OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Comparison Visual Instruction Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Comparing two images in terms of Commonalities and Differences (CaD) is a fundamental human capability that forms the basis of advanced visual reasoning and interpretation. It is essential for the generation of detailed and contextually relevant descriptions, performing comparative analysis, novelty detection, and making informed decisions based on visual data. However, surprisingly, little attention has been given to these fundamental concepts in the best current mimic of human visual intelligence - Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). We develop and contribute a new two-phase approach CaD-VI for collecting synthetic visual instructions, together with an instruction-following dataset CaD-Inst containing 349K image pairs with CaD instructions collected using CaD-VI. Our approach significantly improves the CaD spotting capabilities in LMMs, advancing the SOTA on a diverse set of related tasks by up to 17.5%. It is also complementary to existing difference-only instruction datasets, allowing automatic targeted refinement of those resources increasing their effectiveness for CaD tuning by up to 10%. Additionally, we propose an evaluation benchmark with 7.5K open-ended QAs to assess the CaD understanding abilities of LMMs.
Less Cybersickness, Please: Demystifying and Detecting Stereoscopic Visual Inconsistencies in Virtual Reality Apps
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The quality of Virtual Reality (VR) apps is vital, particularly the rendering quality of the VR Graphical User Interface (GUI). Different from traditional 2D apps, VR apps create a 3D digital scene for users, by rendering two distinct 2D images for the user's left and right eyes, respectively. Stereoscopic visual inconsistency (denoted as "SVI") issues, however, undermine the rendering process of the user's brain, leading to user discomfort and even adverse health effects. Such issues commonly exist but remain underexplored. We conduct an empirical analysis on 282 SVI bug reports from 15 VR platforms, summarizing 15 types of manifestations. The empirical analysis reveals that automatically detecting SVI issues is challenging, mainly because: (1) lack of training data; (2) the manifestations of SVI issues are diverse, complicated, and often application-specific; (3) most accessible VR apps are closed-source commercial software. Existing pattern-based supervised classification approaches may be inapplicable or ineffective in detecting the SVI issues. To counter these challenges, we propose an unsupervised black-box testing framework named StereoID to identify the stereoscopic visual inconsistencies, based only on the rendered GUI states. StereoID generates a synthetic right-eye image based on the actual left-eye image and computes distances between the synthetic right-eye image and the actual right-eye image to detect SVI issues. We propose a depth-aware conditional stereo image translator to power the image generation process, which captures the expected perspective shifts between left-eye and right-eye images. We build a large-scale unlabeled VR stereo screenshot dataset with larger than 171K images from 288 real-world VR apps for experiments. After substantial experiments, StereoID demonstrates superior performance for detecting SVI issues in both user reports and wild VR apps.
Khmer Semantic Search Engine (KSE): Digital Information Access and Document Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The search engine process is crucial for document content retrieval. For Khmer documents, an effective tool is needed to extract essential keywords and facilitate accurate searches. Despite the daily generation of significant Khmer content, Cambodians struggle to find necessary documents due to the lack of an effective semantic searching tool. Even Google does not deliver high accuracy for Khmer content. Semantic search engines improve search results by employing advanced algorithms to understand various content types. With the rise in Khmer digital content such as reports, articles, and social media feedback enhanced search capabilities are essential. This research proposes the first Khmer Semantic Search Engine (KSE), designed to enhance traditional Khmer search methods. Utilizing semantic matching techniques and formally annotated semantic content, our tool extracts meaningful keywords from user queries, performs precise matching, and provides the best matching offline documents and online URLs. We propose three semantic search frameworks: semantic search based on a keyword dictionary, semantic search based on ontology, and semantic search based on ranking. Additionally, we developed tools for data preparation, including document addition and manual keyword extraction. To evaluate performance, we created a ground truth dataset and addressed issues related to searching and semantic search. Our findings demonstrate that understanding search term semantics can lead to significantly more accurate results.
Active Inference Meeting Energy-Efficient Control of Parallel and Identical Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate the application of active inference in developing energy-efficient control agents for manufacturing systems. Active inference, rooted in neuroscience, provides a unified probabilistic framework integrating perception, learning, and action, with inherent uncertainty quantification elements. Our study explores deep active inference, an emerging field that combines deep learning with the active inference decision-making framework. Leveraging a deep active inference agent, we focus on controlling parallel and identical machine workstations to enhance energy efficiency. We address challenges posed by the problem's stochastic nature and delayed policy response by introducing tailored enhancements to existing agent architectures. Specifically, we introduce multi-step transition and hybrid horizon methods to mitigate the need for complex planning. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of these enhancements and highlight the potential of the active inference-based approach.
