OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Distributed Multi-writer Multi-reader Atomic Register with Optimistically Fast Read and Write
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

A distributed multi-writer multi-reader (MWMR) atomic register is an important primitive that enables a wide range of distributed algorithms. Hence, improving its performance can have large-scale consequences. Since the seminal work of ABD emulation in the message-passing networks [JACM '95], many researchers study fast implementations of atomic registers under various conditions. "Fast" means that a read or a write can be completed with 1 round-trip time (RTT), by contacting a simple majority. In this work, we explore an atomic register with optimal resilience and "optimistically fast" read and write operations. That is, both operations can be fast if there is no concurrent write. This paper has three contributions: (i) We present Gus, the emulation of an MWMR atomic register with optimal resilience and optimistically fast reads and writes when there are up to 5 nodes; (ii) We show that when there are > 5 nodes, it is impossible to emulate an MWMR atomic register with both properties; and (iii) We implement Gus in the framework of EPaxos and Gryff, and show that Gus provides lower tail latency than state-of-the-art systems such as EPaxos, Gryff, Giza, and Tempo under various workloads in the context of geo-replicated object storage systems.
An Empirical Study of Leveraging Knowledge Distillation for Compressing Multilingual Neural Machine Translation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a well-known method for compressing neural models. However, works focusing on distilling knowledge from large multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) models into smaller ones are practically nonexistent, despite the popularity and superiority of MNMT. This paper bridges this gap by presenting an empirical investigation of knowledge distillation for compressing MNMT models. We take Indic to English translation as a case study and demonstrate that commonly used language-agnostic and language-aware KD approaches yield models that are 4-5x smaller but also suffer from performance drops of up to 3.5 BLEU. To mitigate this, we then experiment with design considerations such as shallower versus deeper models, heavy parameter sharing, multi-stage training, and adapters. We observe that deeper compact models tend to be as good as shallower non-compact ones, and that fine-tuning a distilled model on a High-Quality subset slightly boosts translation quality. Overall, we conclude that compressing MNMT models via KD is challenging, indicating immense scope for further research.
Limits of CDCL Learning via Merge Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

In their seminal work, Atserias et al. and independently Pipatsrisawat and Darwiche in 2009 showed that CDCL solvers can simulate resolution proofs with polynomial overhead. However, previous work does not address the tightness of the simulation, i.e., the question of how large this overhead needs to be. In this paper, we address this question by focusing on an important property of proofs generated by CDCL solvers that employ standard learning schemes, namely that the derivation of a learned clause has at least one inference where a literal appears in both premises (aka, a merge literal). Specifically, we show that proofs of this kind can simulate resolution proofs with at most a linear overhead, but there also exist formulas where such overhead is necessary or, more precisely, that there exist formulas with resolution proofs of linear length that require quadratic CDCL proofs.
Contrastive Learning based Semantic Communication for Wireless Image Transmission
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, semantic communication has been widely applied in wireless image transmission systems as it can prioritize the preservation of meaningful semantic information in images over the accuracy of transmitted symbols, leading to improved communication efficiency. However, existing semantic communication approaches still face limitations in achieving considerable inference performance in downstream AI tasks like image recognition, or balancing the inference performance with the quality of the reconstructed image at the receiver. Therefore, this paper proposes a contrastive learning (CL)-based semantic communication approach to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we regard the image corruption during transmission as a form of data augmentation in CL and leverage CL to reduce the semantic distance between the original and the corrupted reconstruction while maintaining the semantic distance among irrelevant images for better discrimination in downstream tasks. Moreover, we design a two-stage training procedure and the corresponding loss functions for jointly optimizing the semantic encoder and decoder to achieve a good trade-off between the performance of image recognition in the downstream task and reconstructed quality. Simulations are finally conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the competitive approaches. In particular, the proposed method can achieve up to 56\% accuracy gain on the CIFAR10 dataset when the bandwidth compression ratio is 1/48.
Enhancing Multi-Camera People Tracking with Anchor-Guided Clustering and Spatio-Temporal Consistency ID Re-Assignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-camera multiple people tracking has become an increasingly important area of research due to the growing demand for accurate and efficient indoor people tracking systems, particularly in settings such as retail, healthcare centers, and transit hubs. We proposed a novel multi-camera multiple people tracking method that uses anchor-guided clustering for cross-camera re-identification and spatio-temporal consistency for geometry-based cross-camera ID reassigning. Our approach aims to improve the accuracy of tracking by identifying key features that are unique to every individual and utilizing the overlap of views between cameras to predict accurate trajectories without needing the actual camera parameters. The method has demonstrated robustness and effectiveness in handling both synthetic and real-world data. The proposed method is evaluated on CVPR AI City Challenge 2023 dataset, achieving IDF1 of 95.36% with the first-place ranking in the challenge. The code is available at: https://github.com/ipl-uw/AIC23_Track1_UWIPL_ETRI.
