OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Self-Supervised Learning Based Handwriting Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present SSL-HV: Self-Supervised Learning approaches applied to the task of Handwriting Verification. This task involves determining whether a given pair of handwritten images originate from the same or different writer distribution. We have compared the performance of multiple generative, contrastive SSL approaches against handcrafted feature extractors and supervised learning on CEDAR AND dataset. We show that ResNet based Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) outperforms other generative approaches achieving 76.3% accuracy, while ResNet-18 fine-tuned using Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization (VICReg) outperforms other contrastive approaches achieving 78% accuracy. Using a pre-trained VAE and VICReg for the downstream task of writer verification we observed a relative improvement in accuracy of 6.7% and 9% over ResNet-18 supervised baseline with 10% writer labels.
Value Alignment and Trust in Human-Robot Interaction: Insights from Simulation and User Study
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

With the advent of AI technologies, humans and robots are increasingly teaming up to perform collaborative tasks. To enable smooth and effective collaboration, the topic of value alignment (operationalized herein as the degree of dynamic goal alignment within a task) between the robot and the human is gaining increasing research attention. Prior literature on value alignment makes an inherent assumption that aligning the values of the robot with that of the human benefits the team. This assumption, however, has not been empirically verified. Moreover, prior literature does not account for human's trust in the robot when analyzing human-robot value alignment. Thus, a research gap needs to be bridged by answering two questions: How does alignment of values affect trust? Is it always beneficial to align the robot's values with that of the human? We present a simulation study and a human-subject study to answer these questions. Results from the simulation study show that alignment of values is important for trust when the overall risk level of the task is high. We also present an adaptive strategy for the robot that uses Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) to match the values of the robot with those of the human during interaction. Our simulations suggest that such an adaptive strategy is able to maintain trust across the full spectrum of human values. We also present results from an empirical study that validate these findings from simulation. Results indicate that real-time personalized value alignment is beneficial to trust and perceived performance by the human when the robot does not have a good prior on the human's values.
What characteristics define disinformation and fake news?: review of taxonomies and definitions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

What characteristics define disinformation and fake news? To address this research question, this Technical Note provides a comprehensive analysis of disinformation and fake news, synthesizing 46 definitions and highlighting four key points addressing their fundamental characteristics. Adopting the Prisma 2020 method, five search sets with the Boolean operator AND were selected in both Portuguese and English, which were applied across four databases, resulting in 237 reviewed articles. Following a meticulous analysis, relevant articles were identified and included, while duplicates and inaccessible documents were excluded. It points to disinformation as information that is totally or partially false, crafted by a sender with the aim of misleading, with opportunistic content designed to manipulate reality, being amplified by individual characteristics of the receiver in their interpretation and by contextual factors in which they are embedded. This Technical Note seeks to contribute to an understanding of the phenomenon of disinformation that includes the contextual dimension, obtaining as fundamental elements of analysis: I.) Sender; II.) Content; III.) Receiver; and IV.) Environment.
The Battle of LLMs: A Comparative Study in Conversational QA Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models have gained considerable interest for their impressive performance on various tasks. Within this domain, ChatGPT and GPT-4, developed by OpenAI, and the Gemini, developed by Google, have emerged as particularly popular among early adopters. Additionally, Mixtral by Mistral AI and Claude by Anthropic are newly released, further expanding the landscape of advanced language models. These models are viewed as disruptive technologies with applications spanning customer service, education, healthcare, and finance. More recently, Mistral has entered the scene, captivating users with its unique ability to generate creative content. Understanding the perspectives of these users is crucial, as they can offer valuable insights into the potential strengths, weaknesses, and overall success or failure of these technologies in various domains. This research delves into the responses generated by ChatGPT, GPT-4, Gemini, Mixtral and Claude across different Conversational QA corpora. Evaluation scores were meticulously computed and subsequently compared to ascertain the overall performance of these models. Our study pinpointed instances where these models provided inaccurate answers to questions, offering insights into potential areas where they might be susceptible to errors. In essence, this research provides a comprehensive comparison and evaluation of these state of-the-art language models, shedding light on their capabilities while also highlighting potential areas for improvement
Bridging the Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs without extensive training or fine-tuning. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield significant improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes LLM Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with multilingual embeddings and achieves improved multilingual task performance. Finally, we introduce a novel learning approach that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embedding model per query at run-time. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Additionally, our approach adapts configurations in both offline and online settings, and can seamlessly adapt to new languages and datasets, leading to substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across diverse languages.
