OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Large Language Models for Solving Rare MIP Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) has been extensively applied in areas requiring mathematical solvers to address complex instances within tight time constraints. However, as the problem scale increases, the complexity of model formulation and finding feasible solutions escalates significantly. In contrast, the model-building cost for end-to-end models, such as large language models (LLMs), remains largely unaffected by problem scale due to their pattern recognition capabilities. While LLMs, like GPT-4, without fine-tuning, can handle some traditional medium-scale MIP problems, they struggle with uncommon or highly specialized MIP scenarios. Fine-tuning LLMs can yield some feasible solutions for medium-scale MIP instances, but these models typically fail to explore diverse solutions when constrained by a low and constant temperature, limiting their performance. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a recursively dynamic temperature method integrated with a chain-of-thought approach. Our findings show that starting with a high temperature and gradually lowering it leads to better feasible solutions compared to other dynamic temperature strategies. Additionally, by comparing results generated by the LLM with those from Gurobi, we demonstrate that the LLM can produce solutions that complement traditional solvers by accelerating the pruning process and improving overall efficiency.
Toward LLM-Powered Social Robots for Supporting Sensitive Disclosures of Stigmatized Health Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Disclosing sensitive health conditions offers significant benefits at both individual and societal levels. However, patients often face challenges due to concerns about stigma. The use of social robots and chatbots to support sensitive disclosures is gaining traction, especially with the emergence of LLM models. Yet, numerous technical, ethical, privacy, safety, efficacy, and reporting concerns must be carefully addressed in this context. In this position paper, we focus on the example of HIV status disclosure, examining key opportunities, technical considerations, and risks associated with LLM-backed social robotics.
Solve paint color effect prediction problem in trajectory optimization of spray painting robot using artificial neural network inspired by the Kubelka Munk model
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Currently, the spray-painting robot trajectory planning technology aiming at spray painting quality mainly applies to single-color spraying. Conventional methods of optimizing the spray gun trajectory based on simulated thickness can only qualitatively reflect the color distribution, and can not simulate the color effect of spray painting at the pixel level. Therefore, it is not possible to accurately control the area covered by the color and the gradation of the edges of the area, and it is also difficult to deal with the situation where multiple colors of paint are sprayed in combination. To solve the above problems, this paper is inspired by the Kubelka-Munk model and combines the 3D machine vision method and artificial neural network to propose a spray painting color effect prediction method. The method is enabled to predict the execution effect of the spray gun trajectory with pixel-level accuracy from the dimension of the surface color of the workpiece after spray painting. On this basis, the method can be used to replace the traditional thickness simulation method to establish the objective function of the spray gun trajectory optimization problem, and thus solve the difficult problem of spray gun trajectory optimization for multi-color paint combination spraying. In this paper, the mathematical model of the spray painting color effect prediction problem is first determined through the analysis of the Kubelka-Munk paint film color rendering model, and at the same time, the spray painting color effect dataset is established with the help of the depth camera and point cloud processing algorithm. After that, the multilayer perceptron model was improved with the help of gating and residual structure and was used for the color prediction task. To verify ...
A Quantum Pigeonhole Principle and Two Semidefinite Relaxations of Communication Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We study semidefinite relaxations of $Π_1$ combinatorial statements. By relaxing the pigeonhole principle, we obtain a new "quantum" pigeonhole principle which is a stronger statement. By relaxing statements of the form "the communication complexity of $f$ is $> k$", we obtain new communication models, which we call "$γ_2$ communication" and "quantum-lab protocols". We prove, via an argument from proof complexity, that any natural model obtained by such a relaxation must solve all Karchmer--Wigderson games efficiently. However, the argument is not constructive, so we work to explicitly construct such protocols in these two models.