Emotion fusion for mental illness detection from social media: A survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Mental illnesses are one of the most prevalent public health problems worldwide, which negatively influence people's lives and society's health. With the increasing popularity of social media, there has been a growing research interest in the early detection of mental illness by analysing user-generated posts on social media. According to the correlation between emotions and mental illness, leveraging and fusing emotion information has developed into a valuable research topic. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of approaches to mental illness detection in social media that incorporate emotion fusion. We begin by reviewing different fusion strategies, along with their advantages and disadvantages. Subsequently, we discuss the major challenges faced by researchers working in this area, including issues surrounding the availability and quality of datasets, the performance of algorithms and interpretability. We additionally suggest some potential directions for future research.
Learning Hierarchically-Structured Concepts II: Overlapping Concepts, and Networks With Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

We continue our study from Lynch and Mallmann-Trenn (Neural Networks, 2021), of how concepts that have hierarchical structure might be represented in brain-like neural networks, how these representations might be used to recognize the concepts, and how these representations might be learned. In Lynch and Mallmann-Trenn (Neural Networks, 2021), we considered simple tree-structured concepts and feed-forward layered networks. Here we extend the model in two ways: we allow limited overlap between children of different concepts, and we allow networks to include feedback edges. For these more general cases, we describe and analyze algorithms for recognition and algorithms for learning.
Sensitivity estimation for differentially private query processing
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Differential privacy has become a popular privacy-preserving method in data analysis, query processing, and machine learning, which adds noise to the query result to avoid leaking privacy. Sensitivity, or the maximum impact of deleting or inserting a tuple on query results, determines the amount of noise added. Computing the sensitivity of some simple queries such as counting query is easy, however, computing the sensitivity of complex queries containing join operations is challenging. Global sensitivity of such a query is unboundedly large, which corrupts the accuracy of the query answer. Elastic sensitivity and residual sensitivity offer upper bounds of local sensitivity to reduce the noise, but they suffer from either low accuracy or high computational overhead. We propose two fast query sensitivity estimation methods based on sampling and sketch respectively, offering competitive accuracy and higher efficiency compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
DADFNet: Dual Attention and Dual Frequency-Guided Dehazing Network for Video-Empowered Intelligent Transportation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Visual surveillance technology is an indispensable functional component of advanced traffic management systems. It has been applied to perform traffic supervision tasks, such as object detection, tracking and recognition. However, adverse weather conditions, e.g., fog, haze and mist, pose severe challenges for video-based transportation surveillance. To eliminate the influences of adverse weather conditions, we propose a dual attention and dual frequency-guided dehazing network (termed DADFNet) for real-time visibility enhancement. It consists of a dual attention module (DAM) and a high-low frequency-guided sub-net (HLFN) to jointly consider the attention and frequency mapping to guide haze-free scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world images demonstrate the superiority of DADFNet over state-of-the-art methods in terms of visibility enhancement and improvement in detection accuracy. Furthermore, DADFNet only takes $6.3$ ms to process a 1,920 * 1,080 image on the 2080 Ti GPU, making it highly efficient for deployment in intelligent transportation systems.
Operations for D-Algebraic Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2023
Year: 2023

A function is differentially algebraic (or simply D-algebraic) if there is a polynomial relationship between some of its derivatives and the indeterminate variable. Many functions in the sciences, such as Mathieu functions, the Weierstrass elliptic functions, and holonomic or D-finite functions are D-algebraic. These functions form a field, and are closed under composition, taking functional inverse, and derivation. We present implementation for each underlying operation. We also give a systematic way for computing an algebraic differential equation from a linear differential equation with D-finite function coefficients. Each command is a feature of our Maple package $NLDE$ available at https://mathrepo.mis.mpg.de/OperationsForDAlgebraicFunctions.
