OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Meta learning with language models: Challenges and opportunities in the classification of imbalanced text
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Detecting out of policy speech (OOPS) content is important but difficult. While machine learning is a powerful tool to tackle this challenging task, it is hard to break the performance ceiling due to factors like quantity and quality limitations on training data and inconsistencies in OOPS definition and data labeling. To realize the full potential of available limited resources, we propose a meta learning technique (MLT) that combines individual models built with different text representations. We analytically show that the resulting technique is numerically stable and produces reasonable combining weights. We combine the MLT with a threshold-moving (TM) technique to further improve the performance of the combined predictor on highly-imbalanced in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets. We also provide computational results to show the statistically significant advantages of the proposed MLT approach. All authors contributed equally to this work.
Manipulation Mask Generator: High-Quality Image Manipulation Mask Generation Method Based on Modified Total Variation Noise Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In artificial intelligence, any model that wants to achieve a good result is inseparable from a large number of high-quality data. It is especially true in the field of tamper detection. This paper proposes a modified total variation noise reduction method to acquire high-quality tampered images. We automatically crawl original and tampered images from the Baidu PS Bar. Baidu PS Bar is a website where net friends post countless tampered images. Subtracting the original image with the tampered image can highlight the tampered area. However, there is also substantial noise on the final print, so these images can't be directly used in the deep learning model. Our modified total variation noise reduction method is aimed at solving this problem. Because a lot of text is slender, it is easy to lose text information after the opening and closing operation. We use MSER (Maximally Stable Extremal Regions) and NMS (Non-maximum Suppression) technology to extract text information. And then use the modified total variation noise reduction technology to process the subtracted image. Finally, we can obtain an image with little noise by adding the image and text information. And the idea also largely retains the text information. Datasets generated in this way can be used in deep learning models, and they will help the model achieve better results.
AutoTrans: A Complete Planning and Control Framework for Autonomous UAV Payload Transportation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The robotics community is increasingly interested in autonomous aerial transportation. Unmanned aerial vehicles with suspended payloads have advantages over other systems, including mechanical simplicity and agility, but pose great challenges in planning and control. To realize fully autonomous aerial transportation, this paper presents a systematic solution to address these difficulties. First, we present a real-time planning method that generates smooth trajectories considering the time-varying shape and non-linear dynamics of the system, ensuring whole-body safety and dynamic feasibility. Additionally, an adaptive NMPC with a hierarchical disturbance compensation strategy is designed to overcome unknown external perturbations and inaccurate model parameters. Extensive experiments show that our method is capable of generating high-quality trajectories online, even in highly constrained environments, and tracking aggressive flight trajectories accurately, even under significant uncertainty. We plan to release our code to benefit the community.
Coordinated Replay Sample Selection for Continual Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Continual Federated Learning (CFL) combines Federated Learning (FL), the decentralized learning of a central model on a number of client devices that may not communicate their data, and Continual Learning (CL), the learning of a model from a continual stream of data without keeping the entire history. In CL, the main challenge is \textit{forgetting} what was learned from past data. While replay-based algorithms that keep a small pool of past training data are effective to reduce forgetting, only simple replay sample selection strategies have been applied to CFL in prior work, and no previous work has explored coordination among clients for better sample selection. To bridge this gap, we adapt a replay sample selection objective based on loss gradient diversity to CFL and propose a new relaxation-based selection of samples to optimize the objective. Next, we propose a practical algorithm to coordinate gradient-based replay sample selection across clients without communicating private data. We benchmark our coordinated and uncoordinated replay sample selection algorithms against random sampling-based baselines with language models trained on a large scale de-identified real-world text dataset. We show that gradient-based sample selection methods both boost performance and reduce forgetting compared to random sampling methods, with our coordination method showing gains early in the low replay size regime (when the budget for storing past data is small).
TableQAKit: A Comprehensive and Practical Toolkit for Table-based Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Table-based question answering (TableQA) is an important task in natural language processing, which requires comprehending tables and employing various reasoning ways to answer the questions. This paper introduces TableQAKit, the first comprehensive toolkit designed specifically for TableQA. The toolkit designs a unified platform that includes plentiful TableQA datasets and integrates popular methods of this task as well as large language models (LLMs). Users can add their datasets and methods according to the friendly interface. Also, pleasantly surprised using the modules in this toolkit achieves new SOTA on some datasets. Finally, \tableqakit{} also provides an LLM-based TableQA Benchmark for evaluating the role of LLMs in TableQA. TableQAKit is open-source with an interactive interface that includes visual operations, and comprehensive data for ease of use.
