OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Impact of Passthrough on VR Exergaming in Public Environments: A Field Study
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Sedentary behavior is becoming increasingly prevalent in daily work and study environments. VR exergaming has emerged as a promising solution in these places of work and study. However, private spaces in these environments are not easy, and engaging in VR exergaming in public settings presents its own set of challenges (e.g., safety, social acceptance, isolation, and privacy protection). The recent development of Passthrough functionality in VR headsets allows users to maintain awareness of their surroundings, enhancing safety and convenience. Despite its potential benefits, little is known about how Passthrough could affect user performance and experience and solve the challenges of playing VR exergames in real-world public environments. To our knowledge, this work is the first to conduct a field study in an underground passageway on a university campus to explore the use of Passthrough in a real-world public environment, with a disturbance-free closed room as a baseline. Results indicate that enabling Passthrough in a public environment improves performance without compromising presence. Moreover, Passthrough can increase social acceptance, especially among individuals with higher levels of self-consciousness. These findings highlight Passthrough's potential to encourage VR exergaming adoption in public environments, with promising implications for overall health and well-being.
Enhancement of Co-located Shared VR Experiences: Representing Non-HMD Observers on Both HMD and 2D Screen
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Virtual reality (VR) not only allows head-mounted display (HMD) users to immerse themselves in virtual worlds but also to share them with others. When designed correctly, this shared experience can be enjoyable. However, in typical scenarios, HMD users are isolated by their devices, and non-HMD observers lack connection with the virtual world. To address this, our research investigates visually representing observers on both HMD and 2D screens to enhance shared experiences. The study, including five representation conditions, reveals that incorporating observer representation positively impacts both HMD users and observers. For how to design and represent them, our work shows that HMD users prefer methods displaying real-world visuals, while observers exhibit diverse preferences regarding being represented with real or virtual images. We provide design guidelines tailored to both displays, offering valuable insights to enhance co-located shared VR experiences for HMD users and non-HMD observers.
Optical Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Optical networks play a crucial role in todays digital topography, enabling the high-speed and reliable transmission of vast amounts of data over optical fibre for long distances. This paper provides an overview of optical networks, especially emphasising on their evolution with time.
Visualization Atlases: Explaining and Exploring Complex Topics through Data, Visualization, and Narration
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper defines, analyzes, and discusses the emerging genre of visualization atlases. We currently witness an increase in web-based, data-driven initiatives that call themselves "atlases" while explaining complex, contemporary issues through data and visualizations: climate change, sustainability, AI, or cultural discoveries. To understand this emerging genre and inform their design, study, and authoring support, we conducted a systematic analysis of 33 visualization atlases and semi-structured interviews with eight visualization atlas creators. Based on our results, we contribute (1) a definition of a visualization atlas as a compendium of (web) pages aimed at explaining and supporting exploration of data about a dedicated topic through data, visualizations and narration. (2) a set of design patterns of 8 design dimensions, (3) insights into the atlas creation from interviews and (4) the definition of 5 visualization atlas genres. We found that visualization atlases are unique in the way they combine i) exploratory visualization, ii) narrative elements from data-driven storytelling and iii) structured navigation mechanisms. They target a wide range of audiences with different levels of domain knowledge, acting as tools for study, communication, and discovery. We conclude with a discussion of current design practices and emerging questions around the ethics and potential real-world impact of visualization atlases, aimed to inform the design and study of visualization atlases.
GRFormer: Grouped Residual Self-Attention for Lightweight Single Image Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Previous works have shown that reducing parameter overhead and computations for transformer-based single image super-resolution (SISR) models (e.g., SwinIR) usually leads to a reduction of performance. In this paper, we present GRFormer, an efficient and lightweight method, which not only reduces the parameter overhead and computations, but also greatly improves performance. The core of GRFormer is Grouped Residual Self-Attention (GRSA), which is specifically oriented towards two fundamental components. Firstly, it introduces a novel grouped residual layer (GRL) to replace the Query, Key, Value (QKV) linear layer in self-attention, aimed at efficiently reducing parameter overhead, computations, and performance loss at the same time. Secondly, it integrates a compact Exponential-Space Relative Position Bias (ES-RPB) as a substitute for the original relative position bias to improve the ability to represent position information while further minimizing the parameter count. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GRFormer outperforms state-of-the-art transformer-based methods for $\times$2, $\times$3 and $\times$4 SISR tasks, notably outperforming SOTA by a maximum PSNR of 0.23dB when trained on the DIV2K dataset, while reducing the number of parameter and MACs by about \textbf{60\%} and \textbf{49\% } in only self-attention module respectively. We hope that our simple and effective method that can easily applied to SR models based on window-division self-attention can serve as a useful tool for further research in image super-resolution. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/sisrformer/GRFormer}.
