OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Challenges of Large Language Models for Mental Health Counseling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The global mental health crisis is looming with a rapid increase in mental disorders, limited resources, and the social stigma of seeking treatment. As the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, large language models (LLMs) capable of understanding and generating human-like text may be used in supporting or providing psychological counseling. However, the application of LLMs in the mental health domain raises concerns regarding the accuracy, effectiveness, and reliability of the information provided. This paper investigates the major challenges associated with the development of LLMs for psychological counseling, including model hallucination, interpretability, bias, privacy, and clinical effectiveness. We explore potential solutions to these challenges that are practical and applicable to the current paradigm of AI. From our experience in developing and deploying LLMs for mental health, AI holds a great promise for improving mental health care, if we can carefully navigate and overcome pitfalls of LLMs.
Locally Optimal Descent for Dynamic Stepsize Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a novel dynamic learning-rate scheduling scheme grounded in theory with the goal of simplifying the manual and time-consuming tuning of schedules in practice. Our approach is based on estimating the locally-optimal stepsize, guaranteeing maximal descent in the direction of the stochastic gradient of the current step. We first establish theoretical convergence bounds for our method within the context of smooth non-convex stochastic optimization, matching state-of-the-art bounds while only assuming knowledge of the smoothness parameter. We then present a practical implementation of our algorithm and conduct systematic experiments across diverse datasets and optimization algorithms, comparing our scheme with existing state-of-the-art learning-rate schedulers. Our findings indicate that our method needs minimal tuning when compared to existing approaches, removing the need for auxiliary manual schedules and warm-up phases and achieving comparable performance with drastically reduced parameter tuning.
Exploring Methods for Cross-lingual Text Style Transfer: The Case of Text Detoxification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Text detoxification is the task of transferring the style of text from toxic to neutral. While here are approaches yielding promising results in monolingual setup, e.g., (Dale et al., 2021; Hallinan et al., 2022), cross-lingual transfer for this task remains a challenging open problem (Moskovskiy et al., 2022). In this work, we present a large-scale study of strategies for cross-lingual text detoxification -- given a parallel detoxification corpus for one language; the goal is to transfer detoxification ability to another language for which we do not have such a corpus. Moreover, we are the first to explore a new task where text translation and detoxification are performed simultaneously, providing several strong baselines for this task. Finally, we introduce new automatic detoxification evaluation metrics with higher correlations with human judgments than previous benchmarks. We assess the most promising approaches also with manual markup, determining the answer for the best strategy to transfer the knowledge of text detoxification between languages.
Weakly-Supervised Video Moment Retrieval via Regularized Two-Branch Proposal Networks with Erasing Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Video moment retrieval is to identify the target moment according to the given sentence in an untrimmed video. Due to temporal boundary annotations of the video are extremely time-consuming to acquire, modeling in the weakly-supervised setting is increasingly focused, where we only have access to the video-sentence pairs during training. Most existing weakly-supervised methods adopt a MIL-based framework to develop inter-sample confrontment, but neglect the intra-sample confrontment between moments with similar semantics. Therefore, these methods fail to distinguish the correct moment from plausible negative moments. Further, the previous attention models in cross-modal interaction tend to focus on a few dominant words exorbitantly, ignoring the comprehensive video-sentence correspondence. In this paper, we propose a novel Regularized Two-Branch Proposal Network with Erasing Mechanism to consider the inter-sample and intra-sample confrontments simultaneously. Concretely, we first devise a language-aware visual filter to generate both enhanced and suppressed video streams. Then, we design the sharable two-branch proposal module to generate positive and plausible negative proposals from the enhanced and suppressed branch respectively, contributing to sufficient confrontment. Besides, we introduce an attention-guided dynamic erasing mechanism in enhanced branch to discover the complementary video-sentence relation. Moreover, we apply two types of proposal regularization to stabilize the training process and improve model performance. The extensive experiments on ActivityCaption, Charades-STA and DiDeMo datasets show the effectiveness of our method.