Dual-path convolutional neural network using micro-FTIR imaging to predict breast cancer subtypes and biomarkers levels: estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor, HER2 and Ki67
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Breast cancer molecular subtypes classification plays an import role to sort patients with divergent prognosis. The biomarkers used are Estrogen Receptor (ER), Progesterone Receptor (PR), HER2, and Ki67. Based on these biomarkers expression levels, subtypes are classified as Luminal A (LA), Luminal B (LB), HER2 subtype, and Triple-Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC). Immunohistochemistry is used to classify subtypes, although interlaboratory and interobserver variations can affect its accuracy, besides being a time-consuming technique. The Fourier transform infrared micro-spectroscopy may be coupled with deep learning for cancer evaluation, where there is still a lack of studies for subtypes and biomarker levels prediction. This study presents a novel 2D deep learning approach to achieve these predictions. Sixty micro-FTIR images of 320x320 pixels were collected from a human breast biopsies microarray. Data were clustered by K-means, preprocessed and 32x32 patches were generated using a fully automated approach. CaReNet-V2, a novel convolutional neural network, was developed to classify breast cancer (CA) vs adjacent tissue (AT) and molecular subtypes, and to predict biomarkers level. The clustering method enabled to remove non-tissue pixels. Test accuracies for CA vs AT and subtype were above 0.84. The model enabled the prediction of ER, PR, and HER2 levels, where borderline values showed lower performance (minimum accuracy of 0.54). Ki67 percentage regression demonstrated a mean error of 3.6%. Thus, CaReNet-V2 is a potential technique for breast cancer biopsies evaluation, standing out as a screening analysis technique and helping to prioritize patients.
LLM-in-the-loop: Leveraging Large Language Model for Thematic Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Thematic analysis (TA) has been widely used for analyzing qualitative data in many disciplines and fields. To ensure reliable analysis, the same piece of data is typically assigned to at least two human coders. Moreover, to produce meaningful and useful analysis, human coders develop and deepen their data interpretation and coding over multiple iterations, making TA labor-intensive and time-consuming. Recently the emerging field of large language models (LLMs) research has shown that LLMs have the potential replicate human-like behavior in various tasks: in particular, LLMs outperform crowd workers on text-annotation tasks, suggesting an opportunity to leverage LLMs on TA. We propose a human-LLM collaboration framework (i.e., LLM-in-the-loop) to conduct TA with in-context learning (ICL). This framework provides the prompt to frame discussions with a LLM (e.g., GPT-3.5) to generate the final codebook for TA. We demonstrate the utility of this framework using survey datasets on the aspects of the music listening experience and the usage of a password manager. Results of the two case studies show that the proposed framework yields similar coding quality to that of human coders but reduces TA's labor and time demands.
Robot Fine-Tuning Made Easy: Pre-Training Rewards and Policies for Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The pre-train and fine-tune paradigm in machine learning has had dramatic success in a wide range of domains because the use of existing data or pre-trained models on the internet enables quick and easy learning of new tasks. We aim to enable this paradigm in robotic reinforcement learning, allowing a robot to learn a new task with little human effort by leveraging data and models from the Internet. However, reinforcement learning often requires significant human effort in the form of manual reward specification or environment resets, even if the policy is pre-trained. We introduce RoboFuME, a reset-free fine-tuning system that pre-trains a multi-task manipulation policy from diverse datasets of prior experiences and self-improves online to learn a target task with minimal human intervention. Our insights are to utilize calibrated offline reinforcement learning techniques to ensure efficient online fine-tuning of a pre-trained policy in the presence of distribution shifts and leverage pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) to build a robust reward classifier for autonomously providing reward signals during the online fine-tuning process. In a diverse set of five real robot manipulation tasks, we show that our method can incorporate data from an existing robot dataset collected at a different institution and improve on a target task within as little as 3 hours of autonomous real-world experience. We also demonstrate in simulation experiments that our method outperforms prior works that use different RL algorithms or different approaches for predicting rewards. Project website: https://robofume.github.io
Online Detection of AI-Generated Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With advancements in AI-generated images coming on a continuous basis, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish traditionally-sourced images (e.g., photos, artwork) from AI-generated ones. Previous detection methods study the generalization from a single generator to another in isolation. However, in reality, new generators are released on a streaming basis. We study generalization in this setting, training on N models and testing on the next (N+k), following the historical release dates of well-known generation methods. Furthermore, images increasingly consist of both real and generated components, for example through image inpainting. Thus, we extend this approach to pixel prediction, demonstrating strong performance using automatically-generated inpainted data. In addition, for settings where commercial models are not publicly available for automatic data generation, we evaluate if pixel detectors can be trained solely on whole synthetic images.