Usefulness of data flow diagrams and large language models for security threat validation: a registered report
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The arrival of recent cybersecurity standards has raised the bar for security assessments in organizations, but existing techniques don't always scale well. Threat analysis and risk assessment are used to identify security threats for new or refactored systems. Still, there is a lack of definition-of-done, so identified threats have to be validated which slows down the analysis. Existing literature has focused on the overall performance of threat analysis, but no previous work has investigated how deep must the analysts dig into the material before they can effectively validate the identified security threats. We propose a controlled experiment with practitioners to investigate whether some analysis material (like LLM-generated advice) is better than none and whether more material (the system's data flow diagram and LLM-generated advice) is better than some material. In addition, we present key findings from running a pilot with 41 MSc students, which are used to improve the study design. Finally, we also provide an initial replication package, including experimental material and data analysis scripts and a plan to extend it to include new materials based on the final data collection campaign with practitioners (e.g., pre-screening questions).
Cross-aware Early Fusion with Stage-divided Vision and Language Transformer Encoders for Referring Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Referring segmentation aims to segment a target object related to a natural language expression. Key challenges of this task are understanding the meaning of complex and ambiguous language expressions and determining the relevant regions in the image with multiple objects by referring to the expression. Recent models have focused on the early fusion with the language features at the intermediate stage of the vision encoder, but these approaches have a limitation that the language features cannot refer to the visual information. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel architecture, Cross-aware early fusion with stage-divided Vision and Language Transformer encoders (CrossVLT), which allows both language and vision encoders to perform the early fusion for improving the ability of the cross-modal context modeling. Unlike previous methods, our method enables the vision and language features to refer to each other's information at each stage to mutually enhance the robustness of both encoders. Furthermore, unlike the conventional scheme that relies solely on the high-level features for the cross-modal alignment, we introduce a feature-based alignment scheme that enables the low-level to high-level features of the vision and language encoders to engage in the cross-modal alignment. By aligning the intermediate cross-modal features in all encoder stages, this scheme leads to effective cross-modal fusion. In this way, the proposed approach is simple but effective for referring image segmentation, and it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on three public benchmarks.
3D Gaussian Editing with A Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The modeling and manipulation of 3D scenes captured from the real world are pivotal in various applications, attracting growing research interest. While previous works on editing have achieved interesting results through manipulating 3D meshes, they often require accurately reconstructed meshes to perform editing, which limits their application in 3D content generation. To address this gap, we introduce a novel single-image-driven 3D scene editing approach based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, enabling intuitive manipulation via directly editing the content on a 2D image plane. Our method learns to optimize the 3D Gaussians to align with an edited version of the image rendered from a user-specified viewpoint of the original scene. To capture long-range object deformation, we introduce positional loss into the optimization process of 3D Gaussian Splatting and enable gradient propagation through reparameterization. To handle occluded 3D Gaussians when rendering from the specified viewpoint, we build an anchor-based structure and employ a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy capable of handling long-range deformation while maintaining structural stability. Furthermore, we design a novel masking strategy to adaptively identify non-rigid deformation regions for fine-scale modeling. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method in handling geometric details, long-range, and non-rigid deformation, demonstrating superior editing flexibility and quality compared to previous approaches.
