OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Practically adaptable CPABE based Health-Records sharing framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

With recent elevated adaptation of cloud services in almost every major public sector, the health sector emerges as a vulnerable segment, particularly in data exchange of sensitive Health records, as determining the retention, exchange, and efficient use of patient records without jeopardizing patient privacy, particularly on mobile-applications remains an area to expand. In the existing scenarios of cloud-mobile services, several vulnerabilities can be found including trapping of data within a single cloud-service-provider and loss of resource control being the significant ones. In this study, we have suggested a CPABE and OAuth2.0 based framework for efficient access-control and authorization respectively to improve the practicality of EHR sharing across a single client-application. In addition to solving issues like practicality, data entrapment, and resource control loss, the suggested framework also aims to provide two significant functionalities simultaneously, the specific operation of client application itself, and straightforward access of data to institutions, governments, and organizations seeking delicate EHRs. Our implementation of the suggested framework along with its analytical comparison signifies its potential in terms of efficient performance and minimal latency as this study would have a considerable impact on the recent literature as it intends to bridge the pragmatic deficit in CPABE-based EHR services.
Finite-Time Error Analysis of Soft Q-Learning: Switching System Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Soft Q-learning is a variation of Q-learning designed to solve entropy regularized Markov decision problems where an agent aims to maximize the entropy regularized value function. Despite its empirical success, there have been limited theoretical studies of soft Q-learning to date. This paper aims to offer a novel and unified finite-time, control-theoretic analysis of soft Q-learning algorithms. We focus on two types of soft Q-learning algorithms: one utilizing the log-sum-exp operator and the other employing the Boltzmann operator. By using dynamical switching system models, we derive novel finite-time error bounds for both soft Q-learning algorithms. We hope that our analysis will deepen the current understanding of soft Q-learning by establishing connections with switching system models and may even pave the way for new frameworks in the finite-time analysis of other reinforcement learning algorithms.
Causal Multi-Label Feature Selection in Federated Setting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-label feature selection serves as an effective mean for dealing with high-dimensional multi-label data. To achieve satisfactory performance, existing methods for multi-label feature selection often require the centralization of substantial data from multiple sources. However, in Federated setting, centralizing data from all sources and merging them into a single dataset is not feasible. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we study a challenging problem of causal multi-label feature selection in federated setting and propose a Federated Causal Multi-label Feature Selection (FedCMFS) algorithm with three novel subroutines. Specifically, FedCMFS first uses the FedCFL subroutine that considers the correlations among label-label, label-feature, and feature-feature to learn the relevant features (candidate parents and children) of each class label while preserving data privacy without centralizing data. Second, FedCMFS employs the FedCFR subroutine to selectively recover the missed true relevant features. Finally, FedCMFS utilizes the FedCFC subroutine to remove false relevant features. The extensive experiments on 8 datasets have shown that FedCMFS is effect for causal multi-label feature selection in federated setting.
RLingua: Improving Reinforcement Learning Sample Efficiency in Robotic Manipulations With Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its capability in solving various tasks but is notorious for its low sample efficiency. In this paper, we propose RLingua, a framework that can leverage the internal knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to reduce the sample complexity of RL in robotic manipulations. To this end, we first present a method for extracting the prior knowledge of LLMs by prompt engineering so that a preliminary rule-based robot controller for a specific task can be generated in a user-friendly manner. Despite being imperfect, the LLM-generated robot controller is utilized to produce action samples during rollouts with a decaying probability, thereby improving RL's sample efficiency. We employ TD3, the widely-used RL baseline method, and modify the actor loss to regularize the policy learning towards the LLM-generated controller. RLingua also provides a novel method of improving the imperfect LLM-generated robot controllers by RL. We demonstrate that RLingua can significantly reduce the sample complexity of TD3 in four robot tasks of panda_gym and achieve high success rates in 12 sampled sparsely rewarded robot tasks in RLBench, where the standard TD3 fails. Additionally, We validated RLingua's effectiveness in real-world robot experiments through Sim2Real, demonstrating that the learned policies are effectively transferable to real robot tasks. Further details about our work are available at our project website https://rlingua.github.io.
