OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fair Active Learning in Low-Data Regimes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In critical machine learning applications, ensuring fairness is essential to avoid perpetuating social inequities. In this work, we address the challenges of reducing bias and improving accuracy in data-scarce environments, where the cost of collecting labeled data prohibits the use of large, labeled datasets. In such settings, active learning promises to maximize marginal accuracy gains of small amounts of labeled data. However, existing applications of active learning for fairness fail to deliver on this, typically requiring large labeled datasets, or failing to ensure the desired fairness tolerance is met on the population distribution. To address such limitations, we introduce an innovative active learning framework that combines an exploration procedure inspired by posterior sampling with a fair classification subroutine. We demonstrate that this framework performs effectively in very data-scarce regimes, maximizing accuracy while satisfying fairness constraints with high probability. We evaluate our proposed approach using well-established real-world benchmark datasets and compare it against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in producing fair models, and improvement over existing methods.
Learning adaptive planning representations with natural language guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Effective planning in the real world requires not only world knowledge, but the ability to leverage that knowledge to build the right representation of the task at hand. Decades of hierarchical planning techniques have used domain-specific temporal action abstractions to support efficient and accurate planning, almost always relying on human priors and domain knowledge to decompose hard tasks into smaller subproblems appropriate for a goal or set of goals. This paper describes Ada (Action Domain Acquisition), a framework for automatically constructing task-specific planning representations using task-general background knowledge from language models (LMs). Starting with a general-purpose hierarchical planner and a low-level goal-conditioned policy, Ada interactively learns a library of planner-compatible high-level action abstractions and low-level controllers adapted to a particular domain of planning tasks. On two language-guided interactive planning benchmarks (Mini Minecraft and ALFRED Household Tasks), Ada strongly outperforms other approaches that use LMs for sequential decision-making, offering more accurate plans and better generalization to complex tasks.
Limits to the Energy Efficiency of CMOS Microprocessors
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

CMOS microprocessors have achieved massive energy efficiency gains but may reach limits soon. This paper presents an approach to estimating the limits on the maximum floating point operations per Joule (FLOP/J) for CMOS microprocessors. We analyze the three primary sources of energy dissipation: transistor switching, interconnect capacitances and leakage power. Using first-principles calculations of minimum energy costs based on Landauer's principle, prior estimates of relevant parameters, and empirical data on hardware, we derive the energy cost per FLOP for each component. Combining these yields a geometric mean estimate of 4.7e15 FP4/J for the maximum CMOS energy efficiency, roughly two hundred-fold more efficient than current microprocessors.
Low-rank constrained multichannel signal denoising considering channel-dependent sensitivity inspired by self-supervised learning for optical fiber sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Optical fiber sensing is a technology wherein audio, vibrations, and temperature are detected using an optical fiber; especially the audio/vibrations-aware sensing is called distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). In DAS, observed data, which is comprised of multichannel data, has suffered from severe noise levels because of the optical noise or the installation methods. In conventional methods for denoising DAS data, signal-processing- or deep-neural-network (DNN)-based models have been studied. The signal-processing-based methods have the interpretability, i.e., non-black box. The DNN-based methods are good at flexibility designing network architectures and objective functions, that is, priors. However, there is no balance between the interpretability and the flexibility of priors in the DAS studies. The DNN-based methods also require a large amount of training data in general. To address the problems, we propose a DNN-structure signal-processing-based denoising method in this paper. As the priors of DAS, we employ spatial knowledge; low rank and channel-dependent sensitivity using the DNN-based structure. The result of fiber-acoustic sensing shows that the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods and the robustness to the number of the spatial ranks. Moreover, the optimized parameters of the proposed method indicate the relationship with the channel sensitivity; the interpretability.
From Centralized to Self-Supervised: Pursuing Realistic Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

In real-world environments, autonomous agents rely on their egocentric observations. They must learn adaptive strategies to interact with others who possess mixed motivations, discernible only through visible cues. Several Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods adopt centralized approaches that involve either centralized training or reward-sharing, often violating the realistic ways in which living organisms, like animals or humans, process information and interact. MARL strategies deploying decentralized training with intrinsic motivation offer a self-supervised approach, enable agents to develop flexible social strategies through the interaction of autonomous agents. However, by contrasting the self-supervised and centralized methods, we reveal that populations trained with reward-sharing methods surpass those using self-supervised methods in a mixed-motive environment. We link this superiority to specialized role emergence and an agent's expertise in its role. Interestingly, this gap shrinks in pure-motive settings, emphasizing the need for evaluations in more complex, realistic environments (mixed-motive). Our preliminary results suggest a gap in population performance that can be closed by improving self-supervised methods and thereby pushing MARL closer to real-world readiness.
