OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
UnibucLLM: Harnessing LLMs for Automated Prediction of Item Difficulty and Response Time for Multiple-Choice Questions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This work explores a novel data augmentation method based on Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting item difficulty and response time of retired USMLE Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) in the BEA 2024 Shared Task. Our approach is based on augmenting the dataset with answers from zero-shot LLMs (Falcon, Meditron, Mistral) and employing transformer-based models based on six alternative feature combinations. The results suggest that predicting the difficulty of questions is more challenging. Notably, our top performing methods consistently include the question text, and benefit from the variability of LLM answers, highlighting the potential of LLMs for improving automated assessment in medical licensing exams. We make our code available https://github.com/ana-rogoz/BEA-2024.
Swa Bhasha: Message-Based Singlish to Sinhala Transliteration
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Machine Transliteration provides the ability to transliterate a basic language into different languages in a computational way. Transliteration is an important technical process that has caught the attention most recently. The Sinhala transliteration has many constraints because of the insufficiency of resources in the Sinhala language. Due to these limitations, Sinhala Transliteration is highly complex and time-consuming. Therefore, the majority of the Sri Lankans uses non-formal texting language named 'Singlish' to make that process simple. This study has focused on the transliteration of the Singlish language at the word level by reducing the complication in the transliteration. A new approach of coding system has invented with the rule-based approach that can map the matching Sinhala words even without the vowels. Various typing patterns were collected by different communities for this. The collected data have analyzed with every Sinhala character and unique Singlish patterns related to them were generated. The system has introduced a newly initiated numeric coding system to use with the Singlish letters by matching with the recognized typing patterns. For the mapping process, fuzzy logic-based implementation has used. A codified dictionary has also implemented including unique numeric values. In this system, Each Romanized English letter was assigned with a unique numeric code that can construct a unique pattern for each word. The system can identify the most relevant Sinhala word that matches with the pattern of the Singlish word or it gives the most related word suggestions. For example, the word 'kiyanna,kianna, kynna, kynn, kiynna' have mapped with the accurate Sinhala word "kiyanna". These results revealed that the 'Swa Bhasha' transliteration system has the ability to enhance the Sinhala users' experience while conducting the texting in Singlish to Sinhala.
Declarative Concurrent Data Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Implementing concurrent data structures is challenging and requires a deep understanding of concurrency concepts and careful design to ensure correctness, performance, and scalability. Further, composing operations on two or more concurrent data structures often requires a synchronization wrapper to ensure the operations are applied together atomically, resulting in serialization and, thereby, giving up the performance benefit of the individual data structures. DBMS provides generalized concurrency control (CC) and is a good fit for implementing concurrent data structures. However, DBMSs are over-generalized for this use case, which fails to match the performance of specialized implementations. This paper makes the case for the Declarative Concurrent Data Structures (DCDS) framework for automatically generating concurrent data structures from a serial specification. In DCDS, users declare the attributes and methods needed for their desired data structure through an embedded DSL at design time. DCDS automatically injects CC at build-time, generating a concurrent intermediate representation (IR) compiled into machine code. A declarative interface for designing data structure enables efficient composability through co-optimizing component structures; optimizations are applied to both the composed serial specification and the generated concurrent IR. We realize the DCDS framework in our prototype system Rosti and experimentally show that data structures declared in Rosti can be efficiently composed by co-optimizing their logical functionality and the generated CC protocol. Our evaluation shows that composing a map and a list to create an LRU container can benefit up to 2X performance scalability in Rosti compared to an open-source library. We demonstrate the applicability of DCDS as an in-process OLTP by comparing it with in-memory DBMS, Proteus, and showing up to 2X performance gains.
Text-dependent Speaker Verification (TdSV) Challenge 2024: Challenge Evaluation Plan
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This document outlines the Text-dependent Speaker Verification (TdSV) Challenge 2024, which centers on analyzing and exploring novel approaches for text-dependent speaker verification. The primary goal of this challenge is to motive participants to develop single yet competitive systems, conduct thorough analyses, and explore innovative concepts such as multi-task learning, self-supervised learning, few-shot learning, and others, for text-dependent speaker verification.
