OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reducing the Cost: Cross-Prompt Pre-Finetuning for Short Answer Scoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automated Short Answer Scoring (SAS) is the task of automatically scoring a given input to a prompt based on rubrics and reference answers. Although SAS is useful in real-world applications, both rubrics and reference answers differ between prompts, thus requiring a need to acquire new data and train a model for each new prompt. Such requirements are costly, especially for schools and online courses where resources are limited and only a few prompts are used. In this work, we attempt to reduce this cost through a two-phase approach: train a model on existing rubrics and answers with gold score signals and finetune it on a new prompt. Specifically, given that scoring rubrics and reference answers differ for each prompt, we utilize key phrases, or representative expressions that the answer should contain to increase scores, and train a SAS model to learn the relationship between key phrases and answers using already annotated prompts (i.e., cross-prompts). Our experimental results show that finetuning on existing cross-prompt data with key phrases significantly improves scoring accuracy, especially when the training data is limited. Finally, our extensive analysis shows that it is crucial to design the model so that it can learn the task's general property.
Including Non-Autistic Peers in Games Designed for Autistic Socialization
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Through a review of current game practices, the author highlights concerns regarding the safety of public social games and the singular medical approach to serious game design for autism. The paper identifies a disconnect between the needs of autistic children and the existing solutions. To fill this gap, a neurodiversity approach to serious game design is proposed. This approach aims to address the social needs of autistic children, enabling them to interact with their neurotypical peers directly, confidently, and safely.
Research Advances and New Paradigms for Biology-inspired Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are gaining popularity in the computational simulation and artificial intelligence fields owing to their biological plausibility and computational efficiency. This paper explores the historical development of SNN and concludes that these two fields are intersecting and merging rapidly. Following the successful application of Dynamic Vision Sensors (DVS) and Dynamic Audio Sensors (DAS), SNNs have found some proper paradigms, such as continuous visual signal tracking, automatic speech recognition, and reinforcement learning for continuous control, that have extensively supported their key features, including spike encoding, neuronal heterogeneity, specific functional circuits, and multiscale plasticity. Compared to these real-world paradigms, the brain contains a spiking version of the biology-world paradigm, which exhibits a similar level of complexity and is usually considered a mirror of the real world. Considering the projected rapid development of invasive and parallel Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), as well as the new BCI-based paradigms that include online pattern recognition and stimulus control of biological spike trains, SNNs naturally leverage their advantages in energy efficiency, robustness, and flexibility. The biological brain has inspired the present study of SNNs and effective SNN machine-learning algorithms, which can help enhance neuroscience discoveries in the brain by applying them to the new BCI paradigm. Such two-way interactions with positive feedback can accelerate brain science research and brain-inspired intelligence technology.
LMM-VQA: Advancing Video Quality Assessment with Large Multimodal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of $5\%$ in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.
A Multiscale Gradient Fusion Method for Edge Detection in Color Images Utilizing the CBM3D Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, a color edge detection strategy based on collaborative filtering combined with multiscale gradient fusion is proposed. The block-matching and 3D (BM3D) filter are used to enhance the sparse representation in the transform domain and achieve the effect of denoising, whereas the multiscale gradient fusion makes up for the defect of loss of details in single-scale edge detection and improves the edge detection resolution and quality. First, the RGB images in the dataset are converted to XYZ color space images through mathematical operations. Second, the colored block-matching and 3D (CBM3D) filter are used on the sparse images and to remove noise interference. Then, the vector gradients of the color image and the anisotropic Gaussian directional derivative of the two scale parameters are calculated and averaged pixel-by-pixel to obtain a new edge strength map. Finally, the edge features are enhanced by image normalization and non-maximum suppression technology, and on that basis, the edge contour is obtained by double threshold selection and a new morphological refinement method. Through an experimental analysis of the edge detection dataset, the method proposed has good noise robustness and high edge quality, which is better than the Color Sobel, Color Canny, SE and Color AGDD as shown by the PR curve, AUC, PSNR, MSE, and FOM indicators.