GeoGauss: Strongly Consistent and Light-Coordinated OLTP for Geo-Replicated SQL Database
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Multinational enterprises conduct global business that has a demand for geo-distributed transactional databases. Existing state-of-the-art databases adopt a sharded master-follower replication architecture. However, the single-master serving mode incurs massive cross-region writes from clients, and the sharded architecture requires multiple round-trip acknowledgments (e.g., 2PC) to ensure atomicity for cross-shard transactions. These limitations drive us to seek yet another design choice. In this paper, we propose a strongly consistent OLTP database GeoGauss with full replica multi-master architecture. To efficiently merge the updates from different master nodes, we propose a multi-master OCC that unifies data replication and concurrent transaction processing. By leveraging an epoch-based delta state merge rule and the optimistic asynchronous execution, GeoGauss ensures strong consistency with light-coordinated protocol and allows more concurrency with weak isolation, which are sufficient to meet our needs. Our geo-distributed experimental results show that GeoGauss achieves 7.06X higher throughput and 17.41X lower latency than the state-of-the-art geo-distributed database CockroachDB on the TPC-C benchmark.
Disentangling Neuron Representations with Concept Vectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Mechanistic interpretability aims to understand how models store representations by breaking down neural networks into interpretable units. However, the occurrence of polysemantic neurons, or neurons that respond to multiple unrelated features, makes interpreting individual neurons challenging. This has led to the search for meaningful vectors, known as concept vectors, in activation space instead of individual neurons. The main contribution of this paper is a method to disentangle polysemantic neurons into concept vectors encapsulating distinct features. Our method can search for fine-grained concepts according to the user's desired level of concept separation. The analysis shows that polysemantic neurons can be disentangled into directions consisting of linear combinations of neurons. Our evaluations show that the concept vectors found encode coherent, human-understandable features.
Any-to-Any Style Transfer: Making Picasso and Da Vinci Collaborate
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Style transfer aims to render the style of a given image for style reference to another given image for content reference, and has been widely adopted in artistic generation and image editing. Existing approaches either apply the holistic style of the style image in a global manner, or migrate local colors and textures of the style image to the content counterparts in a pre-defined way. In either case, only one result can be generated for a specific pair of content and style images, which therefore lacks flexibility and is hard to satisfy different users with different preferences. We propose here a novel strategy termed Any-to-Any Style Transfer to address this drawback, which enables users to interactively select styles of regions in the style image and apply them to the prescribed content regions. In this way, personalizable style transfer is achieved through human-computer interaction. At the heart of our approach lies in (1) a region segmentation module based on Segment Anything, which supports region selection with only some clicks or drawing on images and thus takes user inputs conveniently and flexibly; (2) and an attention fusion module, which converts inputs from users to controlling signals for the style transfer model. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness for personalizable style transfer. Notably, our approach performs in a plug-and-play manner portable to any style transfer method and enhance the controllablity. Our code is available \href{https://github.com/Huage001/Transfer-Any-Style}{here}.
Rehabilitation Exercise Repetition Segmentation and Counting using Skeletal Body Joints
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Physical exercise is an essential component of rehabilitation programs that improve quality of life and reduce mortality and re-hospitalization rates. In AI-driven virtual rehabilitation programs, patients complete their exercises independently at home, while AI algorithms analyze the exercise data to provide feedback to patients and report their progress to clinicians. To analyze exercise data, the first step is to segment it into consecutive repetitions. There has been a significant amount of research performed on segmenting and counting the repetitive activities of healthy individuals using raw video data, which raises concerns regarding privacy and is computationally intensive. Previous research on patients' rehabilitation exercise segmentation relied on data collected by multiple wearable sensors, which are difficult to use at home by rehabilitation patients. Compared to healthy individuals, segmenting and counting exercise repetitions in patients is more challenging because of the irregular repetition duration and the variation between repetitions. This paper presents a novel approach for segmenting and counting the repetitions of rehabilitation exercises performed by patients, based on their skeletal body joints. Skeletal body joints can be acquired through depth cameras or computer vision techniques applied to RGB videos of patients. Various sequential neural networks are designed to analyze the sequences of skeletal body joints and perform repetition segmentation and counting. Extensive experiments on three publicly available rehabilitation exercise datasets, KIMORE, UI-PRMD, and IntelliRehabDS, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared to previous methods. The proposed method enables accurate exercise analysis while preserving privacy, facilitating the effective delivery of virtual rehabilitation programs.