The Child Factor in Child-Robot Interaction: Discovering the Impact of Developmental Stage and Individual Characteristics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Social robots, owing to their embodied physical presence in human spaces and the ability to directly interact with the users and their environment, have a great potential to support children in various activities in education, healthcare and daily life. Child-Robot Interaction (CRI), as any domain involving children, inevitably faces the major challenge of designing generalized strategies to work with unique, turbulent and very diverse individuals. Addressing this challenging endeavor requires to combine the standpoint of the robot-centered perspective, i.e. what robots technically can and are best positioned to do, with that of the child-centered perspective, i.e. what children may gain from the robot and how the robot should act to best support them in reaching the goals of the interaction. This article aims to help researchers bridge the two perspectives and proposes to address the development of CRI scenarios with insights from child psychology and child development theories. To that end, we review the outcomes of the CRI studies, outline common trends and challenges, and identify two key factors from child psychology that impact child-robot interactions, especially in a long-term perspective: developmental stage and individual characteristics. For both of them we discuss prospective experiment designs which support building naturally engaging and sustainable interactions.
SiNC+: Adaptive Camera-Based Vitals with Unsupervised Learning of Periodic Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Subtle periodic signals, such as blood volume pulse and respiration, can be extracted from RGB video, enabling noncontact health monitoring at low cost. Advancements in remote pulse estimation -- or remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) -- are currently driven by deep learning solutions. However, modern approaches are trained and evaluated on benchmark datasets with ground truth from contact-PPG sensors. We present the first non-contrastive unsupervised learning framework for signal regression to mitigate the need for labelled video data. With minimal assumptions of periodicity and finite bandwidth, our approach discovers the blood volume pulse directly from unlabelled videos. We find that encouraging sparse power spectra within normal physiological bandlimits and variance over batches of power spectra is sufficient for learning visual features of periodic signals. We perform the first experiments utilizing unlabelled video data not specifically created for rPPG to train robust pulse rate estimators. Given the limited inductive biases, we successfully applied the same approach to camera-based respiration by changing the bandlimits of the target signal. This shows that the approach is general enough for unsupervised learning of bandlimited quasi-periodic signals from different domains. Furthermore, we show that the framework is effective for finetuning models on unlabelled video from a single subject, allowing for personalized and adaptive signal regressors.
Real-Time Safe Control of Neural Network Dynamic Models with Sound Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Safe control of neural network dynamic models (NNDMs) is important to robotics and many applications. However, it remains challenging to compute an optimal safe control in real time for NNDM. To enable real-time computation, we propose to use a sound approximation of the NNDM in the control synthesis. In particular, we propose Bernstein over-approximated neural dynamics (BOND) based on the Bernstein polynomial over-approximation (BPO) of ReLU activation functions in NNDM. To mitigate the errors introduced by the approximation and to ensure persistent feasibility of the safe control problems, we synthesize a worst-case safety index using the most unsafe approximated state within the BPO relaxation of NNDM offline. For the online real-time optimization, we formulate the first-order Taylor approximation of the nonlinear worst-case safety constraint as an additional linear layer of NNDM with the l2 bounded bias term for the higher-order remainder. Comprehensive experiments with different neural dynamics and safety constraints show that with safety guaranteed, our NNDMs with sound approximation are 10-100 times faster than the safe control baseline that uses mixed integer programming (MIP), validating the effectiveness of the worst-case safety index and scalability of the proposed BOND in real-time large-scale settings. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/BOND.
Exploring Hybrid Work Realities: A Case Study with Software Professionals From Underrepresented Groups
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Context. In the post-pandemic era, software professionals resist returning to office routines, favoring the flexibility gained from remote work. Hybrid work structures, then, become popular within software companies, allowing them to choose not to work in the office every day, preserving flexibility, and creating several benefits, including an increase in the support for underrepresented groups in software development. Goal. We investigated how software professionals from underrepresented groups are experiencing post-pandemic hybrid work. In particular, we analyzed the experiences of neurodivergents, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and people with disabilities working in the software industry. Method. We conducted a case study focusing on the underrepresented groups within a well-established South American software company. Results. Hybrid work is preferred by software professionals from underrepresented groups in the post-pandemic era. Advantages include improved focus at home, personalized work setups, and accommodation for health treatments. Concerns arise about isolation and inadequate infrastructure support, highlighting the need for proactive organizational strategies. Conclusions. Hybrid work emerges as a promising strategy for fostering diversity and inclusion in software engineering, addressing past limitations of the traditional office environment.
