OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Model Editing with Canonical Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce model editing with canonical examples, a setting in which (1) a single learning example is provided per desired behavior, (2) evaluation is performed exclusively out-of-distribution, and (3) deviation from an initial model is strictly limited. A canonical example is a simple instance of good behavior, e.g., The capital of Mauritius is Port Louis) or bad behavior, e.g., An aspect of researchers is coldhearted). The evaluation set contains more complex examples of each behavior (like a paragraph in which the capital of Mauritius is called for.) We create three datasets and modify three more for model editing with canonical examples, covering knowledge-intensive improvements, social bias mitigation, and syntactic edge cases. In our experiments on Pythia language models, we find that LoRA outperforms full finetuning and MEMIT. We then turn to the Backpack language model architecture because it is intended to enable targeted improvement. The Backpack defines a large bank of sense vectors--a decomposition of the different uses of each word--which are weighted and summed to form the output logits of the model. We propose sense finetuning, which selects and finetunes a few ($\approx$ 10) sense vectors for each canonical example, and find that it outperforms other finetuning methods, e.g., 4.8% improvement vs 0.3%. Finally, we improve GPT-J-6B by an inference-time ensemble with just the changes from sense finetuning of a 35x smaller Backpack, in one setting outperforming editing GPT-J itself (4.1% vs 1.0%).
Passwords Are Meant to Be Secret: A Practical Secure Password Entry Channel for Web Browsers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Password-based authentication faces various security and usability issues. Password managers help alleviate some of these issues by enabling users to manage their passwords effectively. However, malicious client-side scripts and browser extensions can steal passwords after they have been autofilled by the manager into the web page. In this paper, we explore what role the password manager can take in preventing the theft of autofilled credentials without requiring a change to user behavior. To this end, we identify a threat model for password exfiltration and then use this threat model to explore the design space for secure password entry implemented using a password manager. We identify five potential designs that address this issue, each with varying security and deployability tradeoffs. Our analysis shows the design that best balances security and usability is for the manager to autofill a fake password and then rely on the browser to replace the fake password with the actual password immediately before the web request is handed over to the operating system to be transmitted over the network. This removes the ability for malicious client-side scripts or browser extensions to access and exfiltrate the real password. We implement our design in the Firefox browser and conduct experiments, which show that it successfully thwarts malicious scripts and extensions on 97\% of the Alexa top 1000 websites, while also maintaining the capability to revert to default behavior on the remaining websites, avoiding functionality regressions. Most importantly, this design is transparent to users, requiring no change to user behavior.
Development and validation of an artificial intelligence model to accurately predict spinopelvic parameters
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Objective. Achieving appropriate spinopelvic alignment has been shown to be associated with improved clinical symptoms. However, measurement of spinopelvic radiographic parameters is time-intensive and interobserver reliability is a concern. Automated measurement tools have the promise of rapid and consistent measurements, but existing tools are still limited by some degree of manual user-entry requirements. This study presents a novel artificial intelligence (AI) tool called SpinePose that automatically predicts spinopelvic parameters with high accuracy without the need for manual entry. Methods. SpinePose was trained and validated on 761 sagittal whole-spine X-rays to predict sagittal vertical axis (SVA), pelvic tilt (PT), pelvic incidence (PI), sacral slope (SS), lumbar lordosis (LL), T1-pelvic angle (T1PA), and L1-pelvic angle (L1PA). A separate test set of 40 X-rays was labeled by 4 reviewers, including fellowship-trained spine surgeons and a fellowship-trained radiologist with neuroradiology subspecialty certification. Median errors relative to the most senior reviewer were calculated to determine model accuracy on test images. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) were used to assess inter-rater reliability. Results. SpinePose exhibited the following median (interquartile range) parameter errors: SVA: 2.2(2.3)mm, p=0.93; PT: 1.3(1.2)°, p=0.48; SS: 1.7(2.2)°, p=0.64; PI: 2.2(2.1)°, p=0.24; LL: 2.6(4.0)°, p=0.89; T1PA: 1.1(0.9)°, p=0.42; and L1PA: 1.4(1.6)°, p=0.49. Model predictions also exhibited excellent reliability at all parameters (ICC: 0.91-1.0). Conclusions. SpinePose accurately predicted spinopelvic parameters with excellent reliability comparable to fellowship-trained spine surgeons and neuroradiologists. Utilization of predictive AI tools in spinal imaging can substantially aid in patient selection and surgical planning.