Detecting Buggy Contracts via Smart Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Smart contracts are susceptible to critical vulnerabilities. Hybrid dynamic analyses, such as concolic execution assisted fuzzing and foundation model assisted fuzzing, have emerged as highly effective testing techniques for smart contract bug detection recently. This hybrid approach has shown initial promise in real-world benchmarks, but it still suffers from low scalability to find deep bugs buried in complex code patterns. We observe that performance bottlenecks of existing dynamic analyses and model hallucination are two main factors limiting the scalability of this hybrid approach in finding deep bugs. To overcome the challenges, we design an interactive, self-deciding foundation model based system, called SmartSys, to support hybrid smart contract dynamic analyses. The key idea is to teach foundation models about performance bottlenecks of different dynamic analysis techniques, making it possible to forecast the right technique and generates effective fuzz targets that can reach deep, hidden bugs. To prune hallucinated, incorrect fuzz targets, SmartSys feeds foundation models with feedback from dynamic analysis during compilation and at runtime. The interesting results of SmartSys include: i) discovering a smart contract protocol vulnerability that has escaped eleven tools and survived multiple audits for over a year; ii) improving coverage by up to 14.3\% on real-world benchmarks compared to the baselines.
Multi-scale Feature Fusion with Point Pyramid for 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Effective point cloud processing is crucial to LiDARbased autonomous driving systems. The capability to understand features at multiple scales is required for object detection of intelligent vehicles, where road users may appear in different sizes. Recent methods focus on the design of the feature aggregation operators, which collect features at different scales from the encoder backbone and assign them to the points of interest. While efforts are made into the aggregation modules, the importance of how to fuse these multi-scale features has been overlooked. This leads to insufficient feature communication across scales. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Point Pyramid RCNN (POP-RCNN), a feature pyramid-based framework for 3D object detection on point clouds. POP-RCNN consists of a Point Pyramid Feature Enhancement (PPFE) module to establish connections across spatial scales and semantic depths for information exchange. The PPFE module effectively fuses multi-scale features for rich information without the increased complexity in feature aggregation. To remedy the impact of inconsistent point densities, a point density confidence module is deployed. This design integration enables the use of a lightweight feature aggregator, and the emphasis on both shallow and deep semantics, realising a detection framework for 3D object detection. With great adaptability, the proposed method can be applied to a variety of existing frameworks to increase feature richness, especially for long-distance detection. By adopting the PPFE in the voxel-based and point-voxel-based baselines, experimental results on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset show that the proposed method achieves remarkable performance even with limited computational headroom.
Introducing Ensemble Machine Learning Algorithms for Automatic Test Case Generation using Learning Based Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Ensemble methods are powerful machine learning algorithms that combine multiple models to enhance prediction capabilities and reduce generalization errors. However, their potential to generate effective test cases for fault detection in a System Under Test (SUT) has not been extensively explored. This study aims to systematically investigate the combination of ensemble methods and base classifiers for model inference in a Learning Based Testing (LBT) algorithm to generate fault-detecting test cases for SUTs as a proof of concept. We conduct a series of experiments on functions, generating effective test cases using different ensemble methods and classifier combinations for model inference in our proposed LBT method. We then compare the test suites based on their mutation score. The results indicate that Boosting ensemble methods show overall better performance in generating effective test cases, and the proposed method is performing better than random generation. This analysis helps determine the appropriate ensemble methods for various types of functions. By incorporating ensemble methods into the LBT, this research contributes to the understanding of how to leverage ensemble methods for effective test case generation.
Exploring the Advances in Using Machine Learning to Identify Technical Debt and Self-Admitted Technical Debt
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In software engineering, technical debt, signifying the compromise between short-term expediency and long-term maintainability, is being addressed by researchers through various machine learning approaches. This study seeks to provide a reflection on the current research landscape employing machine learning methods for detecting technical debt and self-admitted technical debt in software projects and compare the machine learning research about technical debt and self-admitted technical debt. We performed a literature review of studies published up to 2024 that discuss technical debt and self-admitted technical debt identification using machine learning. Our findings reveal the utilization of a diverse range of machine learning techniques, with BERT models proving significantly more effective than others. This study demonstrates that although the performance of techniques has improved over the years, no universally adopted approach reigns supreme. The results suggest prioritizing BERT techniques over others in future works.
