OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Data Augmentation Techniques for Cross-Domain WiFi CSI-based Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The recognition of human activities based on WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) enables contactless and visual privacy-preserving sensing in indoor environments. However, poor model generalization, due to varying environmental conditions and sensing hardware, is a well-known problem in this space. To address this issue, in this work, data augmentation techniques commonly used in image-based learning are applied to WiFi CSI to investigate their effects on model generalization performance in cross-scenario and cross-system settings. In particular, we focus on the generalization between line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) through-wall scenarios, as well as on the generalization between different antenna systems, which remains under-explored. We collect and make publicly available a dataset of CSI amplitude spectrograms of human activities. Utilizing this data, an ablation study is conducted in which activity recognition models based on the EfficientNetV2 architecture are trained, allowing us to assess the effects of each augmentation on model generalization performance. The gathered results show that specific combinations of simple data augmentation techniques applied to CSI amplitude data can significantly improve cross-scenario and cross-system generalization.
Robust Meta-Model for Predicting the Need for Blood Transfusion in Non-traumatic ICU Patients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: Blood transfusions, crucial in managing anemia and coagulopathy in ICU settings, require accurate prediction for effective resource allocation and patient risk assessment. However, existing clinical decision support systems have primarily targeted a particular patient demographic with unique medical conditions and focused on a single type of blood transfusion. This study aims to develop an advanced machine learning-based model to predict the probability of transfusion necessity over the next 24 hours for a diverse range of non-traumatic ICU patients. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study on 72,072 adult non-traumatic ICU patients admitted to a high-volume US metropolitan academic hospital between 2016 and 2020. We developed a meta-learner and various machine learning models to serve as predictors, training them annually with four-year data and evaluating on the fifth, unseen year, iteratively over five years. Results: The experimental results revealed that the meta-model surpasses the other models in different development scenarios. It achieved notable performance metrics, including an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUROC) curve of 0.97, an accuracy rate of 0.93, and an F1-score of 0.89 in the best scenario. Conclusion: This study pioneers the use of machine learning models for predicting blood transfusion needs in a diverse cohort of critically ill patients. The findings of this evaluation confirm that our model not only predicts transfusion requirements effectively but also identifies key biomarkers for making transfusion decisions.
Machine Learning Classification of Alzheimer's Disease Stages Using Cerebrospinal Fluid Biomarkers Alone
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease is a challenge because the existing methodologies do not identify the patients in their preclinical stage, which can last up to a decade prior to the onset of clinical symptoms. Several research studies demonstrate the potential of cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers, amyloid beta 1-42, T-tau, and P-tau, in early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease stages. In this work, we used machine learning models to classify different stages of Alzheimer's disease based on the cerebrospinal fluid biomarker levels alone. An electronic health record of patients from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Centre database was analyzed and the patients were subdivided based on mini-mental state scores and clinical dementia ratings. Statistical and correlation analyses were performed to identify significant differences between the Alzheimer's stages. Afterward, machine learning classifiers including K-Nearest Neighbors, Ensemble Boosted Tree, Ensemble Bagged Tree, Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, and Naive Bayes classifiers were employed to classify the Alzheimer's disease stages. The results demonstrate that Ensemble Boosted Tree (84.4%) and Logistic Regression (73.4%) provide the highest accuracy for binary classification, while Ensemble Bagged Tree (75.4%) demonstrates better accuracy for multiclassification. The findings from this research are expected to help clinicians in making an informed decision regarding the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's from the cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers alone, monitoring of the disease progression, and implementation of appropriate intervention measures.
Safety and Performance, Why Not Both? Bi-Objective Optimized Model Compression against Heterogeneous Attacks Toward AI Software Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The size of deep learning models in artificial intelligence (AI) software is increasing rapidly, hindering the large-scale deployment on resource-restricted devices (e.g., smartphones). To mitigate this issue, AI software compression plays a crucial role, which aims to compress model size while keeping high performance. However, the intrinsic defects in a big model may be inherited by the compressed one. Such defects may be easily leveraged by adversaries, since a compressed model is usually deployed in a large number of devices without adequate protection. In this article, we aim to address the safe model compression problem from the perspective of safety-performance co-optimization. Specifically, inspired by the test-driven development (TDD) paradigm in software engineering, we propose a test-driven sparse training framework called SafeCompress. By simulating the attack mechanism as safety testing, SafeCompress can automatically compress a big model to a small one following the dynamic sparse training paradigm. Then, considering two kinds of representative and heterogeneous attack mechanisms, i.e., black-box membership inference attack and white-box membership inference attack, we develop two concrete instances called BMIA-SafeCompress and WMIA-SafeCompress. Further, we implement another instance called MMIA-SafeCompress by extending SafeCompress to defend against the occasion when adversaries conduct black-box and white-box membership inference attacks simultaneously. We conduct extensive experiments on five datasets for both computer vision and natural language processing tasks. The results show the effectiveness and generalizability of our framework. We also discuss how to adapt SafeCompress to other attacks besides membership inference attack, demonstrating the flexibility of SafeCompress.
