OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Cooperative Content Dissemination Framework for Fog-Based Internet of Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

As the fog-based internet of vehicles (IoV) is equipped with rich perception, computing, communication and storage resources, it provides a new solution for the bulk data processing. However, the impact caused by the mobility of vehicles brings a challenge to the content scheduling and resource allocation of content dissemination service. In this paper, we propose a time-varying resource relationship graph to model the intertwined impact of the perception, computation, communication and storage resources across multiple snapshots on the content dissemination process of IoV. Based on this graph model, the content dissemination process is modeled as a mathematical optimization problem, where the quality of service of both delay tolerant and delay sensitive services are considered. Owing to its NP-completeness, the optimization problem is decomposed into a joint link and subchannel scheduling subproblem and as well a joint power and flow control subproblem. Then, a cascaded low complexity scheduling algorithm is proposed for the joint link and subchannel scheduling subproblem. Moreover, a robust resource management algorithm is developed for the power and flow control subproblem, where the channel uncertainties in future snapshots are fully considered in the algorithm. Finally, we conduct simulations to show that the effectiveness of the proposed approaches outperforms other state-of-art approaches.
ROG-Map: An Efficient Robocentric Occupancy Grid Map for Large-scene and High-resolution LiDAR-based Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in LiDAR technology have opened up new possibilities for robotic navigation. Given the widespread use of occupancy grid maps (OGMs) in robotic motion planning, this paper aims to address the challenges of integrating LiDAR with OGMs. To this end, we propose ROG-Map, a uniform grid-based OGM that maintains a local map moving along with the robot to enable efficient map operation and reduce memory costs for large-scene autonomous flight. Moreover, we present a novel incremental obstacle inflation method that significantly reduces the computational cost of inflation. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on various public datasets. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROG-Map, we integrate it into a complete quadrotor system and perform autonomous flights against both small obstacles and large-scale scenes. During real-world flight tests with a 0.05 m resolution local map and 30mx30mx12m local map size, ROG-Map takes only 29.8% of frame time on average to update the map at a frame rate of 50 Hz (\ie, 5.96 ms in 20 ms), including 0.33% (i.e., 0.66 ms) to perform obstacle inflation, demonstrating outstanding real-world performance. We release ROG-Map as an open-source ROS package to promote the development of LiDAR-based motion planning.
Hyperdimensional Computing with Spiking-Phasor Neurons
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) are a powerful framework for representing compositional reasoning. They lend themselves to neural-network implementations, allowing us to create neural networks that can perform cognitive functions, like spatial reasoning, arithmetic, symbol binding, and logic. But the vectors involved can be quite large, hence the alternative label Hyperdimensional (HD) computing. Advances in neuromorphic hardware hold the promise of reducing the running time and energy footprint of neural networks by orders of magnitude. In this paper, we extend some pioneering work to run VSA algorithms on a substrate of spiking neurons that could be run efficiently on neuromorphic hardware.
Applying Plain Transformers to Real-World Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

To apply transformer-based models to point cloud understanding, many previous works modify the architecture of transformers by using, e.g., local attention and down-sampling. Although they have achieved promising results, earlier works on transformers for point clouds have two issues. First, the power of plain transformers is still under-explored. Second, they focus on simple and small point clouds instead of complex real-world ones. This work revisits the plain transformers in real-world point cloud understanding. We first take a closer look at some fundamental components of plain transformers, e.g., patchifier and positional embedding, for both efficiency and performance. To close the performance gap due to the lack of inductive bias and annotated data, we investigate self-supervised pre-training with masked autoencoder (MAE). Specifically, we propose drop patch, which prevents information leakage and significantly improves the effectiveness of MAE. Our models achieve SOTA results in semantic segmentation on the S3DIS dataset and object detection on the ScanNet dataset with lower computational costs. Our work provides a new baseline for future research on transformers for point clouds.
Diffusion Probabilistic Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Diffusion probabilistic models have quickly become a major approach for generative modeling of images, 3D geometry, video and other domains. However, to adapt diffusion generative modeling to these domains the denoising network needs to be carefully designed for each domain independently, oftentimes under the assumption that data lives in a Euclidean grid. In this paper we introduce Diffusion Probabilistic Fields (DPF), a diffusion model that can learn distributions over continuous functions defined over metric spaces, commonly known as fields. We extend the formulation of diffusion probabilistic models to deal with this field parametrization in an explicit way, enabling us to define an end-to-end learning algorithm that side-steps the requirement of representing fields with latent vectors as in previous approaches (Dupont et al., 2022a; Du et al., 2021). We empirically show that, while using the same denoising network, DPF effectively deals with different modalities like 2D images and 3D geometry, in addition to modeling distributions over fields defined on non-Euclidean metric spaces.
