OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AlphaZeroES: Direct score maximization outperforms planning loss minimization
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Planning at execution time has been shown to dramatically improve performance for agents in both single-agent and multi-agent settings. A well-known family of approaches to planning at execution time are AlphaZero and its variants, which use Monte Carlo Tree Search together with a neural network that guides the search by predicting state values and action probabilities. AlphaZero trains these networks by minimizing a planning loss that makes the value prediction match the episode return, and the policy prediction at the root of the search tree match the output of the full tree expansion. AlphaZero has been applied to both single-agent environments (such as Sokoban) and multi-agent environments (such as chess and Go) with great success. In this paper, we explore an intriguing question: In single-agent environments, can we outperform AlphaZero by directly maximizing the episode score instead of minimizing this planning loss, while leaving the MCTS algorithm and neural architecture unchanged? To directly maximize the episode score, we use evolution strategies, a family of algorithms for zeroth-order blackbox optimization. Our experiments indicate that, across multiple environments, directly maximizing the episode score outperforms minimizing the planning loss.
Security of AI Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

AI agents have been boosted by large language models. AI agents can function as intelligent assistants and complete tasks on behalf of their users with access to tools and the ability to execute commands in their environments. Through studying and experiencing the workflow of typical AI agents, we have raised several concerns regarding their security. These potential vulnerabilities are not addressed by the frameworks used to build the agents, nor by research aimed at improving the agents. In this paper, we identify and describe these vulnerabilities in detail from a system security perspective, emphasizing their causes and severe effects. Furthermore, we introduce defense mechanisms corresponding to each vulnerability with design and experiments to evaluate their viability. Altogether, this paper contextualizes the security issues in the current development of AI agents and delineates methods to make AI agents safer and more reliable.
Global AI Governance in Healthcare: A Cross-Jurisdictional Regulatory Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being adopted across the world and promises a new revolution in healthcare. While AI-enabled medical devices in North America dominate 42.3% of the global market, the use of AI-enabled medical devices in other countries is still a story waiting to be unfolded. We aim to delve deeper into global regulatory approaches towards AI use in healthcare, with a focus on how common themes are emerging globally. We compare these themes to the World Health Organization's (WHO) regulatory considerations and principles on ethical use of AI for healthcare applications. Our work seeks to take a global perspective on AI policy by analyzing 14 legal jurisdictions including countries representative of various regions in the world (North America, South America, South East Asia, Middle East, Africa, Australia, and the Asia-Pacific). Our eventual goal is to foster a global conversation on the ethical use of AI in healthcare and the regulations that will guide it. We propose solutions to promote international harmonization of AI regulations and examine the requirements for regulating generative AI, using China and Singapore as examples of countries with well-developed policies in this area.
TikTag: Breaking ARM's Memory Tagging Extension with Speculative Execution
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) is a new hardware feature introduced in ARMv8.5-A architecture, aiming to detect memory corruption vulnerabilities. The low overhead of MTE makes it an attractive solution to mitigate memory corruption attacks in modern software systems and is considered the most promising path forward for improving C/C++ software security. This paper explores the potential security risks posed by speculative execution attacks against MTE. Specifically, this paper identifies new TikTag gadgets capable of leaking the MTE tags from arbitrary memory addresses through speculative execution. With TikTag gadgets, attackers can bypass the probabilistic defense of MTE, increasing the attack success rate by close to 100%. We demonstrate that TikTag gadgets can be used to bypass MTE-based mitigations in real-world systems, Google Chrome and the Linux kernel. Experimental results show that TikTag gadgets can successfully leak an MTE tag with a success rate higher than 95% in less than 4 seconds. We further propose new defense mechanisms to mitigate the security risks posed by TikTag gadgets.
From an Integrated Usability Framework to Lessons on Usability and Performance of Open Government Data Portals: A Comparative Study of European Union and Gulf Cooperation Council Countries
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives aim to enhance public participation and collaboration by making government data accessible to diverse stakeholders, fostering social, environmental, and economic benefits through public value generation. However, challenges such as declining popularity, lack of OGD portal usability, and private interests overshadowing public accessibility persist. This study proposes an integrated usability framework for evaluating OGD portals, focusing on inclusivity, user collaboration, and data exploration. Employing Design Science Research (DSR), the framework is developed and applied to 33 OGD portals from the European Union (EU) and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The quantitative analysis is complemented by qualitative analysis and clustering, enabling assessment of portal performance, identification of best practices, and common weaknesses. This results in 19 high-level recommendations for improving the open data ecosystem. Key findings highlight the competitive nature of EU portals and the innovative features of GCC portals, emphasizing the need for multilingual support, better communication mechanisms, and improved dataset usability. The study stresses trends towards exposing data quality indicators and incorporating advanced functionalities such as AI systems. This framework serves as a baseline for OGD portal requirements elicitation, offering practical implications for developing sustainable, collaborative, and robust OGD portals, ultimately contributing to a more transparent and equitable world.
