OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Virtual Mines -- Component-level recycling of printed circuit boards using deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This contribution gives an overview of an ongoing project using machine learning and computer vision components for improving the electronic waste recycling process. In circular economy, the "virtual mines" concept refers to production cycles where interesting raw materials are reclaimed in an efficient and cost-effective manner from end-of-life items. In particular, the growth of e-waste, due to the increasingly shorter life cycle of hi-tech goods, is a global problem. In this paper, we describe a pipeline based on deep learning model to recycle printed circuit boards at the component level. A pre-trained YOLOv5 model is used to analyze the results of the locally developed dataset. With a different distribution of class instances, YOLOv5 managed to achieve satisfactory precision and recall, with the ability to optimize with large component instances.
Robust Zero Trust Architecture: Joint Blockchain based Federated learning and Anomaly Detection based Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a robust zero-trust architecture (ZTA) tailored for the decentralized system that empowers efficient remote work and collaboration within IoT networks. Using blockchain-based federated learning principles, our proposed framework includes a robust aggregation mechanism designed to counteract malicious updates from compromised clients, enhancing the security of the global learning process. Moreover, secure and reliable trust computation is essential for remote work and collaboration. The robust ZTA framework integrates anomaly detection and trust computation, ensuring secure and reliable device collaboration in a decentralized fashion. We introduce an adaptive algorithm that dynamically adjusts to varying user contexts, using unsupervised clustering to detect novel anomalies, like zero-day attacks. To ensure a reliable and scalable trust computation, we develop an algorithm that dynamically adapts to varying user contexts by employing incremental anomaly detection and clustering techniques to identify and share local and global anomalies between nodes. Future directions include scalability improvements, Dirichlet process for advanced anomaly detection, privacy-preserving techniques, and the integration of post-quantum cryptographic methods to safeguard against emerging quantum threats.
Teaching Theorizing in Software Engineering Research
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This chapter seeks to support software engineering (SE) researchers and educators in teaching the importance of theory as well as the theorizing process. Drawing on insights from other fields, the chapter presents 12 intermediate products of theorizing and what they mean in an SE context. These intermediate products serve different roles: some are theory products to frame research studies, some are theory generators, and others are components of theory. Whereas the SE domain doesn't have many theories of its own, these intermediate products of theorizing can be found widely. The chapter aims to help readers to recognize these intermediate products, their role, and how they can help in the theorizing process within SE research. To illustrate their utility, the chapter then applies the set of intermediate theorizing products to the software architecture research field. The chapter ends with a suggested structure for a 12-week course on theorizing in SE which can be readily adapted by educators.
LIPE: Learning Personalized Identity Prior for Non-rigid Image Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Although recent years have witnessed significant advancements in image editing thanks to the remarkable progress of text-to-image diffusion models, the problem of non-rigid image editing still presents its complexities and challenges. Existing methods often fail to achieve consistent results due to the absence of unique identity characteristics. Thus, learning a personalized identity prior might help with consistency in the edited results. In this paper, we explore a novel task: learning the personalized identity prior for text-based non-rigid image editing. To address the problems in jointly learning prior and editing the image, we present LIPE, a two-stage framework designed to customize the generative model utilizing a limited set of images of the same subject, and subsequently employ the model with learned prior for non-rigid image editing. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our approach in various editing scenarios over past related leading methods in qualitative and quantitative ways.
Beyond Silence: Bias Analysis through Loss and Asymmetric Approach in Audio Anti-Spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Current trends in audio anti-spoofing detection research strive to improve models' ability to generalize across unseen attacks by learning to identify a variety of spoofing artifacts. This emphasis has primarily focused on the spoof class. Recently, several studies have noted that the distribution of silence differs between the two classes, which can serve as a shortcut. In this paper, we extend class-wise interpretations beyond silence. We employ loss analysis and asymmetric methodologies to move away from traditional attack-focused and result-oriented evaluations towards a deeper examination of model behaviors. Our investigations highlight the significant differences in training dynamics between the two classes, emphasizing the need for future research to focus on robust modeling of the bonafide class.