Automatic Generation of Python Programs Using Context-Free Grammars
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, data has emerged as the new gold, serving as a powerful tool for creating intelligent systems. However, procuring high-quality data remains challenging, especially for code. To address this, we developed TinyPy Generator, a tool that generates random Python programs using a context-free grammar. The generated programs are guaranteed to be correct by construction. Our system uses custom production rules (in the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) format) to recursively generate code. This allows us to generate code with different levels of complexity, ranging from code containing only assignments to more complex code containing conditionals and loops. Our proposed tool enables effortless large-scale Python code generation, beneficial for a wide range of applications. TinyPy Generator is particularly useful in the field of machine learning, where it can generate substantial amounts of Python code for training Python language models. Additionally, researchers who are studying programming languages can utilize this tool to create datasets for their experiments, which can help validate the robustness of code interpreters or compilers. Unlike existing research, we have open-sourced our implementation. This allows customization according to user needs and extends potential usage to other languages.
Towards Fixed-Point Formats Determination for Faust Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Modern programmable digital signal processing relies on floating-point numbers for their ease of use. Fixed-point number formats have the potential to save resources and improve execution time, but realising this potential burdens the programmer with the need to define each format, at every step of the computation. This article reviews existing methods to automatically determine fixed-point formats, then describes and evaluates the prototype implementation of automatic fixed-point format determination in the Faust compiler.
Transformer-based Fusion of 2D-pose and Spatio-temporal Embeddings for Distracted Driver Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Classification and localization of driving actions over time is important for advanced driver-assistance systems and naturalistic driving studies. Temporal localization is challenging because it requires robustness, reliability, and accuracy. In this study, we aim to improve the temporal localization and classification accuracy performance by adapting video action recognition and 2D human-pose estimation networks to one model. Therefore, we design a transformer-based fusion architecture to effectively combine 2D-pose features and spatio-temporal features. The model uses 2D-pose features as the positional embedding of the transformer architecture and spatio-temporal features as the main input to the encoder of the transformer. The proposed solution is generic and independent of the camera numbers and positions, giving frame-based class probabilities as output. Finally, the post-processing step combines information from different camera views to obtain final predictions and eliminate false positives. The model performs well on the A2 test set of the 2023 NVIDIA AI City Challenge for naturalistic driving action recognition, achieving the overlap score of the organizer-defined distracted driver behaviour metric of 0.5079.
Assembly Theory is an approximation to algorithmic complexity based on LZ compression that does not explain selection or evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We prove the full equivalence between Assembly Theory (AT) and Shannon Entropy via a method based upon the principles of statistical compression renamed `assembly index' that belongs to the LZ family of popular compression algorithms (ZIP, GZIP, JPEG). Such popular algorithms have been shown to empirically reproduce the results of AT, results that have also been reported before in successful applications to separating organic from non-organic molecules and in the context of the study of selection and evolution. We show that the assembly index value is equivalent to the size of a minimal context-free grammar. The statistical compressibility of such a method is bounded by Shannon Entropy and other equivalent traditional LZ compression schemes, such as LZ77, LZ78, or LZW. In addition, we demonstrate that AT, and the algorithms supporting its pathway complexity, assembly index, and assembly number, define compression schemes and methods that are subsumed into the theory of algorithmic (Kolmogorov-Solomonoff-Chaitin) complexity. Due to AT's current lack of logical consistency in defining causality for non-stochastic processes and the lack of empirical evidence that it outperforms other complexity measures found in the literature capable of explaining the same phenomena, we conclude that the assembly index and the assembly number do not lead to an explanation or quantification of biases in generative (physical or biological) processes, including those brought about by (abiotic or Darwinian) selection and evolution, that could not have been arrived at using Shannon Entropy or that have not been reported before using classical information theory or algorithmic complexity.
Spatial features of CO2 for occupancy detection in a naturally ventilated school building
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate occupancy information helps to improve building energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Occupancy detection methods based on CO2 sensors have received attention due to their low cost and low intrusiveness. In naturally ventilated buildings, the accuracy of CO2-based occupancy detection is generally low in related studies due to the complex ventilation behavior and the difficulty in measuring the actual air exchange through windows. In this study, we present two novel features for occupancy detection based on the spatial distribution of the CO2 concentration. After a quantitative analysis with Support Vector Machine (SVM) as classifier, it was found that the accuracy of occupancy state detection in naturally ventilated rooms could be improved by up to 14.8 percentage points compared to the baseline, reaching 83.2 % (F1 score 0.84) without any ventilation information. With ventilation information, the accuracy reached 87.6 % (F1 score 0.89). The performance of occupancy quantity detection was significantly improved by up to 25.3 percentage points versus baseline, reaching 56 %, with root mean square error (RMSE) of 11.44 occupants, using only CO2-related features. Additional ventilation information further enhanced the performance to 61.8 % (RMSE 9.02 occupants). By incorporating spatial features, the model using only CO2-related features revealed similar performance as the model containing additional ventilation information, resulting in a better low-cost occupancy detection method for naturally ventilated buildings.