Virtual and Remote Robotic Laboratory Using EJS, MATLAB and LabVIEW
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper describes the design and implementation of a virtual and remote laboratory based on Easy Java Simulations (EJS) and LabVIEW. The main application of this laboratory is to improve the study of sensors in Mobile Robotics, dealing with the problems that arise on the real world experiments. This laboratory allows the user to work from their homes, tele-operating a real robot that takes measurements from its sensors in order to obtain a map of its environment. In addition, the application allows interacting with a robot simulation (virtual laboratory) or with a real robot (remote laboratory), with the same simple and intuitive graphical user interface in EJS. Thus, students can develop signal processing and control algorithms for the robot in simulation and then deploy them on the real robot for testing purposes. Practical examples of application of the laboratory on the inter University Master of Systems Engineering and Automatic Control are presented.
PULSE: Parametric Hardware Units for Low-power Sparsity-Aware Convolution Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have become popular for their more bio-realistic behavior than Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, effectively leveraging the intrinsic, unstructured sparsity of SNNs in hardware is challenging, especially due to the variability in sparsity across network layers. This variability depends on several factors, including the input dataset, encoding scheme, and neuron model. Most existing SNN accelerators fail to account for the layer-specific workloads of an application (model + dataset), leading to high energy consumption. To address this, we propose a design-time parametric hardware generator that takes layer-wise sparsity and the number of processing elements as inputs and synthesizes the corresponding hardware. The proposed design compresses sparse spike trains using a priority encoder and efficiently shifts the activations across the network's layers. We demonstrate the robustness of our proposed approach by first profiling a given application's characteristics followed by performing efficient resource allocation. Results on a Xilinx Kintex FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) using MNIST, FashionMNIST, and SVHN datasets show a 3.14x improvement in accelerator efficiency (FPS/W) compared to a sparsity-oblivious systolic array-based accelerator. Compared to the most recent sparsity-aware work, our solution improves efficiency by 1.72x.
Halo Reduction in Display Systems through Smoothed Local Histogram Equalization and Human Visual System Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Halo artifacts significantly impact display quality. We propose a method to reduce halos in Local Histogram Equalization (LHE) algorithms by separately addressing dark and light variants. This approach results in visually natural images by exploring the relationship between lateral inhibition and halo artifacts in the human visual system.
Collaborative filtering, K-nearest neighbor and cosine similarity in home decor recommender systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

An architectural framework, based on collaborative filtering using K-nearest neighbor and cosine similarity, was developed and implemented to fit the requirements for the company DecorRaid. The aim of the paper is to test different evaluation techniques within the environment to research the recommender systems performance. Three perspectives were found relevant for evaluating a recommender system in the specific environment, namely dataset, system and user perspective. With these perspectives it was possible to gain a broader view of the recommender systems performance. Online A/B split testing was conducted to compare the performance of small adjustments to the RS and to test the relevance of the evaluation techniques. Key factors are solving the sparsity and cold start problem, where the suggestion is to research a hybrid RS combining Content-based and CF based techniques.
ASAP-MPC: An Asynchronous Update Scheme for Online Motion Planning with Nonlinear Model Predictive Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) scheme targeted at motion planning for mechatronic motion systems, such as drones and mobile platforms. NMPC-based motion planning typically requires low computation times to be able to provide control inputs at the required rate for system stability, disturbance rejection, and overall performance. Although there exist various ways in literature to reduce the solution times in NMPC, such times may not be low enough to allow real-time implementations. This paper presents ASAP-MPC, an approach to handle varying, sometimes restrictively large, solution times with an asynchronous update scheme, always allowing for full convergence and real-time execution. The NMPC algorithm is combined with a linear state feedback controller tracking the optimised trajectories for improved robustness against possible disturbances and plant-model mismatch. ASAP-MPC seamlessly merges trajectories, resulting from subsequent NMPC solutions, providing a smooth and continuous overall trajectory for the motion system. This frameworks applicability to embedded applications is shown on two different experiment setups where a state-of-the-art method fails: a quadcopter flying through a cluttered environment in hardware-in-the-loop simulation and a scale model truck-trailer manoeuvring in a structured lab environment.
