consider the multifaceted question of bias in the context of humanoid, AI-enabled, and expressive social robots: Where does bias arise, what does it look like, and what can (or should) we do about it. I offer observations on human-robot interaction (HRI) along two parallel tracks: (1) robots designed in bias-conscious ways and (2) robots that may help us tackle bias in the human world. I outline a curated selection of cases for each track drawn from the latest HRI research and positioned against social, legal, and ethical factors. I also propose a set of critical next steps to tackle the challenges and opportunities on bias within HRI research and practice.