Elephants Never Forget: Testing Language Models for Memorization of Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data. Starting with simple qualitative tests for whether an LLM knows the names and values of features, we introduce a variety of different techniques to assess the degrees of contamination, including statistical tests for conditional distribution modeling and four tests that identify memorization. Our investigation reveals that LLMs are pre-trained on many popular tabular datasets. This exposure can lead to invalid performance evaluation on downstream tasks because the LLMs have, in effect, been fit to the test set. Interestingly, we also identify a regime where the language model reproduces important statistics of the data, but fails to reproduce the dataset verbatim. On these datasets, although seen during training, good performance on downstream tasks might not be due to overfitting. Our findings underscore the need for ensuring data integrity in machine learning tasks with LLMs. To facilitate future research, we release an open-source tool that can perform various tests for memorization \url{https://github.com/interpretml/LLM-Tabular-Memorization-Checker}.
Streamlining in the Riemannian Realm: Efficient Riemannian Optimization with Loopless Variance Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we investigate stochastic optimization on Riemannian manifolds, focusing on the crucial variance reduction mechanism used in both Euclidean and Riemannian settings. Riemannian variance-reduced methods usually involve a double-loop structure, computing a full gradient at the start of each loop. Determining the optimal inner loop length is challenging in practice, as it depends on strong convexity or smoothness constants, which are often unknown or hard to estimate. Motivated by Euclidean methods, we introduce the Riemannian Loopless SVRG (R-LSVRG) and PAGE (R-PAGE) methods. These methods replace the outer loop with probabilistic gradient computation triggered by a coin flip in each iteration, ensuring simpler proofs, efficient hyperparameter selection, and sharp convergence guarantees. Using R-PAGE as a framework for non-convex Riemannian optimization, we demonstrate its applicability to various important settings. For example, we derive Riemannian MARINA (R-MARINA) for distributed settings with communication compression, providing the best theoretical communication complexity guarantees for non-convex distributed optimization over Riemannian manifolds. Experimental results support our theoretical findings.
Transferring Relative Monocular Depth to Surgical Vision with Temporal Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Relative monocular depth, inferring depth up to shift and scale from a single image, is an active research topic. Recent deep learning models, trained on large and varied meta-datasets, now provide excellent performance in the domain of natural images. However, few datasets exist which provide ground truth depth for endoscopic images, making training such models from scratch unfeasible. This work investigates the transfer of these models into the surgical domain, and presents an effective and simple way to improve on standard supervision through the use of temporal consistency self-supervision. We show temporal consistency significantly improves supervised training alone when transferring to the low-data regime of endoscopy, and outperforms the prevalent self-supervision technique for this task. In addition we show our method drastically outperforms the state-of-the-art method from within the domain of endoscopy. We also release our code, model and ensembled meta-dataset, Meta-MED, establishing a strong benchmark for future work.
A SysML Profile for the Standardized Description of Processes during System Development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

A key aspect in creating models of production systems with the use of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) lies in the description of system functions. These functions shouldbe described in a clear and standardized manner.The VDI/VDE 3682 standard for Formalised Process De-scription (FPD) provides a simple and easily understandable representation of processes. These processes can be conceptualized as functions within the system model, making the FPD particularly well-suited for the standardized representation ofthe required functions. Hence, this contribution focuses on thedevelopment of a Domain-Specific Modeling Language(DSML) that facilitates the integration of VDI/VDE 3682 into the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). The presented approach not onlyextends classical SysML with domain-specific requirements but also facilitates model verification through constraints modeled in Object Constraint Language (OCL). Additionally, it enables automatic serialization of process descriptions into the Extensible Markup Language (XML) using the Velocity Template Language (VTL). This serialization enables the use of process modeling in applications outside of MBSE. The approach was validated using an collar screwing use case in the major component assembly in aircraft production.