SyncFusion: Multimodal Onset-synchronized Video-to-Audio Foley Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Sound design involves creatively selecting, recording, and editing sound effects for various media like cinema, video games, and virtual/augmented reality. One of the most time-consuming steps when designing sound is synchronizing audio with video. In some cases, environmental recordings from video shoots are available, which can aid in the process. However, in video games and animations, no reference audio exists, requiring manual annotation of event timings from the video. We propose a system to extract repetitive actions onsets from a video, which are then used - in conjunction with audio or textual embeddings - to condition a diffusion model trained to generate a new synchronized sound effects audio track. In this way, we leave complete creative control to the sound designer while removing the burden of synchronization with video. Furthermore, editing the onset track or changing the conditioning embedding requires much less effort than editing the audio track itself, simplifying the sonification process. We provide sound examples, source code, and pretrained models to faciliate reproducibility
Data Augmentation Techniques for Machine Translation of Code-Switched Texts: A Comparative Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Code-switching (CSW) text generation has been receiving increasing attention as a solution to address data scarcity. In light of this growing interest, we need more comprehensive studies comparing different augmentation approaches. In this work, we compare three popular approaches: lexical replacements, linguistic theories, and back-translation (BT), in the context of Egyptian Arabic-English CSW. We assess the effectiveness of the approaches on machine translation and the quality of augmentations through human evaluation. We show that BT and CSW predictive-based lexical replacement, being trained on CSW parallel data, perform best on both tasks. Linguistic theories and random lexical replacement prove to be effective in the lack of CSW parallel data, where both approaches achieve similar results.
Moral Foundations of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Moral foundations theory (MFT) is a psychological assessment tool that decomposes human moral reasoning into five factors, including care/harm, liberty/oppression, and sanctity/degradation (Graham et al., 2009). People vary in the weight they place on these dimensions when making moral decisions, in part due to their cultural upbringing and political ideology. As large language models (LLMs) are trained on datasets collected from the internet, they may reflect the biases that are present in such corpora. This paper uses MFT as a lens to analyze whether popular LLMs have acquired a bias towards a particular set of moral values. We analyze known LLMs and find they exhibit particular moral foundations, and show how these relate to human moral foundations and political affiliations. We also measure the consistency of these biases, or whether they vary strongly depending on the context of how the model is prompted. Finally, we show that we can adversarially select prompts that encourage the moral to exhibit a particular set of moral foundations, and that this can affect the model's behavior on downstream tasks. These findings help illustrate the potential risks and unintended consequences of LLMs assuming a particular moral stance.
Containerized Vertical Farming Using Cobots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Containerized vertical farming is a type of vertical farming practice using hydroponics in which plants are grown in vertical layers within a mobile shipping container. Space limitations within shipping containers make the automation of different farming operations challenging. In this paper, we explore the use of cobots (i.e., collaborative robots) to automate two key farming operations, namely, the transplantation of saplings and the harvesting of grown plants. Our method uses a single demonstration from a farmer to extract the motion constraints associated with the tasks, namely, transplanting and harvesting, and can then generalize to different instances of the same task. For transplantation, the motion constraint arises during insertion of the sapling within the growing tube, whereas for harvesting, it arises during extraction from the growing tube. We present experimental results to show that using RGBD camera images (obtained from an eye-in-hand configuration) and one demonstration for each task, it is feasible to perform transplantation of saplings and harvesting of leafy greens using a cobot, without task-specific programming.