BP-NTT: Fast and Compact in-SRAM Number Theoretic Transform with Bit-Parallel Modular Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) is an essential mathematical tool for computing polynomial multiplication in promising lattice-based cryptography. However, costly division operations and complex data dependencies make efficient and flexible hardware design to be challenging, especially on resource-constrained edge devices. Existing approaches either focus on only limited parameter settings or impose substantial hardware overhead. In this paper, we introduce a hardware-algorithm methodology to efficiently accelerate NTT in various settings using in-cache computing. By leveraging an optimized bit-parallel modular multiplication and introducing costless shift operations, our proposed solution provides up to 29x higher throughput-per-area and 2.8-100x better throughput-per-area-per-joule compared to the state-of-the-art.
On the Capacity Region of Optical Intensity Broadcast Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper investigates the capacity region of the optical intensity broadcast channels (OI-BCs), where the input is subject to a peak-intensity constraint, an average-intensity constraint, or both. By leveraging the decomposition results of several random variables, i.e., uniform, exponential, and truncated exponential random variables, and adopting a superposition coding (SC) scheme, the inner bound on the capacity region is derived. Then, the outer bound is derived by applying the conditional entropy power inequality (EPI). In the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the inner bound asymptotically matches the outer bound, thus characterizing the high-SNR asymptotic capacity region. The bounds are also extended to the general K-user BCs without loss of high-SNR asymptotic optimality.
Consta-dihedral Codes over Finite Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

It is proved in a reference (Fan, Lin, IEEE TIT, vol.67, pp.5016-5025) that the self-dual (LCD respectively) dihedral codes over a finite field~$F$ with ${|F|=q}$ are asymptotically good if $q$ is even (odd respectively). In this paper, we investigate the algebraic property and the asymptotic property of conta-dihedral codes over $F$, and show that: if $q$ is even or $4\,|\,(q-1)$, then the self-dual consta-dihedral codes are asymptotically good; otherwise, the LCD consta-dihedral codes are asymptotically good. And, with the help of a technique developed in this paper, some errors in the reference mentioned above are corrected.
Speeding Up EfficientNet: Selecting Update Blocks of Convolutional Neural Networks using Genetic Algorithm in Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The performance of convolutional neural networks (CNN) depends heavily on their architectures. Transfer learning performance of a CNN relies quite strongly on selection of its trainable layers. Selecting the most effective update layers for a certain target dataset often requires expert knowledge on CNN architecture which many practitioners do not posses. General users prefer to use an available architecture (e.g. GoogleNet, ResNet, EfficientNet etc.) that is developed by domain experts. With the ever-growing number of layers, it is increasingly becoming quite difficult and cumbersome to handpick the update layers. Therefore, in this paper we explore the application of genetic algorithm to mitigate this problem. The convolutional layers of popular pretrained networks are often grouped into modules that constitute their building blocks. We devise a genetic algorithm to select blocks of layers for updating the parameters. By experimenting with EfficientNetB0 pre-trained on ImageNet and using Food-101, CIFAR-100 and MangoLeafBD as target datasets, we show that our algorithm yields similar or better results than the baseline in terms of accuracy, and requires lower training and evaluation time due to learning less number of parameters. We also devise a metric called block importance to measure efficacy of each block as update block and analyze the importance of the blocks selected by our algorithm.
Distance-based Weight Transfer from Near-field to Far-field Speaker Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

The scarcity of labeled far-field speech is a constraint for training superior far-field speaker verification systems. Fine-tuning the model pre-trained on large-scale near-field speech substantially outperforms training from scratch. However, the fine-tuning method suffers from two limitations--catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. In this paper, we propose a weight transfer regularization(WTR) loss to constrain the distance of the weights between the pre-trained model with large-scale near-field speech and the fine-tuned model through a small number of far-field speech. With the WTR loss, the fine-tuning process takes advantage of the previously acquired discriminative ability from the large-scale near-field speech without catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, we use the PAC-Bayes generalization theory to analyze the generalization bound of the fine-tuned model with the WTR loss. The analysis result indicates that the WTR term makes the fine-tuned model have a tighter generalization upper bound. Moreover, we explore three kinds of norm distance for weight transfer, which are L1-norm distance, L2-norm distance and Max-norm distance. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the WTR loss on VoxCeleb (pre-trained dataset) and FFSVC (fine-tuned dataset) datasets.