Auffusion: Leveraging the Power of Diffusion and Large Language Models for Text-to-Audio Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in diffusion models and large language models (LLMs) have significantly propelled the field of AIGC. Text-to-Audio (TTA), a burgeoning AIGC application designed to generate audio from natural language prompts, is attracting increasing attention. However, existing TTA studies often struggle with generation quality and text-audio alignment, especially for complex textual inputs. Drawing inspiration from state-of-the-art Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models, we introduce Auffusion, a TTA system adapting T2I model frameworks to TTA task, by effectively leveraging their inherent generative strengths and precise cross-modal alignment. Our objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that Auffusion surpasses previous TTA approaches using limited data and computational resource. Furthermore, previous studies in T2I recognizes the significant impact of encoder choice on cross-modal alignment, like fine-grained details and object bindings, while similar evaluation is lacking in prior TTA works. Through comprehensive ablation studies and innovative cross-attention map visualizations, we provide insightful assessments of text-audio alignment in TTA. Our findings reveal Auffusion's superior capability in generating audios that accurately match textual descriptions, which further demonstrated in several related tasks, such as audio style transfer, inpainting and other manipulations. Our implementation and demos are available at https://auffusion.github.io.
DTBS: Dual-Teacher Bi-directional Self-training for Domain Adaptation in Nighttime Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Due to the poor illumination and the difficulty in annotating, nighttime conditions pose a significant challenge for autonomous vehicle perception systems. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has been widely applied to semantic segmentation on such images to adapt models from normal conditions to target nighttime-condition domains. Self-training (ST) is a paradigm in UDA, where a momentum teacher is utilized for pseudo-label prediction, but a confirmation bias issue exists. Because the one-directional knowledge transfer from a single teacher is insufficient to adapt to a large domain shift. To mitigate this issue, we propose to alleviate domain gap by incrementally considering style influence and illumination change. Therefore, we introduce a one-stage Dual-Teacher Bi-directional Self-training (DTBS) framework for smooth knowledge transfer and feedback. Based on two teacher models, we present a novel pipeline to respectively decouple style and illumination shift. In addition, we propose a new Re-weight exponential moving average (EMA) to merge the knowledge of style and illumination factors, and provide feedback to the student model. In this way, our method can be embedded in other UDA methods to enhance their performance. For example, the Cityscapes to ACDC night task yielded 53.8 mIoU (\%), which corresponds to an improvement of +5\% over the previous state-of-the-art. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/hf618/DTBS}.
A Novel Dual-Stage Evolutionary Algorithm for Finding Robust Solutions
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

In robust optimization problems, the magnitude of perturbations is relatively small. Consequently, solutions within certain regions are less likely to represent the robust optima when perturbations are introduced. Hence, a more efficient search process would benefit from increased opportunities to explore promising regions where global optima or good local optima are situated. In this paper, we introduce a novel robust evolutionary algorithm named the dual-stage robust evolutionary algorithm (DREA) aimed at discovering robust solutions. DREA operates in two stages: the peak-detection stage and the robust solution-searching stage. The primary objective of the peak-detection stage is to identify peaks in the fitness landscape of the original optimization problem. Conversely, the robust solution-searching stage focuses on swiftly identifying the robust optimal solution using information obtained from the peaks discovered in the initial stage. These two stages collectively enable the proposed DREA to efficiently obtain the robust optimal solution for the optimization problem. This approach achieves a balance between solution optimality and robustness by separating the search processes for optimal and robust optimal solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that DREA significantly outperforms five state-of-the-art algorithms across 18 test problems characterized by diverse complexities. Moreover, when evaluated on higher-dimensional robust optimization problems (100-$D$ and 200-$D$), DREA also demonstrates superior performance compared to all five counterpart algorithms.