Advancing Graph Generation through Beta Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models have excelled in generating natural images and are now being adapted to a variety of data types, including graphs. However, conventional models often rely on Gaussian or categorical diffusion processes, which can struggle to accommodate the mixed discrete and continuous components characteristic of graph data. Graphs typically feature discrete structures and continuous node attributes that often exhibit rich statistical patterns, including sparsity, bounded ranges, skewed distributions, and long-tailed behavior. To address these challenges, we introduce Graph Beta Diffusion (GBD), a generative model specifically designed to handle the diverse nature of graph data. GBD leverages a beta diffusion process, effectively modeling both continuous and discrete elements. Additionally, we propose a modulation technique that enhances the realism of generated graphs by stabilizing critical graph topology while maintaining flexibility for other components. GBD competes strongly with existing models across multiple general and biochemical graph benchmarks, showcasing its ability to capture the intricate balance between discrete and continuous features inherent in real-world graph data. The PyTorch code is available on GitHub.
STAR: A First-Ever Dataset and A Large-Scale Benchmark for Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size Satellite Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Scene graph generation (SGG) in satellite imagery (SAI) benefits promoting understanding of geospatial scenarios from perception to cognition. In SAI, objects exhibit great variations in scales and aspect ratios, and there exist rich relationships between objects (even between spatially disjoint objects), which makes it attractive to holistically conduct SGG in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) SAI. However, there lack such SGG datasets. Due to the complexity of large-size SAI, mining triplets <subject, relationship, object> heavily relies on long-range contextual reasoning. Consequently, SGG models designed for small-size natural imagery are not directly applicable to large-size SAI. This paper constructs a large-scale dataset for SGG in large-size VHR SAI with image sizes ranging from 512 x 768 to 27,860 x 31,096 pixels, named STAR (Scene graph generaTion in lArge-size satellite imageRy), encompassing over 210K objects and over 400K triplets. To realize SGG in large-size SAI, we propose a context-aware cascade cognition (CAC) framework to understand SAI regarding object detection (OBD), pair pruning and relationship prediction for SGG. We also release a SAI-oriented SGG toolkit with about 30 OBD and 10 SGG methods which need further adaptation by our devised modules on our challenging STAR dataset. The dataset and toolkit are available at: https://linlin-dev.github.io/project/STAR.
Towards Single Slot Finality: Evaluating Consensus Mechanisms and Methods for Faster Ethereum Finality
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Ethereum's current Gasper consensus mechanism, which combines the Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree (LMD-GHOST) fork choice rule with the probabilistic Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget (FFG) finality overlay, finalizes transactions in 64 to 95 blocks, an approximate 15-minute delay. This finalization latency impacts user experience and exposes the network to short-term chain reorganization risks, potentially enabling transaction censorship or frontrunning by validators without severe penalties. As the ecosystem pursues a rollup-centric roadmap to scale Ethereum into a secure global settlement layer, faster finality allows cross-layer and inter-rollup communication with greater immediacy, reducing capital inefficiencies. Single slot finality (SSF), wherein transactions are finalized within the same slot they are proposed, promises to advance the Ethereum protocol and enable better user experiences by enabling near-instant economic finality. This thesis systematically studies distributed consensus protocols through propose-vote-merge, PBFT-inspired, and graded agreement families - scrutinizing their capacities to enhance or replace LMD-GHOST. The analysis delves into the intricate tradeoffs between safety, liveness, and finality, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities in designing an optimal consensus protocol for Ethereum. It also explores different design decisions and mechanisms by which single slot or fast finality can be enabled, including cumulative finality, subsampling, and application-layer fast finality. Furthermore, this work introduces SSF-enabled and streamlined fast finality constructions based on a single-vote total order broadcast protocol. The insights and recommendations in this thesis provide a solid foundation for the Ethereum community to make informed decisions regarding the future direction of the protocol's consensus.
SGPRS: Seamless GPU Partitioning Real-Time Scheduler for Periodic Deep Learning Workloads
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are useful in many applications, including transportation, healthcare, and speech recognition. Despite various efforts to improve accuracy, few works have studied DNN in the context of real-time requirements. Coarse resource allocation and sequential execution in existing frameworks result in underutilization. In this work, we conduct GPU speedup gain analysis and propose SGPRS, the first real-time GPU scheduler considering zero configuration partition switch. The proposed scheduler not only meets more deadlines for parallel tasks but also sustains overall performance beyond the pivot point.
