OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Knowledge Graph-Based Search Engine for Robustly Finding Doctors and Locations in the Healthcare Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Efficiently finding doctors and locations is an important search problem for patients in the healthcare domain, for which traditional information retrieval methods tend not to work optimally. In the last ten years, knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a powerful way to combine the benefits of gleaning insights from semi-structured data using semantic modeling, natural language processing techniques like information extraction, and robust querying using structured query languages like SPARQL and Cypher. In this short paper, we present a KG-based search engine architecture for robustly finding doctors and locations in the healthcare domain. Early results demonstrate that our approach can lead to significantly higher coverage for complex queries without degrading quality.
Optimizing Solution-Samplers for Combinatorial Problems: The Landscape of Policy-Gradient Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by gradient-based methods (e.g., policy gradient) to successively obtain better solution distributions. In this work we introduce a novel theoretical framework for analyzing the effectiveness of such methods. We ask whether there exist generative models that (i) are expressive enough to generate approximately optimal solutions; (ii) have a tractable, i.e, polynomial in the size of the input, number of parameters; (iii) their optimization landscape is benign in the sense that it does not contain sub-optimal stationary points. Our main contribution is a positive answer to this question. Our result holds for a broad class of combinatorial problems including Max- and Min-Cut, Max-$k$-CSP, Maximum-Weight-Bipartite-Matching, and the Traveling Salesman Problem. As a byproduct of our analysis we introduce a novel regularization process over vanilla gradient descent and provide theoretical and experimental evidence that it helps address vanishing-gradient issues and escape bad stationary points.
Accelerating Deep Neural Network guided MCTS using Adaptive Parallelism
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Neural Network guided Monte-Carlo Tree Search (DNN-MCTS) is a powerful class of AI algorithms. In DNN-MCTS, a Deep Neural Network model is trained collaboratively with a dynamic Monte-Carlo search tree to guide the agent towards actions that yields the highest returns. While the DNN operations are highly parallelizable, the search tree operations involved in MCTS are sequential and often become the system bottleneck. Existing MCTS parallel schemes on shared-memory multi-core CPU platforms either exploit data parallelism but sacrifice memory access latency, or take advantage of local cache for low-latency memory accesses but constrain the tree search to a single thread. In this work, we analyze the tradeoff of these parallel schemes and develop performance models for both parallel schemes based on the application and hardware parameters. We propose a novel implementation that addresses the tradeoff by adaptively choosing the optimal parallel scheme for the MCTS component on the CPU. Furthermore, we propose an efficient method for searching the optimal communication batch size as the MCTS component on the CPU interfaces with DNN operations offloaded to an accelerator (GPU). Using a representative DNN-MCTS algorithm - Alphazero on board game benchmarks, we show that the parallel framework is able to adaptively generate the best-performing parallel implementation, leading to a range of $1.5\times - 3\times$ speedup compared with the baseline methods on CPU and CPU-GPU platforms.
Increasing Entropy to Boost Policy Gradient Performance on Personalization Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this effort, we consider the impact of regularization on the diversity of actions taken by policies generated from reinforcement learning agents trained using a policy gradient. Policy gradient agents are prone to entropy collapse, which means certain actions are seldomly, if ever, selected. We augment the optimization objective function for the policy with terms constructed from various $φ$-divergences and Maximum Mean Discrepancy which encourages current policies to follow different state visitation and/or action choice distribution than previously computed policies. We provide numerical experiments using MNIST, CIFAR10, and Spotify datasets. The results demonstrate the advantage of diversity-promoting policy regularization and that its use on gradient-based approaches have significantly improved performance on a variety of personalization tasks. Furthermore, numerical evidence is given to show that policy regularization increases performance without losing accuracy.