Object Location Prediction in Real-time using LSTM Neural Network and Polynomial Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper details the design and implementation of a system for predicting and interpolating object location coordinates. Our solution is based on processing inertial measurements and global positioning system data through a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network and polynomial regression. LSTM is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN) particularly suited for processing data sequences and avoiding the long-term dependency problem. We employed data from real-world vehicles and the global positioning system (GPS) sensors. A critical pre-processing step was developed to address varying sensor frequencies and inconsistent GPS time steps and dropouts. The LSTM-based system's performance was compared with the Kalman Filter. The system was tuned to work in real-time with low latency and high precision. We tested our system on roads under various driving conditions, including acceleration, turns, deceleration, and straight paths. We tested our proposed solution's accuracy and inference time and showed that it could perform in real-time. Our LSTM-based system yielded an average error of 0.11 meters with an inference time of 2 ms. This represents a 76\% reduction in error compared to the traditional Kalman filter method, which has an average error of 0.46 meters with a similar inference time to the LSTM-based system.
FViT-Grasp: Grasping Objects With Using Fast Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This study addresses the challenge of manipulation, a prominent issue in robotics. We have devised a novel methodology for swiftly and precisely identifying the optimal grasp point for a robot to manipulate an object. Our approach leverages a Fast Vision Transformer (FViT), a type of neural network designed for processing visual data and predicting the most suitable grasp location. Demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in terms of speed while maintaining a high level of accuracy, our method holds promise for potential deployment in real-time robotic grasping applications. We believe that this study provides a baseline for future research in vision-based robotic grasp applications. Its high speed and accuracy bring researchers closer to real-life applications.
Explicit Refinement Types
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

We present λert, a type theory supporting refinement types with explicit proofs. Instead of solving refinement constraints with an SMT solver like DML and Liquid Haskell, our system requires and permits programmers to embed proofs of properties within the program text, letting us support a rich logic of properties including quantifiers and induction. We show that the type system is sound by showing that every refined program erases to a simply-typed program, and by means of a denotational semantics, we show that every erased program has all of the properties demanded by its refined type. All of our proofs are formalised in Lean 4.
When Side-Channel Attacks Break the Black-Box Property of Embedded Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Artificial intelligence, and specifically deep neural networks (DNNs), has rapidly emerged in the past decade as the standard for several tasks from specific advertising to object detection. The performance offered has led DNN algorithms to become a part of critical embedded systems, requiring both efficiency and reliability. In particular, DNNs are subject to malicious examples designed in a way to fool the network while being undetectable to the human observer: the adversarial examples. While previous studies propose frameworks to implement such attacks in black box settings, those often rely on the hypothesis that the attacker has access to the logits of the neural network, breaking the assumption of the traditional black box. In this paper, we investigate a real black box scenario where the attacker has no access to the logits. In particular, we propose an architecture-agnostic attack which solve this constraint by extracting the logits. Our method combines hardware and software attacks, by performing a side-channel attack that exploits electromagnetic leakages to extract the logits for a given input, allowing an attacker to estimate the gradients and produce state-of-the-art adversarial examples to fool the targeted neural network. Through this example of adversarial attack, we demonstrate the effectiveness of logits extraction using side-channel as a first step for more general attack frameworks requiring either the logits or the confidence scores.
PrivateLoRA For Efficient Privacy Preserving LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

End users face a choice between privacy and efficiency in current Large Language Model (LLM) service paradigms. In cloud-based paradigms, users are forced to compromise data locality for generation quality and processing speed. Conversely, edge device paradigms maintain data locality but fail to deliver satisfactory performance. In this work, we propose a novel LLM service paradigm that distributes privacy-sensitive computation on edge devices and shared computation in the cloud. Only activations are transmitted between the central cloud and edge devices to ensure data locality. Our core innovation, PrivateLoRA, addresses the challenging communication overhead by exploiting the low rank of residual activations, achieving over 95% communication reduction. Consequently, PrivateLoRA effectively maintains data locality and is extremely resource efficient. Under standard 5G networks, PrivateLoRA achieves throughput over 300% of device-only solutions for 7B models and over 80% of an A100 GPU for 33B models. PrivateLoRA also provides tuning performance comparable to LoRA for advanced personalization. Our approach democratizes access to state-of-the-art generative AI for edge devices, paving the way for more tailored LLM experiences for the general public. To our knowledge, our proposed framework is the first efficient and privacy-preserving LLM solution in the literature.