LLaVA-Docent: Instruction Tuning with Multimodal Large Language Model to Support Art Appreciation Education
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the development of various AI systems to support learning in various domains, AI assistance for art appreciation education has not been extensively explored. Art appreciation, often perceived as an unfamiliar and challenging endeavor for most students, can be more accessible with a generative AI enabled conversation partner that provides tailored questions and encourages the audience to deeply appreciate artwork. This study explores the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in art appreciation education, with a focus on developing LLaVA-Docent, a model designed to serve as a personal tutor for art appreciation. Our approach involved design and development research, focusing on iterative enhancement to design and develop the application to produce a functional MLLM-enabled chatbot along with a data design framework for art appreciation education. To that end, we established a virtual dialogue dataset that was generated by GPT-4, which was instrumental in training our MLLM, LLaVA-Docent. The performance of LLaVA-Docent was evaluated by benchmarking it against alternative settings and revealed its distinct strengths and weaknesses. Our findings highlight the efficacy of the MMLM-based personalized art appreciation chatbot and demonstrate its applicability for a novel approach in which art appreciation is taught and experienced.
Value function interference and greedy action selection in value-based multi-objective reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) algorithms extend conventional reinforcement learning (RL) to the more general case of problems with multiple, conflicting objectives, represented by vector-valued rewards. Widely-used scalar RL methods such as Q-learning can be modified to handle multiple objectives by (1) learning vector-valued value functions, and (2) performing action selection using a scalarisation or ordering operator which reflects the user's utility with respect to the different objectives. However, as we demonstrate here, if the user's utility function maps widely varying vector-values to similar levels of utility, this can lead to interference in the value-function learned by the agent, leading to convergence to sub-optimal policies. This will be most prevalent in stochastic environments when optimising for the Expected Scalarised Return criterion, but we present a simple example showing that interference can also arise in deterministic environments. We demonstrate empirically that avoiding the use of random tie-breaking when identifying greedy actions can ameliorate, but not fully overcome, the problems caused by value function interference.
Safe Active Learning for Time-Series Modeling with Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Learning time-series models is useful for many applications, such as simulation and forecasting. In this study, we consider the problem of actively learning time-series models while taking given safety constraints into account. For time-series modeling we employ a Gaussian process with a nonlinear exogenous input structure. The proposed approach generates data appropriate for time series model learning, i.e. input and output trajectories, by dynamically exploring the input space. The approach parametrizes the input trajectory as consecutive trajectory sections, which are determined stepwise given safety requirements and past observations. We analyze the proposed algorithm and evaluate it empirically on a technical application. The results show the effectiveness of our approach in a realistic technical use case.
Multimodal Interpretable Data-Driven Models for Early Prediction of Antimicrobial Multidrug Resistance Using Multivariate Time-Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Electronic health records (EHR) is an inherently multimodal register of the patient's health status characterized by static data and multivariate time series (MTS). While MTS are a valuable tool for clinical prediction, their fusion with other data modalities can possibly result in more thorough insights and more accurate results. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have emerged as fundamental tools for identifying and defining underlying patterns in the healthcare domain. However, fundamental improvements in interpretability are needed for DNN models to be widely used in the clinical setting. In this study, we present an approach built on a collection of interpretable multimodal data-driven models that may anticipate and understand the emergence of antimicrobial multidrug resistance (AMR) germs in the intensive care unit (ICU) of the University Hospital of Fuenlabrada (Madrid, Spain). The profile and initial health status of the patient are modeled using static variables, while the evolution of the patient's health status during the ICU stay is modeled using several MTS, including mechanical ventilation and antibiotics intake. The multimodal DNNs models proposed in this paper include interpretable principles in addition to being effective at predicting AMR and providing an explainable prediction support system for AMR in the ICU. Furthermore, our proposed methodology based on multimodal models and interpretability schemes can be leveraged in additional clinical problems dealing with EHR data, broadening the impact and applicability of our results.
A plastic correction algorithm for full-field elasto-plastic finite element simulations : critical assessment of predictive capabilities and improvement by machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a new local plastic correction algorithm that is aimed at accelerating elasto-plastic finite element (FE) simulations for structural problems exhibiting localised plasticity (around e.g. notches, geometrical defects). The proposed method belongs to the category of generalised multi-axial Neuber-type methods, which process the results of an elastic prediction point-wise in order to calculate an approximation of the full elasto-plastic solution. The proposed algorithm relies on a rule of local proportionality, which, in the context of J2 plasticity, allows us to express the plastic plastic correction problem in terms of the amplitude of the full mechanical tensors only. This lightweight correction problem can be solved for numerically using a fully implicit time integrator that shares similarities with the radial return algorithm. The numerical capabilities of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated for a notched structure and a specimen containing a distribution of spherical pores, subjected to monotonic and cyclic loading. As a second point of innovation, we show that the proposed local plastic correction algorithm can be further accelerated by employing a simple meta-modelling strategy, with virtually no added errors. At last, we develop and investigate the merits of a deep-learning-based corrective layer designed to the approximation error of the plastic corrector. A convolutional architecture is used to analyse the neighbourhoods of material points and outputs a scalar correction to the point-wise Neuber-type predictions. This optional brick of the proposed plastic correction methodology relies on the availability of a set of full elasto-plastic finite element solutions to be used as training data-set.