The 2024 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge: Glioma Segmentation on Post-treatment MRI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Gliomas are the most common malignant primary brain tumors in adults and one of the deadliest types of cancer. There are many challenges in treatment and monitoring due to the genetic diversity and high intrinsic heterogeneity in appearance, shape, histology, and treatment response. Treatments include surgery, radiation, and systemic therapies, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) playing a key role in treatment planning and post-treatment longitudinal assessment. The 2024 Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge on post-treatment glioma MRI will provide a community standard and benchmark for state-of-the-art automated segmentation models based on the largest expert-annotated post-treatment glioma MRI dataset. Challenge competitors will develop automated segmentation models to predict four distinct tumor sub-regions consisting of enhancing tissue (ET), surrounding non-enhancing T2/fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) hyperintensity (SNFH), non-enhancing tumor core (NETC), and resection cavity (RC). Models will be evaluated on separate validation and test datasets using standardized performance metrics utilized across the BraTS 2024 cluster of challenges, including lesion-wise Dice Similarity Coefficient and Hausdorff Distance. Models developed during this challenge will advance the field of automated MRI segmentation and contribute to their integration into clinical practice, ultimately enhancing patient care.
A Critique of Snapshot Isolation
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

The support for transactions is an essential part of a database management system (DBMS). Without this support, the developers are burdened with ensuring atomic execution of a transaction despite failures as well as concurrent accesses to the database by other transactions. Ideally, a transactional system provides serializability, which means that the outcome of concurrent transactions is equivalent to a serial execution of them. Based on experiences on lock-based implementations, nevertheless, serializability is known as an expensive feature that comes with high overhead and low concurrency. Commercial systems, hence, compromise serializability by implementing weaker guarantees such as snapshot isolation. The developers, therefore, are still burdened with the anomalies that could arise due to the lack of serializability. There have been recent attempts to enrich large-scale data stores, such as HBase and BigTable, with transactional support. Not surprisingly, inspired by traditional database management systems, serializability is usually compromised for the benefit of efficiency. For example, Google Percolator, implements lock-based snapshot isolation on top of BigTable. We show in this paper that this compromise is not necessary in lock-free implementations of transactional support. We introduce write-snapshot isolation, a novel isolation level that has a performance comparable with that of snapshot isolation, and yet provides serializability. The main insight in write-snapshot isolation is to prevent read-write conflicts in contrast to write-write conflicts that are prevented by snapshot isolation.
Phased Consistency Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Consistency Models (CMs) have made significant progress in accelerating the generation of diffusion models. However, their application to high-resolution, text-conditioned image generation in the latent space remains unsatisfactory. In this paper, we identify three key flaws in the current design of Latent Consistency Models (LCMs). We investigate the reasons behind these limitations and propose Phased Consistency Models (PCMs), which generalize the design space and address the identified limitations. Our evaluations demonstrate that PCMs outperform LCMs across 1--16 step generation settings. While PCMs are specifically designed for multi-step refinement, they achieve comparable 1-step generation results to previously state-of-the-art specifically designed 1-step methods. Furthermore, we show the methodology of PCMs is versatile and applicable to video generation, enabling us to train the state-of-the-art few-step text-to-video generator. Our code is available at https://github.com/G-U-N/Phased-Consistency-Model.
Capacity Results for Non-Ergodic Multi-Modal Broadcast Channels with Controllable Statistics
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Movable antennas and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces enable a new paradigm in which channel statistics can be controlled and altered. Further, the known trajectory and operation protocol of communication satellites results in networks with predictable statistics. The predictability of future changes results in a non-ergodic model for which the fundamentals are largely unknown. We consider the canonical two-user broadcast erasure channel in which channel statistics vary at a priori known points. We consider a multi-modal setting with two non-transient modes (whose lengths scale linearly with the blocklength) and an arbitrary number of transient modes. We provide a new set of outer-bounds on the capacity region of this problem when the encoder has access to causal ACK/NACK feedback. The outer-bounds reveal the significant role of the non-transient mode with higher erasure probability both on the outer and the inner bounds. We show the outer-bounds are achievable in non-trivial regimes, characterizing the capacity region for a wide range of parameters. We also discuss the regimes where the inner and outer bounds diverge and analyze the gap between the two. A key finding of this work is the significant gain of inter-modal coding over the separate treating of individual modes.