ALINA: Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Labels are the cornerstone of supervised machine learning algorithms. Most visual recognition methods are fully supervised, using bounding boxes or pixel-wise segmentations for object localization. Traditional labeling methods, such as crowd-sourcing, are prohibitive due to cost, data privacy, amount of time, and potential errors on large datasets. To address these issues, we propose a novel annotation framework, Advanced Line Identification and Notation Algorithm (ALINA), which can be used for labeling taxiway datasets that consist of different camera perspectives and variable weather attributes (sunny and cloudy). Additionally, the CIRCular threshoLd pixEl Discovery And Traversal (CIRCLEDAT) algorithm has been proposed, which is an integral step in determining the pixels corresponding to taxiway line markings. Once the pixels are identified, ALINA generates corresponding pixel coordinate annotations on the frame. Using this approach, 60,249 frames from the taxiway dataset, AssistTaxi have been labeled. To evaluate the performance, a context-based edge map (CBEM) set was generated manually based on edge features and connectivity. The detection rate after testing the annotated labels with the CBEM set was recorded as 98.45%, attesting its dependability and effectiveness.
Automated Essay Scoring Using Grammatical Variety and Errors with Multi-Task Learning and Item Response Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study examines the effect of grammatical features in automatic essay scoring (AES). We use two kinds of grammatical features as input to an AES model: (1) grammatical items that writers used correctly in essays, and (2) the number of grammatical errors. Experimental results show that grammatical features improve the performance of AES models that predict the holistic scores of essays. Multi-task learning with the holistic and grammar scores, alongside using grammatical features, resulted in a larger improvement in model performance. We also show that a model using grammar abilities estimated using Item Response Theory (IRT) as the labels for the auxiliary task achieved comparable performance to when we used grammar scores assigned by human raters. In addition, we weight the grammatical features using IRT to consider the difficulty of grammatical items and writers' grammar abilities. We found that weighting grammatical features with the difficulty led to further improvement in performance.
Trajectory Planning for Autonomous Driving in Unstructured Scenarios Based on Graph Neural Network and Numerical Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In unstructured environments, obstacles are diverse and lack lane markings, making trajectory planning for intelligent vehicles a challenging task. Traditional trajectory planning methods typically involve multiple stages, including path planning, speed planning, and trajectory optimization. These methods require the manual design of numerous parameters for each stage, resulting in significant workload and computational burden. While end-to-end trajectory planning methods are simple and efficient, they often fail to ensure that the trajectory meets vehicle dynamics and obstacle avoidance constraints in unstructured scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel trajectory planning method based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and numerical optimization. The proposed method consists of two stages: (1) initial trajectory prediction using the GNN, (2) trajectory optimization using numerical optimization. First, the graph neural network processes the environment information and predicts a rough trajectory, replacing traditional path and speed planning. This predicted trajectory serves as the initial solution for the numerical optimization stage, which optimizes the trajectory to ensure compliance with vehicle dynamics and obstacle avoidance constraints. We conducted simulation experiments to validate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm and compared it with other mainstream planning algorithms. The results demonstrate that the proposed method simplifies the trajectory planning process and significantly improves planning efficiency.
Fusion of regional and sparse attention in Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Modern vision transformers leverage visually inspired local interaction between pixels through attention computed within window or grid regions, in contrast to the global attention employed in the original ViT. Regional attention restricts pixel interactions within specific regions, while sparse attention disperses them across sparse grids. These differing approaches pose a challenge between maintaining hierarchical relationships vs. capturing a global context. In this study, drawing inspiration from atrous convolution, we propose Atrous Attention, a blend of regional and sparse attention that dynamically integrates both local and global information while preserving hierarchical structures. Based on this, we introduce a versatile, hybrid vision transformer backbone called ACC-ViT, tailored for standard vision tasks. Our compact model achieves approximately 84% accuracy on ImageNet-1K with fewer than 28.5 million parameters, outperforming the state-of-the-art MaxViT by 0.42% while requiring 8.4% fewer parameters.