Leveraging Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Multi-Lingual Text-to-Speech Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Different languages have distinct phonetic systems and vary in their prosodic features making it challenging to develop a Text-to-Speech (TTS) model that can effectively synthesise speech in multilingual settings. Furthermore, TTS architecture needs to be both efficient enough to capture nuances in multiple languages and efficient enough to be practical for deployment. The standard approach is to build transformer based model such as SpeechT5 and train it on large multilingual dataset. As the size of these models grow the conventional fine-tuning for adapting these model becomes impractical due to heavy computational cost. In this paper, we proposes to integrate parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods such as adapters and hypernetwork with TTS architecture for multilingual speech synthesis. Notably, in our experiments PETL methods able to achieve comparable or even better performance compared to full fine-tuning with only $\sim$2.5\% tunable parameters.The code and samples are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/multilingualTTS-BA4C.
Image-Guided Outdoor LiDAR Perception Quality Assessment for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

LiDAR is one of the most crucial sensors for autonomous vehicle perception. However, current LiDAR-based point cloud perception algorithms lack comprehensive and rigorous LiDAR quality assessment methods, leading to uncertainty in detection performance. Additionally, existing point cloud quality assessment algorithms are predominantly designed for indoor environments or single-object scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel image-guided point cloud quality assessment algorithm for outdoor autonomous driving environments, named the Image-Guided Outdoor Point Cloud Quality Assessment (IGO-PQA) algorithm. Our proposed algorithm comprises two main components. The first component is the IGO-PQA generation algorithm, which leverages point cloud data, corresponding RGB surrounding view images, and agent objects' ground truth annotations to generate an overall quality score for a single-frame LiDAR-based point cloud. The second component is a transformer-based IGO-PQA regression algorithm for no-reference outdoor point cloud quality assessment. This regression algorithm allows for the direct prediction of IGO-PQA scores in an online manner, without requiring image data and object ground truth annotations. We evaluate our proposed algorithm using the nuScenes and Waymo open datasets. The IGO-PQA generation algorithm provides consistent and reasonable perception quality indices. Furthermore, our proposed IGO-PQA regression algorithm achieves a Pearson Linear Correlation Coefficient (PLCC) of 0.86 on the nuScenes dataset and 0.97 on the Waymo dataset.
ALPBench: A Benchmark for Active Learning Pipelines on Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In settings where only a budgeted amount of labeled data can be afforded, active learning seeks to devise query strategies for selecting the most informative data points to be labeled, aiming to enhance learning algorithms' efficiency and performance. Numerous such query strategies have been proposed and compared in the active learning literature. However, the community still lacks standardized benchmarks for comparing the performance of different query strategies. This particularly holds for the combination of query strategies with different learning algorithms into active learning pipelines and examining the impact of the learning algorithm choice. To close this gap, we propose ALPBench, which facilitates the specification, execution, and performance monitoring of active learning pipelines. It has built-in measures to ensure evaluations are done reproducibly, saving exact dataset splits and hyperparameter settings of used algorithms. In total, ALPBench consists of 86 real-world tabular classification datasets and 5 active learning settings, yielding 430 active learning problems. To demonstrate its usefulness and broad compatibility with various learning algorithms and query strategies, we conduct an exemplary study evaluating 9 query strategies paired with 8 learning algorithms in 2 different settings. We provide ALPBench here: https://github.com/ValentinMargraf/ActiveLearningPipelines.