New Curriculum, New Chance -- Retrieval Augmented Generation for Lesson Planning in Ugandan Secondary Schools. Prototype Quality Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Introduction: Poor educational quality in Secondary Schools is still regarded as one of the major struggles in 21st century Uganda - especially in rural areas. Research identifies several problems, including low quality or absent teacher lesson planning. As the government pushes towards the implementation of a new curriculum, exiting lesson plans become obsolete and the problem is worsened. Using a Retrieval Augmented Generation approach, we developed a prototype that generates customized lesson plans based on the government-accredited textbooks. This helps teachers create lesson plans more efficiently and with better quality, ensuring they are fully aligned the new curriculum and the competence-based learning approach. Methods: The prototype was created using Cohere LLM and Sentence Embeddings, and LangChain Framework - and thereafter made available on a public website. Vector stores were trained for three new curriculum textbooks (ICT, Mathematics, History), all at Secondary 1 Level. Twenty-four lessons plans were generated following a pseudo-random generation protocol, based on the suggested periods in the textbooks. The lesson plans were analyzed regarding their technical quality by three independent raters following the Lesson Plan Analysis Protocol (LPAP) by Ndihokubwayo et al. (2022) that is specifically designed for East Africa and competence-based curriculums. Results: Evaluation of 24 lesson plans using the LPAP resulted in an average quality of between 75 and 80%, corresponding to "very good lesson plan". None of the lesson plans scored below 65%, although one lesson plan could be argued to have been missing the topic. In conclusion, the quality of the generated lesson plans is at least comparable, if not better, than those created by humans, as demonstrated in a study in Rwanda, whereby no lesson plan even reached the benchmark of 50%.
Optimizing HIV Patient Engagement with Reinforcement Learning in Resource-Limited Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

By providing evidence-based clinical decision support, digital tools and electronic health records can revolutionize patient management, especially in resource-poor settings where fewer health workers are available and often need more training. When these tools are integrated with AI, they can offer personalized support and adaptive interventions, effectively connecting community health workers (CHWs) and healthcare facilities. The CHARM (Community Health Access & Resource Management) app is an AI-native mobile app for CHWs. Developed through a joint partnership of Causal Foundry (CF) and mothers2mothers (m2m), CHARM empowers CHWs, mainly local women, by streamlining case management, enhancing learning, and improving communication. This paper details CHARM's development, integration, and upcoming reinforcement learning-based adaptive interventions, all aimed at enhancing health worker engagement, efficiency, and patient outcomes, thereby enhancing CHWs' capabilities and community health.
Towards Fair and Rigorous Evaluations: Hyperparameter Optimization for Top-N Recommendation Task with Implicit Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread use of the internet has led to an overwhelming amount of data, which has resulted in the problem of information overload. Recommender systems have emerged as a solution to this problem by providing personalized recommendations to users based on their preferences and historical data. However, as recommendation models become increasingly complex, finding the best hyperparameter combination for different models has become a challenge. The high-dimensional hyperparameter search space poses numerous challenges for researchers, and failure to disclose hyperparameter settings may impede the reproducibility of research results. In this paper, we investigate the Top-N implicit recommendation problem and focus on optimizing the benchmark recommendation algorithm commonly used in comparative experiments using hyperparameter optimization algorithms. We propose a research methodology that follows the principles of a fair comparison, employing seven types of hyperparameter search algorithms to fine-tune six common recommendation algorithms on three datasets. We have identified the most suitable hyperparameter search algorithms for various recommendation algorithms on different types of datasets as a reference for later study. This study contributes to algorithmic research in recommender systems based on hyperparameter optimization, providing a fair basis for comparison.
Exact Trajectory Similarity Search With N-tree: An Efficient Metric Index for kNN and Range Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Similarity search is the problem of finding in a collection of objects those that are similar to a given query object. It is a fundamental problem in modern applications and the objects considered may be as diverse as locations in space, text documents, images, twitter messages, or trajectories of moving objects. In this paper we are motivated by the latter application. Trajectories are recorded movements of mobile objects such as vehicles, animals, public transportation, or parts of the human body. We propose a novel distance function called DistanceAvg to capture the similarity of such movements. To be practical, it is necessary to provide indexing for this distance measure. Fortunately we do not need to start from scratch. A generic and unifying approach is metric space, which organizes the set of objects solely by a distance (similarity) function with certain natural properties. Our function DistanceAvg is a metric. Although metric indexes have been studied for decades and many such structures are available, they do not offer the best performance with trajectories. In this paper we propose a new design, which outperforms the best existing indexes for kNN queries and is equally good for range queries. It is especially suitable for expensive distance functions as they occur in trajectory similarity search. In many applications, kNN queries are more practical than range queries as it may be difficult to determine an appropriate search radius. Our index provides exact result sets for the given distance function.