Cognitively Inspired Energy-Based World Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

One of the predominant methods for training world models is autoregressive prediction in the output space of the next element of a sequence. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), this takes the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) predicting the next token; in Computer Vision (CV), this takes the form of autoregressive models predicting the next frame/token/pixel. However, this approach differs from human cognition in several respects. First, human predictions about the future actively influence internal cognitive processes. Second, humans naturally evaluate the plausibility of predictions regarding future states. Based on this capability, and third, by assessing when predictions are sufficient, humans allocate a dynamic amount of time to make a prediction. This adaptive process is analogous to System 2 thinking in psychology. All these capabilities are fundamental to the success of humans at high-level reasoning and planning. Therefore, to address the limitations of traditional autoregressive models lacking these human-like capabilities, we introduce Energy-Based World Models (EBWM). EBWM involves training an Energy-Based Model (EBM) to predict the compatibility of a given context and a predicted future state. In doing so, EBWM enables models to achieve all three facets of human cognition described. Moreover, we developed a variant of the traditional autoregressive transformer tailored for Energy-Based models, termed the Energy-Based Transformer (EBT). Our results demonstrate that EBWM scales better with data and GPU Hours than traditional autoregressive transformers in CV, and that EBWM offers promising early scaling in NLP. Consequently, this approach offers an exciting path toward training future models capable of System 2 thinking and intelligently searching across state spaces.
Modeling Common Cause Failure in Dynamic PRA
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper we propose a dynamic model of Common Cause Failures (CCF) that allows to generate common cause events in time. The proposed model is a generalization of Binomial Failure Rate Model (Atwood model) that can generate staggered failures of multiple components due to a common cause. We implement the model using statechart formalism, a similar implementation can be adopted in other modeling languages like Petri Nets or Hybrid Stochastic Automata. The presented model was integrated in a Dynamic PRA study.
Robust Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Beyond effectiveness, the robustness of an information retrieval (IR) system is increasingly attracting attention. When deployed, a critical technology such as IR should not only deliver strong performance on average but also have the ability to handle a variety of exceptional situations. In recent years, research into the robustness of IR has seen significant growth, with numerous researchers offering extensive analyses and proposing myriad strategies to address robustness challenges. In this tutorial, we first provide background information covering the basics and a taxonomy of robustness in IR. Then, we examine adversarial robustness and out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness within IR-specific contexts, extensively reviewing recent progress in methods to enhance robustness. The tutorial concludes with a discussion on the robustness of IR in the context of large language models (LLMs), highlighting ongoing challenges and promising directions for future research. This tutorial aims to generate broader attention to robustness issues in IR, facilitate an understanding of the relevant literature, and lower the barrier to entry for interested researchers and practitioners.
Computer Vision Approaches for Automated Bee Counting Application
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Many application from the bee colony health state monitoring could be efficiently solved using a computer vision techniques. One of such challenges is an efficient way for counting the number of incoming and outcoming bees, which could be used to further analyse many trends, such as the bee colony health state, blooming periods, or for investigating the effects of agricultural spraying. In this paper, we compare three methods for the automated bee counting over two own datasets. The best performing method is based on the ResNet-50 convolutional neural network classifier, which achieved accuracy of 87% over the BUT1 dataset and the accuracy of 93% over the BUT2 dataset.