GPT-ology, Computational Models, Silicon Sampling: How should we think about LLMs in Cognitive Science?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models have taken the cognitive science world by storm. It is perhaps timely now to take stock of the various research paradigms that have been used to make scientific inferences about ``cognition" in these models or about human cognition. We review several emerging research paradigms -- GPT-ology, LLMs-as-computational-models, and ``silicon sampling" -- and review recent papers that have used LLMs under these paradigms. In doing so, we discuss their claims as well as challenges to scientific inference under these various paradigms. We highlight several outstanding issues about LLMs that have to be addressed to push our science forward: closed-source vs open-sourced models; (the lack of visibility of) training data; and reproducibility in LLM research, including forming conventions on new task ``hyperparameters" like instructions and prompts.
Fair and Efficient Completion of Indivisible Goods
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We formulate the problem of fair and efficient completion of indivisible goods, defined as follows: Given a partial allocation of indivisible goods among agents, does there exist an allocation of the remaining goods (i.e., a completion) that satisfies fairness and economic efficiency guarantees of interest? We study the computational complexity of the completion problem for prominent fairness and efficiency notions such as envy-freeness up one good (EF1), proportionality up to one good (Prop1), maximin share (MMS), and Pareto optimality (PO), and focus on the class of additive valuations as well as its subclasses such as binary additive and lexicographic valuations. We find that while the completion problem is significantly harder than the standard fair division problem (wherein the initial partial allocation is empty), the consideration of restricted preferences facilitates positive algorithmic results for threshold-based fairness notions (Prop1 and MMS). On the other hand, the completion problem remains computationally intractable for envy-based notions such as EF1 and EF1+PO even under restricted preferences.
Q-S5: Towards Quantized State Space Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the quest for next-generation sequence modeling architectures, State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as a potent alternative to transformers, particularly for their computational efficiency and suitability for dynamical systems. This paper investigates the effect of quantization on the S5 model to understand its impact on model performance and to facilitate its deployment to edge and resource-constrained platforms. Using quantization-aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ), we systematically evaluate the quantization sensitivity of SSMs across different tasks like dynamical systems modeling, Sequential MNIST (sMNIST) and most of the Long Range Arena (LRA). We present fully quantized S5 models whose test accuracy drops less than 1% on sMNIST and most of the LRA. We find that performance on most tasks degrades significantly for recurrent weights below 8-bit precision, but that other components can be compressed further without significant loss of performance. Our results further show that PTQ only performs well on language-based LRA tasks whereas all others require QAT. Our investigation provides necessary insights for the continued development of efficient and hardware-optimized SSMs.
Is Diffusion Model Safe? Severe Data Leakage via Gradient-Guided Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Gradient leakage has been identified as a potential source of privacy breaches in modern image processing systems, where the adversary can completely reconstruct the training images from leaked gradients. However, existing methods are restricted to reconstructing low-resolution images where data leakage risks of image processing systems are not sufficiently explored. In this paper, by exploiting diffusion models, we propose an innovative gradient-guided fine-tuning method and introduce a new reconstruction attack that is capable of stealing private, high-resolution images from image processing systems through leaked gradients where severe data leakage encounters. Our attack method is easy to implement and requires little prior knowledge. The experimental results indicate that current reconstruction attacks can steal images only up to a resolution of $128 \times 128$ pixels, while our attack method can successfully recover and steal images with resolutions up to $512 \times 512$ pixels. Our attack method significantly outperforms the SOTA attack baselines in terms of both pixel-wise accuracy and time efficiency of image reconstruction. Furthermore, our attack can render differential privacy ineffective to some extent.
Integrated Modeling, Verification, and Code Generation for Unmanned Aerial Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are currently widely used in safety-critical fields such as industrial production, military operations, and disaster relief. Due to the diversity and complexity of application scenarios, UAS have become increasingly intricate. The challenge of designing and implementing highly reliable UAS while effectively controlling development costs and enhancing efficiency is a pressing issue faced by both academia and industry. Addressing this challenge, this paper aims to investigate an integrated approach to modeling, verification, and code generation for UAS. The paper begins by utilizing Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) to model the UAS, proposing a set of generic UAS models. Based on these models, formal specifications are written to describe the system's safety properties and functions. Finally, the paper introduces a method for generating flight controller code for UAS based on the verified models. Experiments conducted with the proposed method demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying potential vulnerabilities in the UAS during the early design phase and in generating viable flight controller code from the verified models. This approach can enhance the efficiency of designing and verifying high-reliability UAS.