FedScore: A privacy-preserving framework for federated scoring system development
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose FedScore, a privacy-preserving federated learning framework for scoring system generation across multiple sites to facilitate cross-institutional collaborations. The FedScore framework includes five modules: federated variable ranking, federated variable transformation, federated score derivation, federated model selection and federated model evaluation. To illustrate usage and assess FedScore's performance, we built a hypothetical global scoring system for mortality prediction within 30 days after a visit to an emergency department using 10 simulated sites divided from a tertiary hospital in Singapore. We employed a pre-existing score generator to construct 10 local scoring systems independently at each site and we also developed a scoring system using centralized data for comparison. We compared the acquired FedScore model's performance with that of other scoring models using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The FedScore model achieved an average area under the curve (AUC) value of 0.763 across all sites, with a standard deviation (SD) of 0.020. We also calculated the average AUC values and SDs for each local model, and the FedScore model showed promising accuracy and stability with a high average AUC value which was closest to the one of the pooled model and SD which was lower than that of most local models. This study demonstrates that FedScore is a privacy-preserving scoring system generator with potentially good generalizability.
To Make Yourself Invisible with Adversarial Semantic Contours
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Modern object detectors are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which may bring risks to real-world applications. The sparse attack is an important task which, compared with the popular adversarial perturbation on the whole image, needs to select the potential pixels that is generally regularized by an $\ell_0$-norm constraint, and simultaneously optimize the corresponding texture. The non-differentiability of $\ell_0$ norm brings challenges and many works on attacking object detection adopted manually-designed patterns to address them, which are meaningless and independent of objects, and therefore lead to relatively poor attack performance. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Semantic Contour (ASC), an MAP estimate of a Bayesian formulation of sparse attack with a deceived prior of object contour. The object contour prior effectively reduces the search space of pixel selection and improves the attack by introducing more semantic bias. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ASC can corrupt the prediction of 9 modern detectors with different architectures (\e.g., one-stage, two-stage and Transformer) by modifying fewer than 5\% of the pixels of the object area in COCO in white-box scenario and around 10\% of those in black-box scenario. We further extend the attack to datasets for autonomous driving systems to verify the effectiveness. We conclude with cautions about contour being the common weakness of object detectors with various architecture and the care needed in applying them in safety-sensitive scenarios.
How to Communicate Robot Motion Intent: A Scoping Review
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Robots are becoming increasingly omnipresent in our daily lives, supporting us and carrying out autonomous tasks. In Human-Robot Interaction, human actors benefit from understanding the robot's motion intent to avoid task failures and foster collaboration. Finding effective ways to communicate this intent to users has recently received increased research interest. However, no common language has been established to systematize robot motion intent. This work presents a scoping review aimed at unifying existing knowledge. Based on our analysis, we present an intent communication model that depicts the relationship between robot and human through different intent dimensions (intent type, intent information, intent location). We discuss these different intent dimensions and their interrelationships with different kinds of robots and human roles. Throughout our analysis, we classify the existing research literature along our intent communication model, allowing us to identify key patterns and possible directions for future research.
Robust Statistical Beamforming with Multi-Cluster Tracking for Time-Varying Massive MIMO (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, a joint design of instantaneous channel estimation, beam tracking, and adaptive beamformer construction for a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system is proposed. This design focuses on efficiency in terms of performance and computational complexity under the adverse effects of time variation and mobility of sources, the presence of multiuser and multipath components, or simply multi-clusters, and the near-far effect. The design is also suitable for hybrid beamforming and frequency-selective channels. In the proposed system, channel parameters are estimated in time-domain duplex (TDD) uplink mode using a per-cluster approach rather than a joint approach, which significantly reduces the complexity. Per-cluster estimation is possible thanks to the proposed interference-aware statistical beamforming method, namely reduced dimensional Generalized Eigenbeamformer (RD-GEB), which undertakes the computational load of interference mitigation and enables a simpler design for the remaining stages. In addition, the overall design is based on the separation of channel parameters as fast-time and slow-time, leaving only the instantaneous channel estimation and channel matched filtering as fast-time operations, which are handled inside cluster-specific reduced dimensional subspaces. Beam tracking and beamformer construction are held in slow-time rarely, which reduces the time-averaged complexity. Furthermore, beam tracking is performed by leveraging a batch of instantaneous channel estimates, which removes the need for an additional training process. The proposed low-complexity design is shown to outperform the conventional methods.