Searching for Snippets of Open-Domain Dialogue in Task-Oriented Dialogue Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Most existing dialogue corpora and models have been designed to fit into 2 predominant categories : task-oriented dialogues portray functional goals, such as making a restaurant reservation or booking a plane ticket, while chit-chat/open-domain dialogues focus on holding a socially engaging talk with a user. However, humans tend to seamlessly switch between modes and even use chitchat to enhance task-oriented conversations. To bridge this gap, new datasets have recently been created, blending both communication modes into conversation examples. The approaches used tend to rely on adding chit-chat snippets to pre-existing, human-generated task-oriented datasets. Given the tendencies observed in humans, we wonder however if the latter do not \textit{already} hold chit-chat sequences. By using topic modeling and searching for topics which are most similar to a set of keywords related to social talk, we explore the training sets of Schema-Guided Dialogues and MultiWOZ. Our study shows that sequences related to social talk are indeed naturally present, motivating further research on ways chitchat is combined into task-oriented dialogues.
Robust Decision Aggregation with Second-order Information
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a decision aggregation problem with two experts who each make a binary recommendation after observing a private signal about an unknown binary world state. An agent, who does not know the joint information structure between signals and states, sees the experts' recommendations and aims to match the action with the true state. Under the scenario, we study whether supplemented additionally with second-order information (each expert's forecast on the other's recommendation) could enable a better aggregation. We adopt a minimax regret framework to evaluate the aggregator's performance, by comparing it to an omniscient benchmark that knows the joint information structure. With general information structures, we show that second-order information provides no benefit. No aggregator can improve over a trivial aggregator, which always follows the first expert's recommendation. However, positive results emerge when we assume experts' signals are conditionally independent given the world state. When the aggregator is deterministic, we present a robust aggregator that leverages second-order information, which can significantly outperform counterparts without it. Second, when two experts are homogeneous, by adding a non-degenerate assumption on the signals, we demonstrate that random aggregators using second-order information can surpass optimal ones without it. In the remaining settings, the second-order information is not beneficial. We also extend the above results to the setting when the aggregator's utility function is more general.
Video Anomaly Detection using GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Accounting for the increased concern for public safety, automatic abnormal event detection and recognition in a surveillance scene is crucial. It is a current open study subject because of its intricacy and utility. The identification of aberrant events automatically, it's a difficult undertaking because everyone's idea of abnormality is different. A typical occurrence in one circumstance could be seen as aberrant in another. Automatic anomaly identification becomes particularly challenging in the surveillance footage with a large crowd due to congestion and high occlusion. With the use of machine learning techniques, this thesis study aims to offer the solution for this use case so that human resources won't be required to keep an eye out for any unusual activity in the surveillance system records. We have developed a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) based anomaly detection model. This model is trained such that it learns together about constructing a high dimensional picture space and determining the latent space from the video's context. The generator uses a residual Autoencoder architecture made up of a multi-stage channel attention-based decoder and a two-stream, deep convolutional encoder that can realise both spatial and temporal data. We have also offered a technique for refining the GAN model that reduces training time while also generalising the model by utilising transfer learning between datasets. Using a variety of assessment measures, we compare our model to the current state-of-the-art techniques on four benchmark datasets. The empirical findings indicate that, in comparison to existing techniques, our network performs favourably on all datasets.
Hierarchical Coded Gradient Aggregation Based on Layered MDS Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The growing privacy concerns and the communication costs associated with transmitting raw data have resulted in techniques like federated learning, where the machine learning models are trained at the edge nodes, and the parameter updates are shared with a central server. Because communications from the edge nodes are often unreliable, a hierarchical setup involving intermediate helper nodes is considered. The communication links between the edges and the helper nodes are error-prone and are modeled as straggling/failing links. To overcome the issue of link failures, coding techniques are proposed. The edge nodes communicate encoded versions of the model updates to the helper nodes, which pass them on to the master after suitable aggregation. The primary work in this area uses repetition codes and Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) codes at the edge nodes to arrive at the Aligned Repetition Coding (ARC) and Aligned MDS Coding (AMC) schemes, respectively. We propose using vector codes, specifically a family of layered MDS codes parameterized by a variable $ν$, at the edge nodes. For the proposed family of codes, suitable aggregation strategies at the helper nodes are also developed. At the extreme values of $ν$, our scheme matches the communication costs incurred by the ARC and AMC schemes, resulting in a graceful transition between these schemes.