Q-DiT: Accurate Post-Training Quantization for Diffusion Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in diffusion models, particularly the architectural transformation from UNet-based models to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs), significantly improve the quality and scalability of image and video generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, the substantial computational costs of these large-scale models pose significant challenges for real-world deployment. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) emerges as a promising solution, enabling model compression and accelerated inference for pretrained models, without the costly retraining. However, research on DiT quantization remains sparse, and existing PTQ frameworks, primarily designed for traditional diffusion models, tend to suffer from biased quantization, leading to notable performance degradation. In this work, we identify that DiTs typically exhibit significant spatial variance in both weights and activations, along with temporal variance in activations. To address these issues, we propose Q-DiT, a novel approach that seamlessly integrates two key techniques: automatic quantization granularity allocation to handle the significant variance of weights and activations across input channels, and sample-wise dynamic activation quantization to adaptively capture activation changes across both timesteps and samples. Extensive experiments conducted on ImageNet and VBench demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Q-DiT. Specifically, when quantizing DiT-XL/2 to W6A8 on ImageNet ($256 \times 256$), Q-DiT achieves a remarkable reduction in FID by 1.09 compared to the baseline. Under the more challenging W4A8 setting, it maintains high fidelity in image and video generation, establishing a new benchmark for efficient, high-quality quantization in DiTs. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/Juanerx/Q-DiT}{https://github.com/Juanerx/Q-DiT}.
GradCheck: Analyzing classifier guidance gradients for conditional diffusion sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

To sample from an unconditionally trained Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), classifier guidance adds conditional information during sampling, but the gradients from classifiers, especially those not trained on noisy images, are often unstable. This study conducts a gradient analysis comparing robust and non-robust classifiers, as well as multiple gradient stabilization techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that these techniques significantly improve the quality of class-conditional samples for non-robust classifiers by providing more stable and informative classifier guidance gradients. The findings highlight the importance of gradient stability in enhancing the performance of classifier guidance, especially on non-robust classifiers.
Depth-Guided Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation (SSIS) aims to leverage an amount of unlabeled data during training. Previous frameworks primarily utilized the RGB information of unlabeled images to generate pseudo-labels. However, such a mechanism often introduces unstable noise, as a single instance can display multiple RGB values. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Depth-Guided (DG) SSIS framework. This framework uses depth maps extracted from input images, which represent individual instances with closely associated distance values, offering precise contours for distinct instances. Unlike RGB data, depth maps provide a unique perspective, making their integration into the SSIS process complex. To this end, we propose Depth Feature Fusion, which integrates features extracted from depth estimation. This integration allows the model to understand depth information better and ensure its effective utilization. Additionally, to manage the variability of depth images during training, we introduce the Depth Controller. This component enables adaptive adjustments of the depth map, enhancing convergence speed and dynamically balancing the loss weights between RGB and depth maps. Extensive experiments conducted on the COCO and Cityscapes datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed method. Our approach establishes a new benchmark for SSIS, outperforming previous methods. Specifically, our DG achieves 22.29%, 31.47%, and 35.14% mAP for 1%, 5%, and 10% labeled data on the COCO dataset, respectively.
Advancing Question Answering on Handwritten Documents: A State-of-the-Art Recognition-Based Model for HW-SQuAD
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Question-answering handwritten documents is a challenging task with numerous real-world applications. This paper proposes a novel recognition-based approach that improves upon the previous state-of-the-art on the HW-SQuAD and BenthamQA datasets. Our model incorporates transformer-based document retrieval and ensemble methods at the model level, achieving an Exact Match score of 82.02% and 69% in HW-SQuAD and BenthamQA datasets, respectively, surpassing the previous best recognition-based approach by 10.89% and 3%. We also enhance the document retrieval component, boosting the top-5 retrieval accuracy from 90% to 95.30%. Our results demonstrate the significance of our proposed approach in advancing question answering on handwritten documents. The code and trained models will be publicly available to facilitate future research in this critical area of natural language.