Transdisciplinary research: How much is academia heeding the call to work more closely with societal stakeholders such as industry, government, and nonprofits?
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Transdisciplinary research, the co-creation of scientific knowledge by multiple stakeholders, is considered essential for addressing major societal problems. Research policy makers and academic leaders frequently call for closer collaboration between academia and societal stakeholders to address the grand challenges of our time. This bibliometric study evaluates progress in collaboration between academia and three societal stakeholders: industry, government, and nonprofit organisations. It analyses the level of co-publishing between academia and these societal stakeholders over the period 2013-2022. We found that research collaboration between academia and all stakeholder types studied grew in absolute terms. However, academia-industry collaboration declined 16% relative to overall academic output while academia-government and academia-nonprofit collaboration grew at roughly the same pace as academic output. Country and field of research breakdowns revealed wide variance. In light of previous work, we consider potential explanations for the gap between policymakers' aspirations and the real global trends. This study is a useful demonstration of large scale, quantitative bibliometric techniques for research policymakers to track the impact of decisions related to funding, intellectual property law, and nonprofit support.
Collaborative Perception in Multi-Robot Systems: Case Studies in Household Cleaning and Warehouse Operations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the paradigm of Collaborative Perception (CP), where multiple robots and sensors in the environment share and integrate sensor data to construct a comprehensive representation of the surroundings. By aggregating data from various sensors and utilizing advanced algorithms, the collaborative perception framework improves task efficiency, coverage, and safety. Two case studies are presented to showcase the benefits of collaborative perception in multi-robot systems. The first case study illustrates the benefits and advantages of using CP for the task of household cleaning with a team of cleaning robots. The second case study performs a comparative analysis of the performance of CP versus Standalone Perception (SP) for Autonomous Mobile Robots operating in a warehouse environment. The case studies validate the effectiveness of CP in enhancing multi-robot coordination, task completion, and overall system performance and its potential to impact operations in other applications as well. Future investigations will focus on optimizing the framework and validating its performance through empirical testing.
Alleviating Class Imbalance in Semi-supervised Multi-organ Segmentation via Balanced Subclass Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has shown notable potential in relieving the heavy demand of dense prediction tasks on large-scale well-annotated datasets, especially for the challenging multi-organ segmentation (MoS). However, the prevailing class-imbalance problem in MoS, caused by the substantial variations in organ size, exacerbates the learning difficulty of the SSL network. To alleviate this issue, we present a two-phase semi-supervised network (BSR-Net) with balanced subclass regularization for MoS. Concretely, in Phase I, we introduce a class-balanced subclass generation strategy based on balanced clustering to effectively generate multiple balanced subclasses from original biased ones according to their pixel proportions. Then, in Phase II, we design an auxiliary subclass segmentation (SCS) task within the multi-task framework of the main MoS task. The SCS task contributes a balanced subclass regularization to the main MoS task and transfers unbiased knowledge to the MoS network, thus alleviating the influence of the class-imbalance problem. Extensive experiments conducted on two publicly available datasets, i.e., the MICCAI FLARE 2022 dataset and the WORD dataset, verify the superior performance of our method compared with other methods.
Bridging the gap between Learning-to-plan, Motion Primitives and Safe Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Trajectory planning under kinodynamic constraints is fundamental for advanced robotics applications that require dexterous, reactive, and rapid skills in complex environments. These constraints, which may represent task, safety, or actuator limitations, are essential for ensuring the proper functioning of robotic platforms and preventing unexpected behaviors. Recent advances in kinodynamic planning demonstrate that learning-to-plan techniques can generate complex and reactive motions under intricate constraints. However, these techniques necessitate the analytical modeling of both the robot and the entire task, a limiting assumption when systems are extremely complex or when constructing accurate task models is prohibitive. This paper addresses this limitation by combining learning-to-plan methods with reinforcement learning, resulting in a novel integration of black-box learning of motion primitives and optimization. We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art safe reinforcement learning methods, showing that our technique, particularly when exploiting task structure, outperforms baseline methods in challenging scenarios such as planning to hit in robot air hockey. This work demonstrates the potential of our integrated approach to enhance the performance and safety of robots operating under complex kinodynamic constraints.