A Network for structural dense displacement based on 3D deformable mesh model and optical flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study proposes a Network to recognize displacement of a RC frame structure from a video by a monocular camera. The proposed Network consists of two modules which is FlowNet2 and POFRN-Net. FlowNet2 is used to generate dense optical flow as well as POFRN-Net is to extract pose parameter H. FlowNet2 convert two video frames into dense optical flow. POFRN-Net is inputted dense optical flow from FlowNet2 to output the pose parameter H. The displacement of any points of structure can be calculated from parameter H. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is applied to obtain frequency domain signal from corresponding displacement signal. Furthermore, the comparison of the truth displacement on the First floor of the First video is shown in this study. Finally, the predicted displacements on four floors of RC frame structure of given three videos are exhibited in the last of this study.
An application of power indices for the family of weighted majority games in partition function form
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Based on Holler (1982) and Armijos-Toro et al. (2021) we propose two power indices to measure the influence of the players in the class of weighted majority games in partition function form. We compare these new power indices with their original versions on the class of games in characteristic function form. Finally, we use both pairs of power indices for games in partition function form to study the distribution of power in the National Assembly of Ecuador that emerged after the elections of February 7, 2021.
Fairness of Exposure in Online Restless Multi-armed Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMABs) generalize the multi-armed bandits where each arm exhibits Markovian behavior and transitions according to their transition dynamics. Solutions to RMAB exist for both offline and online cases. However, they do not consider the distribution of pulls among the arms. Studies have shown that optimal policies lead to unfairness, where some arms are not exposed enough. Existing works in fairness in RMABs focus heavily on the offline case, which diminishes their application in real-world scenarios where the environment is largely unknown. In the online scenario, we propose the first fair RMAB framework, where each arm receives pulls in proportion to its merit. We define the merit of an arm as a function of its stationary reward distribution. We prove that our algorithm achieves sublinear fairness regret in the single pull case $O(\sqrt{T\ln T})$, with $T$ being the total number of episodes. Empirically, we show that our algorithm performs well in the multi-pull scenario as well.
High-Precision Geosteering via Reinforcement Learning and Particle Filters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Geosteering, a key component of drilling operations, traditionally involves manual interpretation of various data sources such as well-log data. This introduces subjective biases and inconsistent procedures. Academic attempts to solve geosteering decision optimization with greedy optimization and Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) showed promise but lacked adaptivity to realistic diverse scenarios. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a solution to these challenges, facilitating optimal decision-making through reward-based iterative learning. State estimation methods, e.g., particle filter (PF), provide a complementary strategy for geosteering decision-making based on online information. We integrate an RL-based geosteering with PF to address realistic geosteering scenarios. Our framework deploys PF to process real-time well-log data to estimate the location of the well relative to the stratigraphic layers, which then informs the RL-based decision-making process. We compare our method's performance with that of using solely either RL or PF. Our findings indicate a synergy between RL and PF in yielding optimized geosteering decisions.
Human Aesthetic Preference-Based Large Text-to-Image Model Personalization: Kandinsky Generation as an Example
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

With the advancement of neural generative capabilities, the art community has actively embraced GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) for creating painterly content. Large text-to-image models can quickly generate aesthetically pleasing outcomes. However, the process can be non-deterministic and often involves tedious trial-and-error, as users struggle with formulating effective prompts to achieve their desired results. This paper introduces a prompting-free generative approach that empowers users to automatically generate personalized painterly content that incorporates their aesthetic preferences in a customized artistic style. This approach involves utilizing ``semantic injection'' to customize an artist model in a specific artistic style, and further leveraging a genetic algorithm to optimize the prompt generation process through real-time iterative human feedback. By solely relying on the user's aesthetic evaluation and preference for the artist model-generated images, this approach creates the user a personalized model that encompasses their aesthetic preferences and the customized artistic style.