The Semantics of Metapropramming in Prolog
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper describes a semantics for pure Prolog programs with negation that provides meaning to metaprograms. Metaprograms are programs that construct and use data structures as programs. In Prolog a primary mataprogramming construct is the use of a variable as a literal in the body of a clause. The traditional Prolog 3-line metainterpreter is another example of a metaprogram. The account given here also supplies a meaning for clauses that have a variable as head, even though most Prolog systems do not support such clauses. This semantics naturally includes such programs, giving them their intuitive meaning. Ideas from M. Denecker and his colleagues form the basis of this approach. The key idea is to notice that if we give meanings to all propositional programs and treat Prolog rules with variables as the set of their ground instances, then we can give meanings to all programs. We must treat Prolog rules (which may be metarules) as templates for generating ground propositional rules, and not as first-order formulas, which they may not be. We use parameterized inductive definitions to give propositional models to Prolog programs, in which the propositions are expressions. Then the set of expressions of a propositional model determine a first-order Herbrand Model, providing a first-order logical semantics for all (pure) Prolog programs, including metaprograms. We give examples to show the applicability of this theory. We also demonstrate how this theory makes proofs of some important properties of metaprograms very straightforward.
Development of simulation model for Single Carrier Transceiver for Nanosatellite
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

CubeSat is a nanosatellite concept emerged from a paper published by Stanford University and with their low cost nature and extreme feasibility , more started researching on nano satellites. New technology emerged , paving path to many academics and small vendors to create their own CubeSat models . This nanosatellite requires a transceiver to maintain its communication between it's systems and the ground station, which helps it navigate and collects data gained from its programmed functions. This transceiver system consists mainly of a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter manages sending data from the satellite to ground station while the receiver captures the data and instruction sent from the ground station to the satellite. These systems were built using separate digital communication devices in the beginning, with many critical limitations with respect to the space and scalability of the modules to be attached and the programmability of hardware materials and the concept of system-on -board emerged. Meanwhile, As the size of electronic devices minimized with the research conducted, FPGA (Filed Programmable Logic Array) was introduced as an architecture to be used in various applications and research needs. The reason FPGA was mention was for the fact that it provides flexibility in the designing of transceiver ed with design and prototypes implementation at a low cost competitional electronic ware and the system -on chip Concept was introduced . This research describes the development a system-on-chip transceiver model for nanosatellites which contains a single carrier . Keywords-Single Carrier, transceiver, system C, FPGA
Spoken Stereoset: On Evaluating Social Bias Toward Speaker in Speech Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Warning: This paper may contain texts with uncomfortable content. Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various tasks, including those involving multimodal data like speech. However, these models often exhibit biases due to the nature of their training data. Recently, more Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) have emerged, underscoring the urgent need to address these biases. This study introduces Spoken Stereoset, a dataset specifically designed to evaluate social biases in SLLMs. By examining how different models respond to speech from diverse demographic groups, we aim to identify these biases. Our experiments reveal significant insights into their performance and bias levels. The findings indicate that while most models show minimal bias, some still exhibit slightly stereotypical or anti-stereotypical tendencies.
RAVE Checklist: Recommendations for Overcoming Challenges in Retrospective Safety Studies of Automated Driving Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The public, regulators, and domain experts alike seek to understand the effect of deployed SAE level 4 automated driving system (ADS) technologies on safety. The recent expansion of ADS technology deployments is paving the way for early stage safety impact evaluations, whereby the observational data from both an ADS and a representative benchmark fleet are compared to quantify safety performance. In January 2024, a working group of experts across academia, insurance, and industry came together in Washington, DC to discuss the current and future challenges in performing such evaluations. A subset of this working group then met, virtually, on multiple occasions to produce this paper. This paper presents the RAVE (Retrospective Automated Vehicle Evaluation) checklist, a set of fifteen recommendations for performing and evaluating retrospective ADS performance comparisons. The recommendations are centered around the concepts of (1) quality and validity, (2) transparency, and (3) interpretation. Over time, it is anticipated there will be a large and varied body of work evaluating the observed performance of these ADS fleets. Establishing and promoting good scientific practices benefits the work of stakeholders, many of whom may not be subject matter experts. This working group's intentions are to: i) strengthen individual research studies and ii) make the at-large community more informed on how to evaluate this collective body of work.