Adaptive Shortcut Debiasing for Online Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel framework DropTop that suppresses the shortcut bias in online continual learning (OCL) while being adaptive to the varying degree of the shortcut bias incurred by continuously changing environment. By the observed high-attention property of the shortcut bias, highly-activated features are considered candidates for debiasing. More importantly, resolving the limitation of the online environment where prior knowledge and auxiliary data are not ready, two novel techniques -- feature map fusion and adaptive intensity shifting -- enable us to automatically determine the appropriate level and proportion of the candidate shortcut features to be dropped. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that, when combined with various OCL algorithms, DropTop increases the average accuracy by up to 10.4% and decreases the forgetting by up to 63.2%.
A Local Appearance Model for Volumetric Capture of Diverse Hairstyle
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Hair plays a significant role in personal identity and appearance, making it an essential component of high-quality, photorealistic avatars. Existing approaches either focus on modeling the facial region only or rely on personalized models, limiting their generalizability and scalability. In this paper, we present a novel method for creating high-fidelity avatars with diverse hairstyles. Our method leverages the local similarity across different hairstyles and learns a universal hair appearance prior from multi-view captures of hundreds of people. This prior model takes 3D-aligned features as input and generates dense radiance fields conditioned on a sparse point cloud with color. As our model splits different hairstyles into local primitives and builds prior at that level, it is capable of handling various hair topologies. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model captures a diverse range of hairstyles and generalizes well to challenging new hairstyles. Empirical results show that our method improves the state-of-the-art approaches in capturing and generating photorealistic, personalized avatars with complete hair.
TigerBot: An Open Multilingual Multitask LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We release and introduce the TigerBot family of large language models (LLMs), consisting of base and chat models, sized from 7, 13, 70 and 180 billion parameters. We develop our models embarking from Llama-2 and BLOOM, and push the boundary further in data, training algorithm, infrastructure, and application tools. Our models yield meaningful performance gain over SOTA open-source models, e.g., Llama-2, specifically 6% gain in English and 20% gain in Chinese. TigerBot model family also achieves leading performance in major academic and industrial benchmarks and leaderboards. We believe that TigerBot represents just a snapshot of lightning-fast progression in LLM open-source community. Therefore, we are thrilled to give back by publicly releasing our models and reporting our approach behind, with additional emphases on building SOTA LLMs in a democratized way and making LLMs of use in real-world applications.
Panel Transitions for Genre Analysis in Visual Narratives
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding how humans communicate and perceive narratives is important for media technology research and development. This is particularly important in current times when there are tools and algorithms that are easily available for amateur users to create high-quality content. Narrative media develops over time a set of recognizable patterns of features across similar artifacts. Genre is one such grouping of artifacts for narrative media with similar patterns, tropes, and story structures. While much work has been done on genre-based classifications in text and video, we present a novel approach to do a multi-modal analysis of genre based on comics and manga-style visual narratives. We present a systematic feature analysis of an annotated dataset that includes a variety of western and eastern visual books with annotations for high-level narrative patterns. We then present a detailed analysis of the contributions of high-level features to genre classification for this medium. We highlight some of the limitations and challenges of our existing computational approaches in modeling subjective labels. Our contributions to the community are: a dataset of annotated manga books, a multi-modal analysis of visual panels and text in a constrained and popular medium through high-level features, and a systematic process for incorporating subjective narrative patterns in computational models.