Reference-based Image Composition with Sketch via Structure-aware Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent remarkable improvements in large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown promising results in generating high-fidelity images. To further enhance editability and enable fine-grained generation, we introduce a multi-input-conditioned image composition model that incorporates a sketch as a novel modal, alongside a reference image. Thanks to the edge-level controllability using sketches, our method enables a user to edit or complete an image sub-part with a desired structure (i.e., sketch) and content (i.e., reference image). Our framework fine-tunes a pre-trained diffusion model to complete missing regions using the reference image while maintaining sketch guidance. Albeit simple, this leads to wide opportunities to fulfill user needs for obtaining the in-demand images. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method offers unique use cases for image manipulation, enabling user-driven modifications of arbitrary scenes.
Contactless Human Activity Recognition using Deep Learning with Flexible and Scalable Software Define Radio
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Ambient computing is gaining popularity as a major technological advancement for the future. The modern era has witnessed a surge in the advancement in healthcare systems, with viable radio frequency solutions proposed for remote and unobtrusive human activity recognition (HAR). Specifically, this study investigates the use of Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI) as a novel method of ambient sensing that can be employed as a contactless means of recognizing human activity in indoor environments. These methods avoid additional costly hardware required for vision-based systems, which are privacy-intrusive, by (re)using Wi-Fi CSI for various safety and security applications. During an experiment utilizing universal software-defined radio (USRP) to collect CSI samples, it was observed that a subject engaged in six distinct activities, which included no activity, standing, sitting, and leaning forward, across different areas of the room. Additionally, more CSI samples were collected when the subject walked in two different directions. This study presents a Wi-Fi CSI-based HAR system that assesses and contrasts deep learning approaches, namely convolutional neural network (CNN), long short-term memory (LSTM), and hybrid (LSTM+CNN), employed for accurate activity recognition. The experimental results indicate that LSTM surpasses current models and achieves an average accuracy of 95.3% in multi-activity classification when compared to CNN and hybrid techniques. In the future, research needs to study the significance of resilience in diverse and dynamic environments to identify the activity of multiple users.
Amplifying Sine Unit: An Oscillatory Activation Function for Deep Neural Networks to Recover Nonlinear Oscillations Efficiently
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Many industrial and real life problems exhibit highly nonlinear periodic behaviors and the conventional methods may fall short of finding their analytical or closed form solutions. Such problems demand some cutting edge computational tools with increased functionality and reduced cost. Recently, deep neural networks have gained massive research interest due to their ability to handle large data and universality to learn complex functions. In this work, we put forward a methodology based on deep neural networks with responsive layers structure to deal nonlinear oscillations in microelectromechanical systems. We incorporated some oscillatory and non oscillatory activation functions such as growing cosine unit known as GCU, Sine, Mish and Tanh in our designed network to have a comprehensive analysis on their performance for highly nonlinear and vibrational problems. Integrating oscillatory activation functions with deep neural networks definitely outperform in predicting the periodic patterns of underlying systems. To support oscillatory actuation for nonlinear systems, we have proposed a novel oscillatory activation function called Amplifying Sine Unit denoted as ASU which is more efficient than GCU for complex vibratory systems such as microelectromechanical systems. Experimental results show that the designed network with our proposed activation function ASU is more reliable and robust to handle the challenges posed by nonlinearity and oscillations. To validate the proposed methodology, outputs of our networks are being compared with the results from Livermore solver for ordinary differential equation called LSODA. Further, graphical illustrations of incurred errors are also being presented in the work.
Improving Post-Training Quantization on Object Detection with Task Loss-Guided Lp Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Efficient inference for object detection networks is a major challenge on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ), which transforms a full-precision model into low bit-width directly, is an effective and convenient approach to reduce model inference complexity. But it suffers severe accuracy drop when applied to complex tasks such as object detection. PTQ optimizes the quantization parameters by different metrics to minimize the perturbation of quantization. The p-norm distance of feature maps before and after quantization, Lp, is widely used as the metric to evaluate perturbation. For the specialty of object detection network, we observe that the parameter p in Lp metric will significantly influence its quantization performance. We indicate that using a fixed hyper-parameter p does not achieve optimal quantization performance. To mitigate this problem, we propose a framework, DetPTQ, to assign different p values for quantizing different layers using an Object Detection Output Loss (ODOL), which represents the task loss of object detection. DetPTQ employs the ODOL-based adaptive Lp metric to select the optimal quantization parameters. Experiments show that our DetPTQ outperforms the state-of-the-art PTQ methods by a significant margin on both 2D and 3D object detectors. For example, we achieve 31.1/31.7(quantization/full-precision) mAP on RetinaNet-ResNet18 with 4-bit weight and 4-bit activation.