Paths to Testing: Why Women Enter and Remain in Software Testing?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Background. Women bring unique problem-solving skills to software development, often favoring a holistic approach and attention to detail. In software testing, precision and attention to detail are essential as professionals explore system functionalities to identify defects. Recognizing the alignment between these skills and women's strengths can derive strategies for enhancing diversity in software engineering. Goal. This study investigates the motivations behind women choosing careers in software testing, aiming to provide insights into their reasons for entering and remaining in the field. Method. This study used a cross-sectional survey methodology following established software engineering guidelines, collecting data from women in software testing to explore their motivations, experiences, and perspectives. Findings. The findings reveal that women enter software testing due to increased entry-level job opportunities, work-life balance, and even fewer gender stereotypes. Their motivations to stay include the impact of delivering high-quality software, continuous learning opportunities, and the challenges the activities bring to them. However, inclusiveness and career development in the field need improvement for sustained diversity. Conclusion. Preliminary yet significant, these findings offer interesting insights for researchers and practitioners towards the understanding of women's diverse motivations in software testing and how this understanding is important for fostering professional growth and creating a more inclusive and equitable industry landscape.
A Grassroots Architecture to Supplant Global Digital Platforms by a Global Digital Democracy
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

We present an architectural alternative to global digital platforms termed grassroots, designed to serve the social, economic, civic, and political needs of local digital communities, as well as their federation. Grassroots platforms may offer local communities an alternative to global digital platforms while operating solely on the smartphones of their members, forsaking any global resources other than the network itself. Such communities may form digital economies without initial capital or external credit, exercise sovereign democratic governance, and federate, ultimately resulting in the grassroots formation of a global digital democracy.
GWLZ: A Group-wise Learning-based Lossy Compression Framework for Scientific Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid expansion of computational capabilities and the ever-growing scale of modern HPC systems present formidable challenges in managing exascale scientific data. Faced with such vast datasets, traditional lossless compression techniques prove insufficient in reducing data size to a manageable level while preserving all information intact. In response, researchers have turned to error-bounded lossy compression methods, which offer a balance between data size reduction and information retention. However, despite their utility, these compressors employing conventional techniques struggle with limited reconstruction quality. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from recent advancements in deep learning and propose GWLZ, a novel group-wise learning-based lossy compression framework with multiple lightweight learnable enhancer models. Leveraging a group of neural networks, GWLZ significantly enhances the decompressed data reconstruction quality with negligible impact on the compression efficiency. Experimental results on different fields from the Nyx dataset demonstrate remarkable improvements by GWLZ, achieving up to 20% quality enhancements with negligible overhead as low as 0.0003x.
Dynamic in Static: Hybrid Visual Correspondence for Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Conventional video object segmentation (VOS) methods usually necessitate a substantial volume of pixel-level annotated video data for fully supervised learning. In this paper, we present HVC, a \textbf{h}ybrid static-dynamic \textbf{v}isual \textbf{c}orrespondence framework for self-supervised VOS. HVC extracts pseudo-dynamic signals from static images, enabling an efficient and scalable VOS model. Our approach utilizes a minimalist fully-convolutional architecture to capture static-dynamic visual correspondence in image-cropped views. To achieve this objective, we present a unified self-supervised approach to learn visual representations of static-dynamic feature similarity. Firstly, we establish static correspondence by utilizing a priori coordinate information between cropped views to guide the formation of consistent static feature representations. Subsequently, we devise a concise convolutional layer to capture the forward / backward pseudo-dynamic signals between two views, serving as cues for dynamic representations. Finally, we propose a hybrid visual correspondence loss to learn joint static and dynamic consistency representations. Our approach, without bells and whistles, necessitates only one training session using static image data, significantly reducing memory consumption ($\sim$16GB) and training time ($\sim$\textbf{2h}). Moreover, HVC achieves state-of-the-art performance in several self-supervised VOS benchmarks and additional video label propagation tasks.