ASP: Learn a Universal Neural Solver!
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Applying machine learning to combinatorial optimization problems has the potential to improve both efficiency and accuracy. However, existing learning-based solvers often struggle with generalization when faced with changes in problem distributions and scales. In this paper, we propose a new approach called ASP: Adaptive Staircase Policy Space Response Oracle to address these generalization issues and learn a universal neural solver. ASP consists of two components: Distributional Exploration, which enhances the solver's ability to handle unknown distributions using Policy Space Response Oracles, and Persistent Scale Adaption, which improves scalability through curriculum learning. We have tested ASP on several challenging COPs, including the traveling salesman problem, the vehicle routing problem, and the prize collecting TSP, as well as the real-world instances from TSPLib and CVRPLib. Our results show that even with the same model size and weak training signal, ASP can help neural solvers explore and adapt to unseen distributions and varying scales, achieving superior performance. In particular, compared with the same neural solvers under a standard training pipeline, ASP produces a remarkable decrease in terms of the optimality gap with 90.9% and 47.43% on generated instances and real-world instances for TSP, and a decrease of 19% and 45.57% for CVRP.
Analyzing Impact of Socio-Economic Factors on COVID-19 Mortality Prediction Using SHAP Value
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper applies multiple machine learning (ML) algorithms to a dataset of de-identified COVID-19 patients provided by the COVID-19 Research Database. The dataset consists of 20,878 COVID-positive patients, among which 9,177 patients died in the year 2020. This paper aims to understand and interpret the association of socio-economic characteristics of patients with their mortality instead of maximizing prediction accuracy. According to our analysis, a patients households annual and disposable income, age, education, and employment status significantly impacts a machine learning models prediction. We also observe several individual patient data, which gives us insight into how the feature values impact the prediction for that data point. This paper analyzes the global and local interpretation of machine learning models on socio-economic data of COVID patients.
Valid Information Guidance Network for Compressed Video Quality Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years deep learning methods have shown great superiority in compressed video quality enhancement tasks. Existing methods generally take the raw video as the ground truth and extract practical information from consecutive frames containing various artifacts. However, they do not fully exploit the valid information of compressed and raw videos to guide the quality enhancement for compressed videos. In this paper, we propose a unique Valid Information Guidance scheme (VIG) to enhance the quality of compressed videos by mining valid information from both compressed videos and raw videos. Specifically, we propose an efficient framework, Compressed Redundancy Filtering (CRF) network, to balance speed and enhancement. After removing the redundancy by filtering the information, CRF can use the valid information of the compressed video to reconstruct the texture. Furthermore, we propose a progressive Truth Guidance Distillation (TGD) strategy, which does not need to design additional teacher models and distillation loss functions. By only using the ground truth as input to guide the model to aggregate the correct spatio-temporal correspondence across the raw frames, TGD can significantly improve the enhancement effect without increasing the extra training cost. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance of compressed video quality enhancement in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Semi-Supervised Constrained Clustering: An In-Depth Overview, Ranked Taxonomy and Future Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Clustering is a well-known unsupervised machine learning approach capable of automatically grouping discrete sets of instances with similar characteristics. Constrained clustering is a semi-supervised extension to this process that can be used when expert knowledge is available to indicate constraints that can be exploited. Well-known examples of such constraints are must-link (indicating that two instances belong to the same group) and cannot-link (two instances definitely do not belong together). The research area of constrained clustering has grown significantly over the years with a large variety of new algorithms and more advanced types of constraints being proposed. However, no unifying overview is available to easily understand the wide variety of available methods, constraints and benchmarks. To remedy this, this study presents in-detail the background of constrained clustering and provides a novel ranked taxonomy of the types of constraints that can be used in constrained clustering. In addition, it focuses on the instance-level pairwise constraints, and gives an overview of its applications and its historical context. Finally, it presents a statistical analysis covering 307 constrained clustering methods, categorizes them according to their features, and provides a ranking score indicating which methods have the most potential based on their popularity and validation quality. Finally, based upon this analysis, potential pitfalls and future research directions are provided.