TCuPGAN: A novel framework developed for optimizing human-machine interactions in citizen science
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

In the era of big data in scientific research, there is a necessity to leverage techniques which reduce human effort in labeling and categorizing large datasets by involving sophisticated machine tools. To combat this problem, we present a novel, general purpose model for 3D segmentation that leverages patch-wise adversariality and Long Short-Term Memory to encode sequential information. Using this model alongside citizen science projects which use 3D datasets (image cubes) on the Zooniverse platforms, we propose an iterative human-machine optimization framework where only a fraction of the 2D slices from these cubes are seen by the volunteers. We leverage the patch-wise discriminator in our model to provide an estimate of which slices within these image cubes have poorly generalized feature representations, and correspondingly poor machine performance. These images with corresponding machine proposals would be presented to volunteers on Zooniverse for correction, leading to a drastic reduction in the volunteer effort on citizen science projects. We trained our model on ~2300 liver tissue 3D electron micrographs. Lipid droplets were segmented within these images through human annotation via the `Etch A Cell - Fat Checker' citizen science project, hosted on the Zooniverse platform. In this work, we demonstrate this framework and the selection methodology which resulted in a measured reduction in volunteer effort by more than 60%. We envision this type of joint human-machine partnership will be of great use on future Zooniverse projects.
Data-Driven Risk Modeling for Infrastructure Projects Using Artificial Intelligence Techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Managing project risk is a key part of the successful implementation of any large project and is widely recognized as a best practice for public agencies to deliver infrastructures. The conventional method of identifying and evaluating project risks involves getting input from subject matter experts at risk workshops in the early phases of a project. As a project moves through its life cycle, these identified risks and their assessments evolve. Some risks are realized to become issues, some are mitigated, and some are retired as no longer important. Despite the value provided by conventional expert-based approaches, several challenges remain due to the time-consuming and expensive processes involved. Moreover, limited is known about how risks evolve from ex-ante to ex-post over time. How well does the project team identify and evaluate risks in the initial phase compared to what happens during project execution? Using historical data and artificial intelligence techniques, this study addressed these limitations by introducing a data-driven framework to identify risks automatically and to examine the quality of early risk registers and risk assessments. Risk registers from more than 70 U.S. major transportation projects form the input dataset.
Refinement calculus of quantum programs with projective assertions
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Refinement calculus provides a structured framework for the progressive and modular development of programs, ensuring their correctness throughout the refinement process. This paper introduces a refinement calculus tailored for quantum programs. To this end, we first study the partial correctness of nondeterministic programs within a quantum while language featuring prescription statements. Orthogonal projectors, which are equivalent to subspaces of the state Hilbert space, are taken as assertions for quantum states. In addition to the denotational semantics where a nondeterministic program is associated with a set of trace-nonincreasing super-operators, we also present their semantics in transforming a postcondition to the weakest liberal postconditions and, conversely, transforming a precondition to the strongest postconditions. Subsequently, refinement rules are introduced based on these dual semantics, offering a systematic approach to the incremental development of quantum programs applicable in various contexts. To illustrate the practical application of the refinement calculus, we examine examples such as the implementation of a $Z$-rotation gate, the repetition code, and the quantum-to-quantum Bernoulli factory. Furthermore, we present Quire, a Python-based interactive prototype tool that provides practical support to programmers engaged in the stepwise development of correct quantum programs.
Uncovering Gender Stereotypes in Video Game Character Designs: A Multi-Modal Analysis of Honor of Kings
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of gender stereotypes in the character design of Honor of Kings, a popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game in China. We probe gender stereotypes through the lens of role assignments, visual designs, spoken lines, and background stories, combining qualitative analysis and text mining based on the moral foundation theory. Male heroes are commonly designed as masculine fighters with power and female heroes as feminine "ornaments" with ideal looks. We contribute with a culture-aware and multi-modal understanding of gender stereotypes in games, leveraging text-, visual-, and role-based evidence.