FeatNavigator: Automatic Feature Augmentation on Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Data-centric AI focuses on understanding and utilizing high-quality, relevant data in training machine learning (ML) models, thereby increasing the likelihood of producing accurate and useful results. Automatic feature augmentation, aiming to augment the initial base table with useful features from other tables, is critical in data preparation as it improves model performance, robustness, and generalizability. While recent works have investigated automatic feature augmentation, most of them have limited capabilities in utilizing all useful features as many of them are in candidate tables not directly joinable with the base table. Worse yet, with numerous join paths leading to these distant features, existing solutions fail to fully exploit them within a reasonable compute budget. We present FeatNavigator, an effective and efficient framework that explores and integrates high-quality features in relational tables for ML models. FeatNavigator evaluates a feature from two aspects: (1) the intrinsic value of a feature towards an ML task (i.e., feature importance) and (2) the efficacy of a join path connecting the feature to the base table (i.e., integration quality). FeatNavigator strategically selects a small set of available features and their corresponding join paths to train a feature importance estimation model and an integration quality prediction model. Furthermore, FeatNavigator's search algorithm exploits both estimated feature importance and integration quality to identify the optimized feature augmentation plan. Our experimental results show that FeatNavigator outperforms state-of-the-art solutions on five public datasets by up to 40.1% in ML model performance.
CircuitVAE: Efficient and Scalable Latent Circuit Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Automatically designing fast and space-efficient digital circuits is challenging because circuits are discrete, must exactly implement the desired logic, and are costly to simulate. We address these challenges with CircuitVAE, a search algorithm that embeds computation graphs in a continuous space and optimizes a learned surrogate of physical simulation by gradient descent. By carefully controlling overfitting of the simulation surrogate and ensuring diverse exploration, our algorithm is highly sample-efficient, yet gracefully scales to large problem instances and high sample budgets. We test CircuitVAE by designing binary adders across a large range of sizes, IO timing constraints, and sample budgets. Our method excels at designing large circuits, where other algorithms struggle: compared to reinforcement learning and genetic algorithms, CircuitVAE typically finds 64-bit adders which are smaller and faster using less than half the sample budget. We also find CircuitVAE can design state-of-the-art adders in a real-world chip, demonstrating that our method can outperform commercial tools in a realistic setting.
Urdu Dependency Parsing and Treebank Development: A Syntactic and Morphological Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Parsing is the process of analyzing a sentence's syntactic structure by breaking it down into its grammatical components. and is critical for various linguistic applications. Urdu is a low-resource, free word-order language and exhibits complex morphology. Literature suggests that dependency parsing is well-suited for such languages. Our approach begins with a basic feature model encompassing word location, head word identification, and dependency relations, followed by a more advanced model integrating part-of-speech (POS) tags and morphological attributes (e.g., suffixes, gender). We manually annotated a corpus of news articles of varying complexity. Using Maltparser and the NivreEager algorithm, we achieved a best-labeled accuracy (LA) of 70% and an unlabeled attachment score (UAS) of 84%, demonstrating the feasibility of dependency parsing for Urdu.
Decoding the Diversity: A Review of the Indic AI Research Landscape
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of large language model (LLM) research directions within Indic languages. Indic languages are those spoken in the Indian subcontinent, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan, among others. These languages have a rich cultural and linguistic heritage and are spoken by over 1.5 billion people worldwide. With the tremendous market potential and growing demand for natural language processing (NLP) based applications in diverse languages, generative applications for Indic languages pose unique challenges and opportunities for research. Our paper deep dives into the recent advancements in Indic generative modeling, contributing with a taxonomy of research directions, tabulating 84 recent publications. Research directions surveyed in this paper include LLM development, fine-tuning existing LLMs, development of corpora, benchmarking and evaluation, as well as publications around specific techniques, tools, and applications. We found that researchers across the publications emphasize the challenges associated with limited data availability, lack of standardization, and the peculiar linguistic complexities of Indic languages. This work aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of NLP, particularly those focused on Indic languages, and contributes to the development of more accurate and efficient LLM applications for these languages.