Depth-discriminative Metric Learning for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Monocular 3D object detection poses a significant challenge due to the lack of depth information in RGB images. Many existing methods strive to enhance the object depth estimation performance by allocating additional parameters for object depth estimation, utilizing extra modules or data. In contrast, we introduce a novel metric learning scheme that encourages the model to extract depth-discriminative features regardless of the visual attributes without increasing inference time and model size. Our method employs the distance-preserving function to organize the feature space manifold in relation to ground-truth object depth. The proposed (K, B, eps)-quasi-isometric loss leverages predetermined pairwise distance restriction as guidance for adjusting the distance among object descriptors without disrupting the non-linearity of the natural feature manifold. Moreover, we introduce an auxiliary head for object-wise depth estimation, which enhances depth quality while maintaining the inference time. The broad applicability of our method is demonstrated through experiments that show improvements in overall performance when integrated into various baselines. The results show that our method consistently improves the performance of various baselines by 23.51% and 5.78% on average across KITTI and Waymo, respectively.
Constrained Online Two-stage Stochastic Optimization: Algorithm with (and without) Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We consider an online two-stage stochastic optimization with long-term constraints over a finite horizon of $T$ periods. At each period, we take the first-stage action, observe a model parameter realization and then take the second-stage action from a feasible set that depends both on the first-stage decision and the model parameter. We aim to minimize the cumulative objective value while guaranteeing that the long-term average second-stage decision belongs to a set. We develop online algorithms for the online two-stage problem from adversarial learning algorithms. Also, the regret bound of our algorithm can be reduced to the regret bound of embedded adversarial learning algorithms. Based on this framework, we obtain new results under various settings. When the model parameters are drawn from unknown non-stationary distributions and we are given machine-learned predictions of the distributions, we develop a new algorithm from our framework with a regret $O(W_T+\sqrt{T})$, where $W_T$ measures the total inaccuracy of the machine-learned predictions. We then develop another algorithm that works when no machine-learned predictions are given and show the performances.
Global Convergence of Natural Policy Gradient with Hessian-aided Momentum Variance Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Natural policy gradient (NPG) and its variants are widely-used policy search methods in reinforcement learning. Inspired by prior work, a new NPG variant coined NPG-HM is developed in this paper, which utilizes the Hessian-aided momentum technique for variance reduction, while the sub-problem is solved via the stochastic gradient descent method. It is shown that NPG-HM can achieve the global last iterate $ε$-optimality with a sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-2})$, which is the best known result for natural policy gradient type methods under the generic Fisher non-degenerate policy parameterizations. The convergence analysis is built upon a relaxed weak gradient dominance property tailored for NPG under the compatible function approximation framework, as well as a neat way to decompose the error when handling the sub-problem. Moreover, numerical experiments on Mujoco-based environments demonstrate the superior performance of NPG-HM over other state-of-the-art policy gradient methods.
Dual Teacher Knowledge Distillation with Domain Alignment for Face Anti-spoofing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Face recognition systems have raised concerns due to their vulnerability to different presentation attacks, and system security has become an increasingly critical concern. Although many face anti-spoofing (FAS) methods perform well in intra-dataset scenarios, their generalization remains a challenge. To address this issue, some methods adopt domain adversarial training (DAT) to extract domain-invariant features. However, the competition between the encoder and the domain discriminator can cause the network to be difficult to train and converge. In this paper, we propose a domain adversarial attack (DAA) method to mitigate the training instability problem by adding perturbations to the input images, which makes them indistinguishable across domains and enables domain alignment. Moreover, since models trained on limited data and types of attacks cannot generalize well to unknown attacks, we propose a dual perceptual and generative knowledge distillation framework for face anti-spoofing that utilizes pre-trained face-related models containing rich face priors. Specifically, we adopt two different face-related models as teachers to transfer knowledge to the target student model. The pre-trained teacher models are not from the task of face anti-spoofing but from perceptual and generative tasks, respectively, which implicitly augment the data. By combining both DAA and dual-teacher knowledge distillation, we develop a dual teacher knowledge distillation with domain alignment framework (DTDA) for face anti-spoofing. The advantage of our proposed method has been verified through extensive ablation studies and comparison with state-of-the-art methods on public datasets across multiple protocols.