Unlearning with Fisher Masking
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine unlearning aims to revoke some training data after learning in response to requests from users, model developers, and administrators. Most previous methods are based on direct fine-tuning, which may neither remove data completely nor retain full performances on the remain data. In this work, we find that, by first masking some important parameters before fine-tuning, the performances of unlearning could be significantly improved. We propose a new masking strategy tailored to unlearning based on Fisher information. Experiments on various datasets and network structures show the effectiveness of the method: without any fine-tuning, the proposed Fisher masking could unlearn almost completely while maintaining most of the performance on the remain data. It also exhibits stronger stability compared to other unlearning baselines
Infrared Small Target Detection Using Double-Weighted Multi-Granularity Patch Tensor Model With Tensor-Train Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Infrared small target detection plays an important role in the remote sensing fields. Therefore, many detection algorithms have been proposed, in which the infrared patch-tensor (IPT) model has become a mainstream tool due to its excellent performance. However, most IPT-based methods face great challenges, such as inaccurate measure of the tensor low-rankness and poor robustness to complex scenes, which will leadto poor detection performance. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel double-weighted multi-granularity infrared patch tensor (DWMGIPT) model. First, to capture different granularity information of tensor from multiple modes, a multi-granularity infrared patch tensor (MGIPT) model is constructed by collecting nonoverlapping patches and tensor augmentation based on the tensor train (TT) decomposition. Second, to explore the latent structure of tensor more efficiently, we utilize the auto-weighted mechanism to balance the importance of information at different granularity. Then, the steering kernel (SK) is employed to extract local structure prior, which suppresses background interference such as strong edges and noise. Finally, an efficient optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is presented to solve the model. Extensive experiments in various challenging scenes show that the proposed algorithm is robust to noise and different scenes. Compared with the other eight state-of-the-art methods, different evaluation metrics demonstrate that our method achieves better detection performance in various complex scenes.
C^2M-DoT: Cross-modal consistent multi-view medical report generation with domain transfer network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In clinical scenarios, multiple medical images with different views are usually generated simultaneously, and these images have high semantic consistency. However, most existing medical report generation methods only consider single-view data. The rich multi-view mutual information of medical images can help generate more accurate reports, however, the dependence of multi-view models on multi-view data in the inference stage severely limits their application in clinical practice. In addition, word-level optimization based on numbers ignores the semantics of reports and medical images, and the generated reports often cannot achieve good performance. Therefore, we propose a cross-modal consistent multi-view medical report generation with a domain transfer network (C^2M-DoT). Specifically, (i) a semantic-based multi-view contrastive learning medical report generation framework is adopted to utilize cross-view information to learn the semantic representation of lesions; (ii) a domain transfer network is further proposed to ensure that the multi-view report generation model can still achieve good inference performance under single-view input; (iii) meanwhile, optimization using a cross-modal consistency loss facilitates the generation of textual reports that are semantically consistent with medical images. Extensive experimental studies on two public benchmark datasets demonstrate that C^2M-DoT substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in all metrics. Ablation studies also confirmed the validity and necessity of each component in C^2M-DoT.
Conjunctive Queries with Negation and Aggregation: A Linear Time Characterization
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we study the complexity of evaluating Conjunctive Queries with negation (\cqneg). First, we present an algorithm with linear preprocessing time and constant delay enumeration for a class of CQs with negation called free-connex signed-acyclic queries. We show that no other queries admit such an algorithm subject to lower bound conjectures. Second, we extend our algorithm to Conjunctive Queries with negation and aggregation over a general semiring, which we call Functional Aggregate Queries with negation (\faqneg). Such an algorithm achieves constant delay enumeration for the same class of queries, but with a slightly increased preprocessing time which includes an inverse Ackermann function. We show that this surprising appearance of the Ackermmann function is probably unavoidable for general semirings, but can be removed when the semiring has specific structure. Finally, we show an application of our results to computing the difference of CQs.
Humanoid Agents: Platform for Simulating Human-like Generative Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Just as computational simulations of atoms, molecules and cells have shaped the way we study the sciences, true-to-life simulations of human-like agents can be valuable tools for studying human behavior. We propose Humanoid Agents, a system that guides Generative Agents to behave more like humans by introducing three elements of System 1 processing: Basic needs (e.g. hunger, health and energy), Emotion and Closeness in Relationships. Humanoid Agents are able to use these dynamic elements to adapt their daily activities and conversations with other agents, as supported with empirical experiments. Our system is designed to be extensible to various settings, three of which we demonstrate, as well as to other elements influencing human behavior (e.g. empathy, moral values and cultural background). Our platform also includes a Unity WebGL game interface for visualization and an interactive analytics dashboard to show agent statuses over time. Our platform is available on https://www.humanoidagents.com/ and code is on https://github.com/HumanoidAgents/HumanoidAgents
Emergent chaotic iterations in hard sparse instances of hamiltonian path problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

A hamiltonian path is a path walk P that can be a hamiltonian path or hamiltonian circuit. Determining whether such hamiltonian path exists in a given graph G = (V, E) is a NP-Complete problem. In this paper, a novel algorithm with chaotic behaviour for hamiltonian path problem is proposed. We show that our algorithm runs in $O(V^5(V + E))$ for hard sparse instances from FHCP challenge dataset.