Exploring Crowdworkers' Perceptions, Current Practices, and Desired Practices Regarding Using Non-Workstation Devices for Crowdwork
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Despite a plethora of research dedicated to designing HITs for non-workstations, there is a lack of research looking specifically into workers' perceptions of the suitability of these devices for managing and completing work. In this work, we fill this research gap by conducting an online survey of 148 workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to explore 1. how crowdworkers currently use their non-workstation devices to complete and manage crowdwork, 2. what challenges they face using those devices, and 3. to what extent they wish they could use those devices if their concerns were addressed. Our results show that workers unanimously favor using a desktop to complete and manage crowdwork. While workers occasionally use smartphones or tablets, they find their suitability marginal at best and have little interest in smart speakers and smartwatches, viewing them as unsuitable for crowdwork. When investigating the reason for these views, we find that the key issue is that non workstation devices lack the tooling necessary to automatically find and accept HITs, tooling that workers view as essential in their efforts to compete with bots in accepting high paying work. To address this problem, we propose a new paradigm for finding, accepting, and completing crowdwork that puts crowdworkers on equal footing with bots in these tasks. We also describe future research directions for tailoring HITs to non workstation devices and definitely answering whether smart speakers and smartwatches have a place in crowdwork.
Distributed Agreement in the Arrovian Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Preference aggregation is a fundamental problem in voting theory, in which public input rankings of a set of alternatives (called preferences) must be aggregated into a single preference that satisfies certain soundness properties. The celebrated Arrow Impossibility Theorem is equivalent to a distributed task in a synchronous fault-free system that satisfies properties such as respecting unanimous preferences, maintaining independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA), and non-dictatorship, along with consensus since only one preference can be decided. In this work, we study a weaker distributed task in which crash faults are introduced, IIA is not required, and the consensus property is relaxed to either $k$-set agreement or $ε$-approximate agreement using any metric on the set of preferences. In particular, we prove several novel impossibility results for both of these tasks in both synchronous and asynchronous distributed systems. We additionally show that the impossibility for our $ε$-approximate agreement task using the Kendall tau or Spearman footrule metrics holds under extremely weak assumptions.
A Sample Efficient Alternating Minimization-based Algorithm For Robust Phase Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we study the robust phase retrieval problem where the task is to recover an unknown signal $θ^* \in \mathbb{R}^d$ in the presence of potentially arbitrarily corrupted magnitude-only linear measurements. We propose an alternating minimization approach that incorporates an oracle solver for a non-convex optimization problem as a subroutine. Our algorithm guarantees convergence to $θ^*$ and provides an explicit polynomial dependence of the convergence rate on the fraction of corrupted measurements. We then provide an efficient construction of the aforementioned oracle under a sparse arbitrary outliers model and offer valuable insights into the geometric properties of the loss landscape in phase retrieval with corrupted measurements. Our proposed oracle avoids the need for computationally intensive spectral initialization, using a simple gradient descent algorithm with a constant step size and random initialization instead. Additionally, our overall algorithm achieves nearly linear sample complexity, $\mathcal{O}(d \, \mathrm{polylog}(d))$.
Modeling Drivers' Risk Perception via Attention to Improve Driving Assistance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) alert drivers during safety-critical scenarios but often provide superfluous alerts due to a lack of consideration for drivers' knowledge or scene awareness. Modeling these aspects together in a data-driven way is challenging due to the scarcity of critical scenario data with in-cabin driver state and world state recorded together. We explore the benefits of driver modeling in the context of Forward Collision Warning (FCW) systems. Working with real-world video dataset of on-road FCW deployments, we collect observers' subjective validity rating of the deployed alerts. We also annotate participants' gaze-to-objects and extract 3D trajectories of the ego vehicle and other vehicles semi-automatically. We generate a risk estimate of the scene and the drivers' perception in a two step process: First, we model the movement of vehicles in a given scenario as a joint trajectory forecasting problem. Then, we reason about the drivers' risk perception of the scene by counterfactually modifying the input to the forecasting model to represent the drivers' actual observations of vehicles in the scene. The difference in these behaviours gives us an estimate of driver behaviour that accounts for their actual (inattentive) observations and their downstream effect on overall scene risk. We compare both a learned scene representation as well as a more traditional ``worse-case'' deceleration model to achieve the future trajectory forecast. Our experiments show that using this risk formulation to generate FCW alerts may lead to improved false positive rate of FCWs and improved FCW timing.