EvolvED: Evolutionary Embeddings to Understand the Generation Process of Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models, widely used in image generation, rely on iterative refinement to generate images from noise. Understanding this data evolution is important for model development and interpretability, yet challenging due to its high-dimensional, iterative nature. Prior works often focus on static or instance-level analyses, missing the iterative and holistic aspects of the generative path. While dimensionality reduction can visualize image evolution for few instances, it does preserve the iterative structure. To address these gaps, we introduce EvolvED, a method that presents a holistic view of the iterative generative process in diffusion models. EvolvED goes beyond instance exploration by leveraging predefined research questions to streamline generative space exploration. Tailored prompts aligned with these questions are used to extract intermediate images, preserving iterative context. Targeted feature extractors trace the evolution of key image attribute evolution, addressing the complexity of high-dimensional outputs. Central to EvolvED is a novel evolutionary embedding algorithm that encodes iterative steps while maintaining semantic relations. It enhances the visualization of data evolution by clustering semantically similar elements within each iteration with t-SNE, grouping elements by iteration, and aligning an instance's elements across iterations. We present rectilinear and radial layouts to represent iterations and support exploration. We apply EvolvED to diffusion models like GLIDE and Stable Diffusion, demonstrating its ability to provide valuable insights into the generative process.
UHD-IQA Benchmark Database: Pushing the Boundaries of Blind Photo Quality Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html
Preserving Node Distinctness in Graph Autoencoders via Similarity Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph autoencoders (GAEs), as a kind of generative self-supervised learning approach, have shown great potential in recent years. GAEs typically rely on distance-based criteria, such as mean-square-error (MSE), to reconstruct the input graph. However, relying solely on a single reconstruction criterion may lead to a loss of distinctiveness in the reconstructed graph, causing nodes to collapse into similar representations and resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we have developed a simple yet effective strategy to preserve the necessary distinctness in the reconstructed graph. Inspired by the knowledge distillation technique, we found that the dual encoder-decoder architecture of GAEs can be viewed as a teacher-student relationship. Therefore, we propose transferring the knowledge of distinctness from the raw graph to the reconstructed graph, achieved through a simple KL constraint. Specifically, we compute pairwise node similarity scores in the raw graph and reconstructed graph. During the training process, the KL constraint is optimized alongside the reconstruction criterion. We conducted extensive experiments across three types of graph tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and generality of our strategy. This indicates that the proposed approach can be employed as a plug-and-play method to avoid vague reconstructions and enhance overall performance.
Disce aut Deficere: Evaluating LLMs Proficiency on the INVALSI Italian Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to generate and manipulate human language, highlighting their potential across various applications. Evaluating LLMs in languages other than English is crucial for ensuring their linguistic versatility, cultural relevance, and applicability in diverse global contexts, thus broadening their usability and effectiveness. We tackle this challenge by introducing a structured benchmark using the INVALSI tests, a set of well-established assessments designed to measure educational competencies across Italy. Our study makes three primary contributions: Firstly, we adapt the INVALSI benchmark for automated LLM evaluation, which involves rigorous adaptation of the test format to suit automated processing while retaining the essence of the original tests. Secondly, we provide a detailed assessment of current LLMs, offering a crucial reference point for the academic community. Finally, we visually compare the performance of these models against human results. Additionally, researchers are invited to submit their models for ongoing evaluation, ensuring the benchmark remains a current and valuable resource.
Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation for Situated Action Generation: A Case Study on Minecraft
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the Minecraft Collaborative Building Task, two players collaborate: an Architect (A) provides instructions to a Builder (B) to assemble a specified structure using 3D blocks. In this work, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs) to predict the sequence of actions taken by the Builder. Leveraging LLMs' in-context learning abilities, we use few-shot prompting techniques, that significantly improve performance over baseline methods. Additionally, we present a detailed analysis of the gaps in performance for future work
FrenchToxicityPrompts: a Large Benchmark for Evaluating and Mitigating Toxicity in French Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly popular but are also prone to generating bias, toxic or harmful language, which can have detrimental effects on individuals and communities. Although most efforts is put to assess and mitigate toxicity in generated content, it is primarily concentrated on English, while it's essential to consider other languages as well. For addressing this issue, we create and release FrenchToxicityPrompts, a dataset of 50K naturally occurring French prompts and their continuations, annotated with toxicity scores from a widely used toxicity classifier. We evaluate 14 different models from four prevalent open-sourced families of LLMs against our dataset to assess their potential toxicity across various dimensions. We hope that our contribution will foster future research on toxicity detection and mitigation beyond Englis