Cost-Sensitive Best Subset Selection for Logistic Regression: A Mixed-Integer Conic Optimization Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

A key challenge in machine learning is to design interpretable models that can reduce their inputs to the best subset for making transparent predictions, especially in the clinical domain. In this work, we propose a certifiably optimal feature selection procedure for logistic regression from a mixed-integer conic optimization perspective that can take an auxiliary cost to obtain features into account. Based on an extensive review of the literature, we carefully create a synthetic dataset generator for clinical prognostic model research. This allows us to systematically evaluate different heuristic and optimal cardinality- and budget-constrained feature selection procedures. The analysis shows key limitations of the methods for the low-data regime and when confronted with label noise. Our paper not only provides empirical recommendations for suitable methods and dataset designs, but also paves the way for future research in the area of meta-learning.
Drawn Tree Decomposition: New Approach for Graph Drawing Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Over the past decade, we witness an increasing amount of interest in the design of exact exponential-time and parameterized algorithms for problems in Graph Drawing. Unfortunately, we still lack knowledge of general methods to develop such algorithms. An even more serious issue is that, here, "standard" parameters very often yield intractability. In particular, for the most common structural parameter, namely, treewidth, we frequently observe NP-hardness already when the input graphs are restricted to have constant (often, being just $1$ or $2$) treewidth. Our work deals with both drawbacks simultaneously. We introduce a novel form of tree decomposition that, roughly speaking, does not decompose (only) a graph, but an entire drawing. As such, its bags and separators are of geometric (rather than only combinatorial) nature. While the corresponding parameter -- like treewidth -- can be arbitrarily smaller than the height (and width) of the drawing, we show that -- unlike treewidth -- it gives rise to efficient algorithms. Specifically, we get slice-wise polynomial (XP) time algorithms parameterized by our parameter. We present a general scheme for the design of such algorithms, and apply it to several central problems in Graph Drawing, including the recognition of grid graphs, minimization of crossings and bends, and compaction. Other than for the class of problems we discussed in the paper, we believe that our decomposition and scheme are of independent interest and can be further extended or generalized to suit even a wider class of problems. Additionally, we discuss classes of drawings where our parameter is bounded by $O(\sqrt{n})$ (where $n$ is the number of vertices of the graph), yielding subexponential-time algorithms. Lastly, we prove which relations exist between drawn treewidth and other width measures, including treewidth, pathwidth, (dual) carving-width and embedded-width.
Sentence-level Prompts Benefit Composed Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving specific images by using a query that involves both a reference image and a relative caption. Most existing CIR models adopt the late-fusion strategy to combine visual and language features. Besides, several approaches have also been suggested to generate a pseudo-word token from the reference image, which is further integrated into the relative caption for CIR. However, these pseudo-word-based prompting methods have limitations when target image encompasses complex changes on reference image, e.g., object removal and attribute modification. In this work, we demonstrate that learning an appropriate sentence-level prompt for the relative caption (SPRC) is sufficient for achieving effective composed image retrieval. Instead of relying on pseudo-word-based prompts, we propose to leverage pretrained V-L models, e.g., BLIP-2, to generate sentence-level prompts. By concatenating the learned sentence-level prompt with the relative caption, one can readily use existing text-based image retrieval models to enhance CIR performance. Furthermore, we introduce both image-text contrastive loss and text prompt alignment loss to enforce the learning of suitable sentence-level prompts. Experiments show that our proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art CIR methods on the Fashion-IQ and CIRR datasets. The source code and pretrained model are publicly available at https://github.com/chunmeifeng/SPRC
An Adaptable IoT Rule Engine Framework for Dataflow Monitoring and Control Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

The monitoring of data generated by a large number of devices in Internet of Things (IoT) systems is an important and complex issue. Several studies have explored the use of generic rule engine, primarily based on the RETE algorithm, for monitoring the flow of device data. In order to solve the performance problem of the RETE algorithm in IoT scenarios, some studies have also proposed improved RETE algorithms. However, implementing modifications to the general rule engine remains challenges in practical applications. The Thingsboard open-source platform introduces an IoT-specific rule engine that does not rely on the RETE algorithm. Its interactive mode attracted attention from developers and researchers. However, the close integration between its rule module and the platform, as well as the difficulty in formulating rules for multiple devices, limits its flexibility. This paper presents an adaptable and user-friendly rule engine framework for monitoring and control IoT device data flows. The framework is easily extensible and allows for the formulation of rules contain multiple devices. We designed a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for rule description. A prototype system of this framework was implemented to verify the validity of theoretical method. The framework has potential to be adaptable to a wide range of IoT scenarios and is especially effective in where real-time control demands are not as strict.