Multiple Prior Representation Learning for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation via Hybrid Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation aims to infer depth information without relying on labeled data. However, the lack of labeled information poses a significant challenge to the model's representation, limiting its ability to capture the intricate details of the scene accurately. Prior information can potentially mitigate this issue, enhancing the model's understanding of scene structure and texture. Nevertheless, solely relying on a single type of prior information often falls short when dealing with complex scenes, necessitating improvements in generalization performance. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel self-supervised monocular depth estimation model that leverages multiple priors to bolster representation capabilities across spatial, context, and semantic dimensions. Specifically, we employ a hybrid transformer and a lightweight pose network to obtain long-range spatial priors in the spatial dimension. Then, the context prior attention is designed to improve generalization, particularly in complex structures or untextured areas. In addition, semantic priors are introduced by leveraging semantic boundary loss, and semantic prior attention is supplemented, further refining the semantic features extracted by the decoder. Experiments on three diverse datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. It integrates multiple priors to comprehensively enhance the representation ability, improving the accuracy and reliability of depth estimation. Codes are available at: \url{https://github.com/MVME-HBUT/MPRLNet}
Preserving Identity with Variational Score for General-purpose 3D Editing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present Piva (Preserving Identity with Variational Score Distillation), a novel optimization-based method for editing images and 3D models based on diffusion models. Specifically, our approach is inspired by the recently proposed method for 2D image editing - Delta Denoising Score (DDS). We pinpoint the limitations in DDS for 2D and 3D editing, which causes detail loss and over-saturation. To address this, we propose an additional score distillation term that enforces identity preservation. This results in a more stable editing process, gradually optimizing NeRF models to match target prompts while retaining crucial input characteristics. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in zero-shot image and neural field editing. Our method successfully alters visual attributes, adds both subtle and substantial structural elements, translates shapes, and achieves competitive results on standard 2D and 3D editing benchmarks. Additionally, our method imposes no constraints like masking or pre-training, making it compatible with a wide range of pre-trained diffusion models. This allows for versatile editing without needing neural field-to-mesh conversion, offering a more user-friendly experience.
Autonomous Multi-Objective Optimization Using Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications, presenting a complex challenge of balancing multiple conflicting objectives. Traditional evolutionary algorithms (EAs), though effective, often rely on domain-specific expertise and iterative fine-tuning, hindering adaptability to unseen MOPs. In recent years, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized software engineering by enabling the autonomous generation and refinement of programs. Leveraging this breakthrough, we propose a new LLM-based framework that autonomously designs EA operators for solving MOPs. The proposed framework includes a robust testing module to refine the generated EA operator through error-driven dialogue with LLMs, a dynamic selection strategy along with informative prompting-based crossover and mutation to fit textual optimization pipeline. Our approach facilitates the design of EA operators without the extensive demands for expert intervention, thereby speeding up the innovation of EA operators. Empirical studies across various MOP categories validate the robustness and superior performance of our proposed framework.
AMSA-UNet: An Asymmetric Multiple Scales U-net Based on Self-attention for Deblurring
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The traditional ingle-scale U-Net often leads to the loss of spatial information during deblurring, which affects the deblurring accracy. Additionally, due to the convolutional method's limitation in capturing long-range dependencies, the quality of the recovered image is degraded. To address the above problems, an asymmetric multiple scales U-net based on self-attention (AMSA-UNet) is proposed to improve the accuracy and computational complexity. By introducing a multiple-scales U shape architecture, the network can focus on blurry regions at the global level and better recover image details at the local level. In order to overcome the limitations of traditional convolutional methods in capturing the long-range dependencies of information, a self-attention mechanism is introduced into the decoder part of the backbone network, which significantly increases the model's receptive field, enabling it to pay more attention to semantic information of the image, thereby producing more accurate and visually pleasing deblurred images. What's more, a frequency domain-based computation method was introduced to reduces the computation amount. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits significant improvements in both accuracy and speed compared to eight excellent methods
CUER: Corrected Uniform Experience Replay for Off-Policy Continuous Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The utilization of the experience replay mechanism enables agents to effectively leverage their experiences on several occasions. In previous studies, the sampling probability of the transitions was modified based on their relative significance. The process of reassigning sample probabilities for every transition in the replay buffer after each iteration is considered extremely inefficient. Hence, in order to enhance computing efficiency, experience replay prioritization algorithms reassess the importance of a transition as it is sampled. However, the relative importance of the transitions undergoes dynamic adjustments when the agent's policy and value function are iteratively updated. Furthermore, experience replay is a mechanism that retains the transitions generated by the agent's past policies, which could potentially diverge significantly from the agent's most recent policy. An increased deviation from the agent's most recent policy results in a greater frequency of off-policy updates, which has a negative impact on the agent's performance. In this paper, we develop a novel algorithm, Corrected Uniform Experience Replay (CUER), which stochastically samples the stored experience while considering the fairness among all other experiences without ignoring the dynamic nature of the transition importance by making sampled state distribution more on-policy. CUER provides promising improvements for off-policy continuous control algorithms in terms of sample efficiency, final performance, and stability of the policy during the training.