Learning a Low-Rank Feature Representation: Achieving Better Trade-Off between Stability and Plasticity in Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In continual learning, networks confront a trade-off between stability and plasticity when trained on a sequence of tasks. To bolster plasticity without sacrificing stability, we propose a novel training algorithm called LRFR. This approach optimizes network parameters in the null space of the past tasks' feature representation matrix to guarantee the stability. Concurrently, we judiciously select only a subset of neurons in each layer of the network while training individual tasks to learn the past tasks' feature representation matrix in low-rank. This increases the null space dimension when designing network parameters for subsequent tasks, thereby enhancing the plasticity. Using CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet as benchmark datasets for continual learning, the proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Participation Incentives in Approval-Based Committee Elections
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

In approval-based committee (ABC) voting, the goal is to choose a subset of predefined size of the candidates based on the voters' approval preferences over the candidates. While this problem has attracted significant attention in recent years, the incentives for voters to participate in an election for a given ABC voting rule have been neglected so far. This paper is thus the first to explicitly study this property, typically called participation, for ABC voting rules. In particular, we show that all ABC scoring rules even satisfy group participation, whereas most sequential rules severely fail participation. We furthermore explore several escape routes to the impossibility for sequential ABC voting rules: we prove for many sequential rules that (i) they satisfy participation on laminar profiles, (ii) voters who approve none of the elected candidates cannot benefit by abstaining, and (iii) it is NP-hard for a voter to decide whether she benefits from abstaining.
Zoom in on the Plant: Fine-grained Analysis of Leaf, Stem and Vein Instances
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Robot perception is far from what humans are capable of. Humans do not only have a complex semantic scene understanding but also extract fine-grained intra-object properties for the salient ones. When humans look at plants, they naturally perceive the plant architecture with its individual leaves and branching system. In this work, we want to advance the granularity in plant understanding for agricultural precision robots. We develop a model to extract fine-grained phenotypic information, such as leaf-, stem-, and vein instances. The underlying dataset RumexLeaves is made publicly available and is the first of its kind with keypoint-guided polyline annotations leading along the line from the lowest stem point along the leaf basal to the leaf apex. Furthermore, we introduce an adapted metric POKS complying with the concept of keypoint-guided polylines. In our experimental evaluation, we provide baseline results for our newly introduced dataset while showcasing the benefits of POKS over OKS.
Deep Learning-Based Cyber-Attack Detection Model for Smart Grids
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, a novel artificial intelligence-based cyber-attack detection model for smart grids is developed to stop data integrity cyber-attacks (DIAs) on the received load data by supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). In the proposed model, first the load data is forecasted using a regression model and after processing stage, the processed data is clustered using the unsupervised learning method. In this work, in order to achieve the best performance, three load forecasting methods (i.e. extra tree regression (ETR), long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM)) are utilized as regression models and their performance is compared. For clustering and outlying detection, the covariance elliptic envelope (EE) is employed as an unsupervised learning method. To examine the proposed model, the hourly load data of the power company of the city of Johor in Malaysia is employed and Two common DIAs, which are DIAs targeting economic loss and DIAs targeting blackouts, are used to evaluate the accuracy of detection methods in several scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed EE-BiLSTM method can perform more robust and accurate compared to the other two methods.
Achelous++: Power-Oriented Water-Surface Panoptic Perception Framework on Edge Devices based on Vision-Radar Fusion and Pruning of Heterogeneous Modalities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Urban water-surface robust perception serves as the foundation for intelligent monitoring of aquatic environments and the autonomous navigation and operation of unmanned vessels, especially in the context of waterway safety. It is worth noting that current multi-sensor fusion and multi-task learning models consume substantial power and heavily rely on high-power GPUs for inference. This contributes to increased carbon emissions, a concern that runs counter to the prevailing emphasis on environmental preservation and the pursuit of sustainable, low-carbon urban environments. In light of these concerns, this paper concentrates on low-power, lightweight, multi-task panoptic perception through the fusion of visual and 4D radar data, which is seen as a promising low-cost perception method. We propose a framework named Achelous++ that facilitates the development and comprehensive evaluation of multi-task water-surface panoptic perception models. Achelous++ can simultaneously execute five perception tasks with high speed and low power consumption, including object detection, object semantic segmentation, drivable-area segmentation, waterline segmentation, and radar point cloud semantic segmentation. Furthermore, to meet the demand for developers to customize models for real-time inference on low-performance devices, a novel multi-modal pruning strategy known as Heterogeneous-Aware SynFlow (HA-SynFlow) is proposed. Besides, Achelous++ also supports random pruning at initialization with different layer-wise sparsity, such as Uniform and Erdos-Renyi-Kernel (ERK). Overall, our Achelous++ framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the WaterScenes benchmark, excelling in both accuracy and power efficiency compared to other single-task and multi-task models. We release and maintain the code at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Achelous.