Adaptative Context Normalization: A Boost for Deep Learning in Image Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Neural network learning for image processing faces major challenges related to changes in distribution across layers, which disrupt model convergence and performance. Activation normalization methods, such as Batch Normalization (BN), have revolutionized this field, but they rely on the simplified assumption that data distribution can be modelled by a single Gaussian distribution. To overcome these limitations, Mixture Normalization (MN) introduced an approach based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), assuming multiple components to model the data. However, this method entails substantial computational requirements associated with the use of Expectation-Maximization algorithm to estimate parameters of each Gaussian components. To address this issue, we introduce Adaptative Context Normalization (ACN), a novel supervised approach that introduces the concept of "context", which groups together a set of data with similar characteristics. Data belonging to the same context are normalized using the same parameters, enabling local representation based on contexts. For each context, the normalized parameters, as the model weights are learned during the backpropagation phase. ACN not only ensures speed, convergence, and superior performance compared to BN and MN but also presents a fresh perspective that underscores its particular efficacy in the field of image processing.
LoCa: Logit Calibration for Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge Distillation (KD), aiming to train a better student model by mimicking the teacher model, plays an important role in model compression. One typical way is to align the output logits. However, we find a common issue named mis-instruction, that the student would be misled when the predictions based on teacher logits do not follow the labels. Meanwhile, there is other useful dark knowledge in the logits such as the class discriminability, which is vital for distillation. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Logit Calibration (LoCa) method, which calibrates the logits from the teacher model based on the ground-truth labels. The key insight is to correct the prediction (to address the mis-instruction issue) and maintain useful dark knowledge simultaneously. Our proposed LoCa does not require any additional parameters. Empirical results on image classification and text generation tasks demonstrate that LoCa can effectively improve the performance of baselines.
Beyond One-Time Validation: A Framework for Adaptive Validation of Prognostic and Diagnostic AI-based Medical Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Prognostic and diagnostic AI-based medical devices hold immense promise for advancing healthcare, yet their rapid development has outpaced the establishment of appropriate validation methods. Existing approaches often fall short in addressing the complexity of practically deploying these devices and ensuring their effective, continued operation in real-world settings. Building on recent discussions around the validation of AI models in medicine and drawing from validation practices in other fields, a framework to address this gap is presented. It offers a structured, robust approach to validation that helps ensure device reliability across differing clinical environments. The primary challenges to device performance upon deployment are discussed while highlighting the impact of changes related to individual healthcare institutions and operational processes. The presented framework emphasizes the importance of repeating validation and fine-tuning during deployment, aiming to mitigate these issues while being adaptable to challenges unforeseen during device development. The framework is also positioned within the current US and EU regulatory landscapes, underscoring its practical viability and relevance considering regulatory requirements. Additionally, a practical example demonstrating potential benefits of the framework is presented. Lastly, guidance on assessing model performance is offered and the importance of involving clinical stakeholders in the validation and fine-tuning process is discussed.
PB-LRDWWS System for the SLT 2024 Low-Resource Dysarthria Wake-Up Word Spotting Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

For the SLT 2024 Low-Resource Dysarthria Wake-Up Word Spotting (LRDWWS) Challenge, we introduce the PB-LRDWWS system. This system combines a dysarthric speech content feature extractor for prototype construction with a prototype-based classification method. The feature extractor is a fine-tuned HuBERT model obtained through a three-stage fine-tuning process using cross-entropy loss. This fine-tuned HuBERT extracts features from the target dysarthric speaker's enrollment speech to build prototypes. Classification is achieved by calculating the cosine similarity between the HuBERT features of the target dysarthric speaker's evaluation speech and prototypes. Despite its simplicity, our method demonstrates effectiveness through experimental results. Our system achieves second place in the final Test-B of the LRDWWS Challenge.
Exploring Straightforward Conversational Red-Teaming
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in business dialogue systems but they pose security and ethical risks. Multi-turn conversations, where context influences the model's behavior, can be exploited to produce undesired responses. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of utilizing off-the-shelf LLMs in straightforward red-teaming approaches, where an attacker LLM aims to elicit undesired output from a target LLM, comparing both single-turn and conversational red-teaming tactics. Our experiments offer insights into various usage strategies that significantly affect their performance as red teamers. They suggest that off-the-shelf models can act as effective red teamers and even adjust their attack strategy based on past attempts, although their effectiveness decreases with greater alignment.