Exploring GPU-to-GPU Communication: Insights into Supercomputer Interconnects
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-GPU nodes are increasingly common in the rapidly evolving landscape of exascale supercomputers. On these systems, GPUs on the same node are connected through dedicated networks, with bandwidths up to a few terabits per second. However, gauging performance expectations and maximizing system efficiency is challenging due to different technologies, design options, and software layers. This paper comprehensively characterizes three supercomputers - Alps, Leonardo, and LUMI - each with a unique architecture and design. We focus on performance evaluation of intra-node and inter-node interconnects on up to 4096 GPUs, using a mix of intra-node and inter-node benchmarks. By analyzing its limitations and opportunities, we aim to offer practical guidance to researchers, system architects, and software developers dealing with multi-GPU supercomputing. Our results show that there is untapped bandwidth, and there are still many opportunities for optimization, ranging from network to software optimization.
Neighborhood and Global Perturbations Supported SAM in Federated Learning: From Local Tweaks To Global Awareness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) can be coordinated under the orchestration of a central server to collaboratively build a privacy-preserving model without the need for data exchange. However, participant data heterogeneity leads to local optima divergence, subsequently affecting convergence outcomes. Recent research has focused on global sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) and dynamic regularization techniques to enhance consistency between global and local generalization and optimization objectives. Nonetheless, the estimation of global SAM introduces additional computational and memory overhead, while dynamic regularization suffers from bias in the local and global dual variables due to training isolation. In this paper, we propose a novel FL algorithm, FedTOGA, designed to consider optimization and generalization objectives while maintaining minimal uplink communication overhead. By linking local perturbations to global updates, global generalization consistency is improved. Additionally, global updates are used to correct local dynamic regularizers, reducing dual variables bias and enhancing optimization consistency. Global updates are passively received by clients, reducing overhead. We also propose neighborhood perturbation to approximate local perturbation, analyzing its strengths and limitations. Theoretical analysis shows FedTOGA achieves faster convergence $O(1/T)$ under non-convex functions. Empirical studies demonstrate that FedTOGA outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, with a 1\% accuracy increase and 30\% faster convergence, achieving state-of-the-art.
EMDFNet: Efficient Multi-scale and Diverse Feature Network for Traffic Sign Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The detection of small objects, particularly traffic signs, is a critical subtask within object detection and autonomous driving. Despite the notable achievements in previous research, two primary challenges persist. Firstly, the main issue is the singleness of feature extraction. Secondly, the detection process fails to effectively integrate with objects of varying sizes or scales. These issues are also prevalent in generic object detection. Motivated by these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel object detection network named Efficient Multi-scale and Diverse Feature Network (EMDFNet) for traffic sign detection that integrates an Augmented Shortcut Module and an Efficient Hybrid Encoder to address the aforementioned issues simultaneously. Specifically, the Augmented Shortcut Module utilizes multiple branches to integrate various spatial semantic information and channel semantic information, thereby enhancing feature diversity. The Efficient Hybrid Encoder utilizes global feature fusion and local feature interaction based on various features to generate distinctive classification features by integrating feature information in an adaptable manner. Extensive experiments on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K (TT100K) benchmark and the German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) demonstrate that our EMDFNet outperforms other state-of-the-art detectors in performance while retaining the real-time processing capabilities of single-stage models. This substantiates the effectiveness of EMDFNet in detecting small traffic signs.