GenDet: Towards Good Generalizations for AI-Generated Image Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The misuse of AI imagery can have harmful societal effects, prompting the creation of detectors to combat issues like the spread of fake news. Existing methods can effectively detect images generated by seen generators, but it is challenging to detect those generated by unseen generators. They do not concentrate on amplifying the output discrepancy when detectors process real versus fake images. This results in a close output distribution of real and fake samples, increasing classification difficulty in detecting unseen generators. This paper addresses the unseen-generator detection problem by considering this task from the perspective of anomaly detection and proposes an adversarial teacher-student discrepancy-aware framework. Our method encourages smaller output discrepancies between the student and the teacher models for real images while aiming for larger discrepancies for fake images. We employ adversarial learning to train a feature augmenter, which promotes smaller discrepancies between teacher and student networks when the inputs are fake images. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art on public benchmarks, and the visualization results show that a large output discrepancy is maintained when faced with various types of generators.
EditGuard: Versatile Image Watermarking for Tamper Localization and Copyright Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In the era where AI-generated content (AIGC) models can produce stunning and lifelike images, the lingering shadow of unauthorized reproductions and malicious tampering poses imminent threats to copyright integrity and information security. Current image watermarking methods, while widely accepted for safeguarding visual content, can only protect copyright and ensure traceability. They fall short in localizing increasingly realistic image tampering, potentially leading to trust crises, privacy violations, and legal disputes. To solve this challenge, we propose an innovative proactive forensics framework EditGuard, to unify copyright protection and tamper-agnostic localization, especially for AIGC-based editing methods. It can offer a meticulous embedding of imperceptible watermarks and precise decoding of tampered areas and copyright information. Leveraging our observed fragility and locality of image-into-image steganography, the realization of EditGuard can be converted into a united image-bit steganography issue, thus completely decoupling the training process from the tampering types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EditGuard balances the tamper localization accuracy, copyright recovery precision, and generalizability to various AIGC-based tampering methods, especially for image forgery that is difficult for the naked eye to detect. The project page is available at https://xuanyuzhang21.github.io/project/editguard/.
VaLID: Variable-Length Input Diffusion for Novel View Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Novel View Synthesis (NVS), which tries to produce a realistic image at the target view given source view images and their corresponding poses, is a fundamental problem in 3D Vision. As this task is heavily under-constrained, some recent work, like Zero123, tries to solve this problem with generative modeling, specifically using pre-trained diffusion models. Although this strategy generalizes well to new scenes, compared to neural radiance field-based methods, it offers low levels of flexibility. For example, it can only accept a single-view image as input, despite realistic applications often offering multiple input images. This is because the source-view images and corresponding poses are processed separately and injected into the model at different stages. Thus it is not trivial to generalize the model into multi-view source images, once they are available. To solve this issue, we try to process each pose image pair separately and then fuse them as a unified visual representation which will be injected into the model to guide image synthesis at the target-views. However, inconsistency and computation costs increase as the number of input source-view images increases. To solve these issues, the Multi-view Cross Former module is proposed which maps variable-length input data to fix-size output data. A two-stage training strategy is introduced to further improve the efficiency during training time. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation over multiple datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method against previous approaches. The code will be released according to the acceptance.
Syntax Monads for the Working Formal Metatheorist
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Formally verifying the properties of formal systems using a proof assistant requires justifying numerous minor lemmas about capture-avoiding substitution. Despite work on category-theoretic accounts of syntax and variable binding, raw, first-order representations of syntax, the kind considered by many practitioners and compiler frontends, have received relatively little attention. Therefore applications miss out on the benefits of category theory, most notably the promise of reusing formalized infrastructural lemmas between implementations of different systems. Our Coq framework Tealeaves provides libraries of reusable infrastructure for a raw, locally nameless representation and can be extended to other representations in a modular fashion. In this paper we give a string-diagrammatic account of decorated traversable monads (DTMs), the key abstraction implemented by Tealeaves. We define DTMs as monoids of structured endofunctors before proving a representation theorem a la Kleisli, yielding a recursion combinator for finitary tree-like datatypes.