Improving Low-Resource Knowledge Tracing Tasks by Supervised Pre-training and Importance Mechanism Fine-tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate student's knowledge mastery based on their historical interactions. Recently, the deep learning based KT (DLKT) approaches have achieved impressive performance in the KT task. These DLKT models heavily rely on the large number of available student interactions. However, due to various reasons such as budget constraints and privacy concerns, observed interactions are very limited in many real-world scenarios, a.k.a, low-resource KT datasets. Directly training a DLKT model on a low-resource KT dataset may lead to overfitting and it is difficult to choose the appropriate deep neural architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a low-resource KT framework called LoReKT to address above challenges. Inspired by the prevalent "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm, we aim to learn transferable parameters and representations from rich-resource KT datasets during the pre-training stage and subsequently facilitate effective adaptation to low-resource KT datasets. Specifically, we simplify existing sophisticated DLKT model architectures with purely a stack of transformer decoders. We design an encoding mechanism to incorporate student interactions from multiple KT data sources and develop an importance mechanism to prioritize updating parameters with high importance while constraining less important ones during the fine-tuning stage. We evaluate LoReKT on six public KT datasets and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of AUC and Accuracy. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/LoReKT.
Enhancing Image Caption Generation Using Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Research on generative models to produce human-aligned / human-preferred outputs has seen significant recent contributions. Between text and image-generative models, we narrowed our focus to text-based generative models, particularly to produce captions for images that align with human preferences. In this research, we explored a potential method to amplify the performance of the Deep Neural Network Model to generate captions that are preferred by humans. This was achieved by integrating Supervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) using the Flickr8k dataset. Also, a novel loss function that is capable of optimizing the model based on human feedback is introduced. In this paper, we provide a concise sketch of our approach and results, hoping to contribute to the ongoing advances in the field of human-aligned generative AI models.
Evaluating Large Language Models in Process Mining: Capabilities, Benchmarks, and Evaluation Strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) for Process Mining (PM) tasks is becoming increasingly essential, and initial approaches yield promising results. However, little attention has been given to developing strategies for evaluating and benchmarking the utility of incorporating LLMs into PM tasks. This paper reviews the current implementations of LLMs in PM and reflects on three different questions. 1) What is the minimal set of capabilities required for PM on LLMs? 2) Which benchmark strategies help choose optimal LLMs for PM? 3) How do we evaluate the output of LLMs on specific PM tasks? The answer to these questions is fundamental to the development of comprehensive process mining benchmarks on LLMs covering different tasks and implementation paradigms.
Redefining Event Types and Group Evolution in Temporal Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Groups -- such as clusters of points or communities of nodes -- are fundamental when addressing various data mining tasks. In temporal data, the predominant approach for characterizing group evolution has been through the identification of ``events". However, the events usually described in the literature, e.g., shrinks/growths, splits/merges, are often arbitrarily defined, creating a gap between such theoretical/predefined types and real-data group observations. Moving beyond existing taxonomies, we think of events as ``archetypes" characterized by a unique combination of quantitative dimensions that we call ``facets". Group dynamics are defined by their position within the facet space, where archetypal events occupy extremities. Thus, rather than enforcing strict event types, our approach can allow for hybrid descriptions of dynamics involving group proximity to multiple archetypes. We apply our framework to evolving groups from several face-to-face interaction datasets, showing it enables richer, more reliable characterization of group dynamics with respect to state-of-the-art methods, especially when the groups are subject to complex relationships. Our approach also offers intuitive solutions to common tasks related to dynamic group analysis, such as choosing an appropriate aggregation scale, quantifying partition stability, and evaluating event quality.
Next4: Snapshots in Ext4 File System
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2024
Year: 2024

The growing value of data as a strategic asset has given rise to the necessity of implementing reliable backup and recovery solutions in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. The data backup methods available today on linux are not effective enough, because while running, most of them block I/Os to guarantee data integrity. We propose and implement Next4 - file system based snapshot feature in Ext4 which creates an instant image of the file system, to provide incremental versions of data, enabling reliable backup and data recovery. In our design, the snapshot feature is implemented by efficiently infusing the copy-on-write strategy in the write-in-place, extent based Ext4 file system, without affecting its basic structure. Each snapshot is an incremental backup of the data within the system. What distinguishes Next4 is the way that the data is backed up, improving both space utilization as well as performance.