Feature Aligning Few shot Learning Method Using Local Descriptors Weighted Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Few-shot classification involves identifying new categories using a limited number of labeled samples. Current few-shot classification methods based on local descriptors primarily leverage underlying consistent features across visible and invisible classes, facing challenges including redundant neighboring information, noisy representations, and limited interpretability. This paper proposes a Feature Aligning Few-shot Learning Method Using Local Descriptors Weighted Rules (FAFD-LDWR). It innovatively introduces a cross-normalization method into few-shot image classification to preserve the discriminative information of local descriptors as much as possible; and enhances classification performance by aligning key local descriptors of support and query sets to remove background noise. FAFD-LDWR performs excellently on three benchmark datasets , outperforming state-of-the-art methods in both 1-shot and 5-shot settings. The designed visualization experiments also demonstrate FAFD-LDWR's improvement in prediction interpretability.
Celtibero: Robust Layered Aggregation for Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) is an innovative approach to distributed machine learning. While FL offers significant privacy advantages, it also faces security challenges, particularly from poisoning attacks where adversaries deliberately manipulate local model updates to degrade model performance or introduce hidden backdoors. Existing defenses against these attacks have been shown to be effective when the data on the nodes is identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.), but they often fail under less restrictive, non-i.i.d data conditions. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Celtibero, a novel defense mechanism that integrates layered aggregation to enhance robustness against adversarial manipulation. Through extensive experiments on the MNIST and IMDB datasets, we demonstrate that Celtibero consistently achieves high main task accuracy (MTA) while maintaining minimal attack success rates (ASR) across a range of untargeted and targeted poisoning attacks. Our results highlight the superiority of Celtibero over existing defenses such as FL-Defender, LFighter, and FLAME, establishing it as a highly effective solution for securing federated learning systems against sophisticated poisoning attacks.
Towards Synthetic Trace Generation of Modeling Operations using In-Context Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Producing accurate software models is crucial in model-driven software engineering (MDE). However, modeling complex systems is an error-prone task that requires deep application domain knowledge. In the past decade, several automated techniques have been proposed to support academic and industrial practitioners by providing relevant modeling operations. Nevertheless, those techniques require a huge amount of training data that cannot be available due to several factors, e.g., privacy issues. The advent of large language models (LLMs) can support the generation of synthetic data although state-of-the-art approaches are not yet supporting the generation of modeling operations. To fill the gap, we propose a conceptual framework that combines modeling event logs, intelligent modeling assistants, and the generation of modeling operations using LLMs. In particular, the architecture comprises modeling components that help the designer specify the system, record its operation within a graphical modeling environment, and automatically recommend relevant operations. In addition, we generate a completely new dataset of modeling events by telling on the most prominent LLMs currently available. As a proof of concept, we instantiate the proposed framework using a set of existing modeling tools employed in industrial use cases within different European projects. To assess the proposed methodology, we first evaluate the capability of the examined LLMs to generate realistic modeling operations by relying on well-founded distance metrics. Then, we evaluate the recommended operations by considering real-world industrial modeling artifacts. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can generate modeling events even though the overall accuracy is higher when considering human-based operations.
May the Forgetting Be with You: Alternate Replay for Learning with Noisy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Forgetting presents a significant challenge during incremental training, making it particularly demanding for contemporary AI systems to assimilate new knowledge in streaming data environments. To address this issue, most approaches in Continual Learning (CL) rely on the replay of a restricted buffer of past data. However, the presence of noise in real-world scenarios, where human annotation is constrained by time limitations or where data is automatically gathered from the web, frequently renders these strategies vulnerable. In this study, we address the problem of CL under Noisy Labels (CLN) by introducing Alternate Experience Replay (AER), which takes advantage of forgetting to maintain a clear distinction between clean, complex, and noisy samples in the memory buffer. The idea is that complex or mislabeled examples, which hardly fit the previously learned data distribution, are most likely to be forgotten. To grasp the benefits of such a separation, we equip AER with Asymmetric Balanced Sampling (ABS): a new sample selection strategy that prioritizes purity on the current task while retaining relevant samples from the past. Through extensive computational comparisons, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of both accuracy and purity of the obtained buffer, resulting in a remarkable average gain of 4.71% points in accuracy with respect to existing loss-based purification strategies. Code is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/mammoth.