MFHCA: Enhancing Speech Emotion Recognition Via Multi-Spatial Fusion and Hierarchical Cooperative Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech emotion recognition is crucial in human-computer interaction, but extracting and using emotional cues from audio poses challenges. This paper introduces MFHCA, a novel method for Speech Emotion Recognition using Multi-Spatial Fusion and Hierarchical Cooperative Attention on spectrograms and raw audio. We employ the Multi-Spatial Fusion module (MF) to efficiently identify emotion-related spectrogram regions and integrate Hubert features for higher-level acoustic information. Our approach also includes a Hierarchical Cooperative Attention module (HCA) to merge features from various auditory levels. We evaluate our method on the IEMOCAP dataset and achieve 2.6\% and 1.87\% improvements on the weighted accuracy and unweighted accuracy, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Faster Post-Quantum TLS 1.3 Based on ML-KEM: Implementation and Assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

TLS is extensively utilized for secure data transmission over networks. However, with the advent of quantum computers, the security of TLS based on traditional public-key cryptography is under threat. To counter quantum threats, it is imperative to integrate post-quantum algorithms into TLS. Most PQ-TLS research focuses on integration and evaluation, but few studies address the improvement of PQ-TLS performance by optimizing PQC implementation. For the TLS protocol, handshake performance is crucial, and for post-quantum TLS (PQ-TLS) the performance of post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) directly impacts handshake performance. In this work, we explore the impact of post-quantum KEMs on PQ-TLS performance. We explore how to improve ML-KEM performance using the latest Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions instruction set AVX-512. We detail a spectrum of techniques devised to parallelize polynomial multiplication, modular reduction, and other computationally intensive modules within ML-KEM. Our optimized ML-KEM implementation achieves up to 1.64x speedup compared to the latest AVX2 implementation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel batch key generation method for ML-KEM that can seamlessly integrate into the TLS protocols. The batch method accelerates the key generation procedure by 3.5x to 4.9x. We integrate the optimized AVX-512 implementation of ML-KEM into TLS 1.3, and assess handshake performance under both PQ-only and hybrid modes. The assessment demonstrates that our faster ML-KEM implementation results in a higher number of TLS 1.3 handshakes per second under both modes. Additionally, we revisit two IND-1-CCA KEM constructions discussed in Eurocrypt22 and Asiacrypt23. Besides, we implement them based on ML-KEM and integrate the one of better performance into TLS 1.3 with benchmarks.
AudioRepInceptionNeXt: A lightweight single-stream architecture for efficient audio recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Recent research has successfully adapted vision-based convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures for audio recognition tasks using Mel-Spectrograms. However, these CNNs have high computational costs and memory requirements, limiting their deployment on low-end edge devices. Motivated by the success of efficient vision models like InceptionNeXt and ConvNeXt, we propose AudioRepInceptionNeXt, a single-stream architecture. Its basic building block breaks down the parallel multi-branch depth-wise convolutions with descending scales of k x k kernels into a cascade of two multi-branch depth-wise convolutions. The first multi-branch consists of parallel multi-scale 1 x k depth-wise convolutional layers followed by a similar multi-branch employing parallel multi-scale k x 1 depth-wise convolutional layers. This reduces computational and memory footprint while separating time and frequency processing of Mel-Spectrograms. The large kernels capture global frequencies and long activities, while small kernels get local frequencies and short activities. We also reparameterize the multi-branch design during inference to further boost speed without losing accuracy. Experiments show that AudioRepInceptionNeXt reduces parameters and computations by 50%+ and improves inference speed 1.28x over state-of-the-art CNNs like the Slow-Fast while maintaining comparable accuracy. It also learns robustly across a variety of audio recognition tasks. Codes are available at https://github.com/StevenLauHKHK/AudioRepInceptionNeXt.
Masked Latent Transformer with the Random Masking Ratio to Advance the Diagnosis of Dental Fluorosis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Dental fluorosis is a chronic disease caused by long-term overconsumption of fluoride, which leads to changes in the appearance of tooth enamel. It is an important basis for early non-invasive diagnosis of endemic fluorosis. However, even dental professionals may not be able to accurately distinguish dental fluorosis and its severity based on tooth images. Currently, there is still a gap in research on applying deep learning to diagnosing dental fluorosis. Therefore, we construct the first open-source dental fluorosis image dataset (DFID), laying the foundation for deep learning research in this field. To advance the diagnosis of dental fluorosis, we propose a pioneering deep learning model called masked latent transformer with the random masking ratio (MLTrMR). MLTrMR introduces a mask latent modeling scheme based on Vision Transformer to enhance contextual learning of dental fluorosis lesion characteristics. Consisting of a latent embedder, encoder, and decoder, MLTrMR employs the latent embedder to extract latent tokens from the original image, whereas the encoder and decoder comprising the latent transformer (LT) block are used to process unmasked tokens and predict masked tokens, respectively. To mitigate the lack of inductive bias in Vision Transformer, which may result in performance degradation, the LT block introduces latent tokens to enhance the learning capacity of latent lesion features. Furthermore, we design an auxiliary loss function to constrain the parameter update direction of the model. MLTrMR achieves 80.19% accuracy, 75.79% F1, and 81.28% quadratic weighted kappa on DFID, making it state-of-the-art (SOTA).