Q-Refine: A Perceptual Quality Refiner for AI-Generated Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid evolution of the Text-to-Image (T2I) model in recent years, their unsatisfactory generation result has become a challenge. However, uniformly refining AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) of different qualities not only limited optimization capabilities for low-quality AIGIs but also brought negative optimization to high-quality AIGIs. To address this issue, a quality-award refiner named Q-Refine is proposed. Based on the preference of the Human Visual System (HVS), Q-Refine uses the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metric to guide the refining process for the first time, and modify images of different qualities through three adaptive pipelines. Experimental shows that for mainstream T2I models, Q-Refine can perform effective optimization to AIGIs of different qualities. It can be a general refiner to optimize AIGIs from both fidelity and aesthetic quality levels, thus expanding the application of the T2I generation models.
Learning Surface Scattering Parameters From SAR Images Using Differentiable Ray Tracing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Simulating high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images in complex scenes has consistently presented a significant research challenge. The development of a microwave-domain surface scattering model and its reversibility are poised to play a pivotal role in enhancing the authenticity of SAR image simulations and facilitating the reconstruction of target parameters. Drawing inspiration from the field of computer graphics, this paper proposes a surface microwave rendering model that comprehensively considers both Specular and Diffuse contributions. The model is analytically represented by the coherent spatially varying bidirectional scattering distribution function (CSVBSDF) based on the Kirchhoff approximation (KA) and the perturbation method (SPM). And SAR imaging is achieved through the synergistic combination of ray tracing and fast mapping projection techniques. Furthermore, a differentiable ray tracing (DRT) engine based on SAR images was constructed for CSVBSDF surface scattering parameter learning. Within this SAR image simulation engine, the use of differentiable reverse ray tracing enables the rapid estimation of parameter gradients from SAR images. The effectiveness of this approach has been validated through simulations and comparisons with real SAR images. By learning the surface scattering parameters, substantial enhancements in SAR image simulation performance under various observation conditions have been demonstrated.
Fundamental Limitation of Semantic Communications: Neural Estimation for Rate-Distortion
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper studies the fundamental limit of semantic communications over the discrete memoryless channel. We consider the scenario to send a semantic source consisting of an observation state and its corresponding semantic state, both of which are recovered at the receiver. To derive the performance limitation, we adopt the semantic rate-distortion function (SRDF) to study the relationship among the minimum compression rate, observation distortion, semantic distortion, and channel capacity. For the case with unknown semantic source distribution, while only a set of the source samples is available, we propose a neural-network-based method by leveraging the generative networks to learn the semantic source distribution. Furthermore, for a special case where the semantic state is a deterministic function of the observation, we design a cascade neural network to estimate the SRDF. For the case with perfectly known semantic source distribution, we propose a general Blahut-Arimoto algorithm to effectively compute the SRDF. Finally, experimental results validate our proposed algorithms for the scenarios with ideal Gaussian semantic source and some practical datasets.
On the Uniqueness of Bayesian Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Standard First-Price and All-Pay Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We study the Bayesian coarse correlated equilibrium (BCCE) of continuous and discretised first-price and all-pay auctions under the standard symmetric independent private-values model. Our study is motivated by the question of how the canonical Bayes-Nash equilibrium (BNE) of the auction relates to the outcomes learned by buyers utilising no-regret algorithms. Numerical experiments show that in two buyer first-price auctions the Wasserstein-$2$ distance of buyers' marginal bid distributions decline as $O(1/n)$ in the discretisation size in instances where the prior distribution is concave, whereas all-pay auctions exhibit similar behaviour without prior dependence. To explain this convergence to a near-equilibrium, we study uniqueness of the BCCE of the continuous auction. Our uniqueness results translate to provable convergence of deterministic self-play to a near equilibrium outcome in these auctions. In the all-pay auction, we show that independent of the prior distribution there is a unique BCCE with symmetric, differentiable, and increasing bidding strategies, which is equivalent to the unique strict BNE. In the first-price auction, we need stronger conditions. Either the prior is strictly concave or the learning algorithm has to be restricted to strictly increasing strategies. Without such strong assumptions, no-regret algorithms can end up in low-price pooling strategies. This is important because it proves that in repeated first-price auctions such as in display ad actions, algorithmic collusion cannot be ruled out without further assumptions even if all bidders rely on no-regret algorithms.