What Makes it Ok to Set a Fire? Iterative Self-distillation of Contexts and Rationales for Disambiguating Defeasible Social and Moral Situations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Moral or ethical judgments rely heavily on the specific contexts in which they occur. Understanding varying shades of defeasible contextualizations (i.e., additional information that strengthens or attenuates the moral acceptability of an action) is critical to accurately represent the subtlety and intricacy of grounded human moral judgment in real-life scenarios. We introduce defeasible moral reasoning: a task to provide grounded contexts that make an action more or less morally acceptable, along with commonsense rationales that justify the reasoning. To elicit high-quality task data, we take an iterative self-distillation approach that starts from a small amount of unstructured seed knowledge from GPT-3 and then alternates between (1) self-distillation from student models; (2) targeted filtering with a critic model trained by human judgment (to boost validity) and NLI (to boost diversity); (3) self-imitation learning (to amplify the desired data quality). This process yields a student model that produces defeasible contexts with improved validity, diversity, and defeasibility. From this model we distill a high-quality dataset, δ-Rules-of-Thumb, of 1.2M entries of contextualizations and rationales for 115K defeasible moral actions rated highly by human annotators 85.9% to 99.8% of the time. Using δ-RoT we obtain a final student model that wins over all intermediate student models by a notable margin.
KITAB: Evaluating LLMs on Constraint Satisfaction for Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study the ability of state-of-the art models to answer constraint satisfaction queries for information retrieval (e.g., 'a list of ice cream shops in San Diego'). In the past, such queries were considered to be tasks that could only be solved via web-search or knowledge bases. More recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated initial emergent abilities in this task. However, many current retrieval benchmarks are either saturated or do not measure constraint satisfaction. Motivated by rising concerns around factual incorrectness and hallucinations of LLMs, we present KITAB, a new dataset for measuring constraint satisfaction abilities of language models. KITAB consists of book-related data across more than 600 authors and 13,000 queries, and also offers an associated dynamic data collection and constraint verification approach for acquiring similar test data for other authors. Our extended experiments on GPT4 and GPT3.5 characterize and decouple common failure modes across dimensions such as information popularity, constraint types, and context availability. Results show that in the absence of context, models exhibit severe limitations as measured by irrelevant information, factual errors, and incompleteness, many of which exacerbate as information popularity decreases. While context availability mitigates irrelevant information, it is not helpful for satisfying constraints, identifying fundamental barriers to constraint satisfaction. We open source our contributions to foster further research on improving constraint satisfaction abilities of future models.
Symmetric Strategies for Multi-Access IoT Network Optimization: A Common Information Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

In the context of IoT deployments, a multitude of devices concurrently require network access to transmit data over a shared communication channel. Employing symmetric strategies can effectively facilitate the collaborative use of the communication medium among these devices. By adopting such strategies, devices collectively optimize their transmission parameters, resulting in minimized collisions and enhanced overall network throughput. Our primary focus centers on the formulation of symmetric (i.e., identical) strategies for the sensors, aiming to optimize a finite horizon team objective. The imposition of symmetric strategies introduces novel facets and complexities into the team problem. To address this, we embrace the common information approach and adapt it to accommodate the use of symmetric strategies. This adaptation yields a dynamic programming framework grounded in common information, wherein each step entails the minimization of a single function mapping from an agent's private information space to the space of probability distributions over possible actions. Our proposed policy/method incurs a reduced cumulative cost compared to other methods employing symmetric strategies, a point substantiated by our simulation results.
I$^2$MD: 3D Action Representation Learning with Inter- and Intra-modal Mutual Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent progresses on self-supervised 3D human action representation learning are largely attributed to contrastive learning. However, in conventional contrastive frameworks, the rich complementarity between different skeleton modalities remains under-explored. Moreover, optimized with distinguishing self-augmented samples, models struggle with numerous similar positive instances in the case of limited action categories. In this work, we tackle the aforementioned problems by introducing a general Inter- and Intra-modal Mutual Distillation (I$^2$MD) framework. In I$^2$MD, we first re-formulate the cross-modal interaction as a Cross-modal Mutual Distillation (CMD) process. Different from existing distillation solutions that transfer the knowledge of a pre-trained and fixed teacher to the student, in CMD, the knowledge is continuously updated and bidirectionally distilled between modalities during pre-training. To alleviate the interference of similar samples and exploit their underlying contexts, we further design the Intra-modal Mutual Distillation (IMD) strategy, In IMD, the Dynamic Neighbors Aggregation (DNA) mechanism is first introduced, where an additional cluster-level discrimination branch is instantiated in each modality. It adaptively aggregates highly-correlated neighboring features, forming local cluster-level contrasting. Mutual distillation is then performed between the two branches for cross-level knowledge exchange. Extensive experiments on three datasets show that our approach sets a series of new records.