UAVs and Neural Networks for search and rescue missions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present a method for detecting objects of interest, including cars, humans, and fire, in aerial images captured by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) usually during vegetation fires. To achieve this, we use artificial neural networks and create a dataset for supervised learning. We accomplish the assisted labeling of the dataset through the implementation of an object detection pipeline that combines classic image processing techniques with pretrained neural networks. In addition, we develop a data augmentation pipeline to augment the dataset with automatically labeled images. Finally, we evaluate the performance of different neural networks.
One Problem, One Solution: Unifying Robot and Environment Design Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The task-specific optimization of robotic systems has long been divided into the optimization of the robot and the optimization of the environment. In this letter, we argue that these two problems are interdependent and should be treated as such. To this end, we present a unified problem formulation that enables for the simultaneous optimization of both the robot kinematics and the environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by jointly optimizing a robotic milling system. To compare our approach to the state of the art we also optimize the robot kinematics and environment separately. The results show that our approach outperforms the state of the art and that simultaneous optimization leads to a much better solution.
Geometry-Aware Safety-Critical Local Reactive Controller for Robot Navigation in Unknown and Cluttered Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This work proposes a safety-critical local reactive controller that enables the robot to navigate in unknown and cluttered environments. In particular, the trajectory tracking task is formulated as a constrained polynomial optimization problem. Then, safety constraints are imposed on the control variables invoking the notion of polynomial positivity certificates in conjunction with their Sum-of-Squares (SOS) approximation, thereby confining the robot motion inside the locally extracted convex free region. It is noteworthy that, in the process of devising the proposed safety constraints, the geometry of the robot can be approximated using any shape that can be characterized with a set of polynomial functions. The optimization problem is further convexified into a semidefinite program (SDP) leveraging truncated multi-sequences (tms) and moment relaxation, which favorably facilitates the effective use of off-the-shelf conic programming solvers, such that real-time performance is attainable. Various robot navigation tasks are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of safety and tracking performance.
A Novel Node Selection Method in Wireless Distributed Edge Storage Based on SDN and Multi-attribute Decision Model
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The distributed edge storage system can store data collected at the edge of the network in a decentralised manner, with low latency, high security, and flexibility. Traditional edge-distributed storage systems only consider one single factor, such as node capacity, when storing data, ignoring network and storage node load conditions that affecting the system's read/write performance. At the same time, it could be more scalable in the widely used wireless terminal application scenarios. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes an innovative software-defined edge storage architecture based on SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and SMB (Server Message Block) protocols, A data storage node selection algorithm that integrates the network state and storage node load state is designed based on multi-attribute decision model, and a system prototype is realised in conjunction with 5G wireless communication technology. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the performance of high-load write operations compared to traditional edge-distributed storage systems. The proposed wireless distributed edge storage system also demonstrates superior scalability and adaptability, effectively addressing the challenge of limited system scalability and improving compatibility with edge scenarios in mobile applications. In addition, it results in cost savings in hardware deployment and presents a promising advancement in edge storage technology.
DRIN: Dynamic Relation Interactive Network for Multimodal Entity Linking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is a task that aims to link ambiguous mentions within multimodal contexts to referential entities in a multimodal knowledge base. Recent methods for MEL adopt a common framework: they first interact and fuse the text and image to obtain representations of the mention and entity respectively, and then compute the similarity between them to predict the correct entity. However, these methods still suffer from two limitations: first, as they fuse the features of text and image before matching, they cannot fully exploit the fine-grained alignment relations between the mention and entity. Second, their alignment is static, leading to low performance when dealing with complex and diverse data. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework called Dynamic Relation Interactive Network (DRIN) for MEL tasks. DRIN explicitly models four different types of alignment between a mention and entity and builds a dynamic Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to dynamically select the corresponding alignment relations for different input samples. Experiments on two datasets show that DRIN outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.