Improved Emotional Alignment of AI and Humans: Human Ratings of Emotions Expressed by Stable Diffusion v1, DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 3
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Generative AI systems are increasingly capable of expressing emotions via text and imagery. Effective emotional expression will likely play a major role in the efficacy of AI systems -- particularly those designed to support human mental health and wellbeing. This motivates our present research to better understand the alignment of AI expressed emotions with the human perception of emotions. When AI tries to express a particular emotion, how might we assess whether they are successful? To answer this question, we designed a survey to measure the alignment between emotions expressed by generative AI and human perceptions. Three generative image models (DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion v1) were used to generate 240 examples of images, each of which was based on a prompt designed to express five positive and five negative emotions across both humans and robots. 24 participants recruited from the Prolific website rated the alignment of AI-generated emotional expressions with a text prompt used to generate the emotion (i.e., "A robot expressing the emotion amusement"). The results of our evaluation suggest that generative AI models are indeed capable of producing emotional expressions that are well-aligned with a range of human emotions; however, we show that the alignment significantly depends upon the AI model used and the emotion itself. We analyze variations in the performance of these systems to identify gaps for future improvement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future AI systems designed to support mental health and wellbeing.
Modeling Long Sequences in Bladder Cancer Recurrence: A Comparative Evaluation of LSTM,Transformer,and Mamba
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional survival analysis methods often struggle with complex time-dependent data,failing to capture and interpret dynamic characteristics adequately.This study aims to evaluate the performance of three long-sequence models,LSTM,Transformer,and Mamba,in analyzing recurrence event data and integrating them with the Cox proportional hazards model.This study integrates the advantages of deep learning models for handling long-sequence data with the Cox proportional hazards model to enhance the performance in analyzing recurrent events with dynamic time information.Additionally,this study compares the ability of different models to extract and utilize features from time-dependent clinical recurrence data.The LSTM-Cox model outperformed both the Transformer-Cox and Mamba-Cox models in prediction accuracy and model fit,achieving a Concordance index of up to 0.90 on the test set.Significant predictors of bladder cancer recurrence,such as treatment stop time,maximum tumor size at recurrence and recurrence frequency,were identified.The LSTM-Cox model aligned well with clinical outcomes,effectively distinguishing between high-risk and low-risk patient groups.This study demonstrates that the LSTM-Cox model is a robust and efficient method for recurrent data analysis and feature extraction,surpassing newer models like Transformer and Mamba.It offers a practical approach for integrating deep learning technologies into clinical risk prediction systems,thereby improving patient management and treatment outcomes.
MM-Mixing: Multi-Modal Mixing Alignment for 3D Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce MM-Mixing, a multi-modal mixing alignment framework for 3D understanding. MM-Mixing applies mixing-based methods to multi-modal data, preserving and optimizing cross-modal connections while enhancing diversity and improving alignment across modalities. Our proposed two-stage training pipeline combines feature-level and input-level mixing to optimize the 3D encoder. The first stage employs feature-level mixing with contrastive learning to align 3D features with their corresponding modalities. The second stage incorporates both feature-level and input-level mixing, introducing mixed point cloud inputs to further refine 3D feature representations. MM-Mixing enhances intermodality relationships, promotes generalization, and ensures feature consistency while providing diverse and realistic training samples. We demonstrate that MM-Mixing significantly improves baseline performance across various learning scenarios, including zero-shot 3D classification, linear probing 3D classification, and cross-modal 3D shape retrieval. Notably, we improved the zero-shot classification accuracy on ScanObjectNN from 51.3% to 61.9%, and on Objaverse-LVIS from 46.8% to 51.4%. Our findings highlight the potential of multi-modal mixing-based alignment to significantly advance 3D object recognition and understanding while remaining straightforward to implement and integrate into existing frameworks.
Aligning in a Compact Space: Contrastive Knowledge Distillation between Heterogeneous Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge distillation is commonly employed to compress neural networks, reducing the inference costs and memory footprint. In the scenario of homogenous architecture, feature-based methods have been widely validated for their effectiveness. However, in scenarios where the teacher and student models are of heterogeneous architectures, the inherent differences in feature representation significantly degrade the performance of these methods. Recent studies have highlighted that low-frequency components constitute the majority of image features. Motivated by this, we propose a Low-Frequency Components-based Contrastive Knowledge Distillation (LFCC) framework that significantly enhances the performance of feature-based distillation between heterogeneous architectures. Specifically, we designe a set of multi-scale low-pass filters to extract the low-frequency components of intermediate features from both the teacher and student models, aligning them in a compact space to overcome architectural disparities. Moreover, leveraging the intrinsic pairing characteristic of the teacher-student framework, we design an innovative sample-level contrastive learning framework that adeptly restructures the constraints of within-sample feature similarity and between-sample feature divergence into a contrastive learning task. This strategy enables the student model to capitalize on intra-sample feature congruence while simultaneously enhancing the discrimination of features among disparate samples. Consequently, our LFCC framework accurately captures the commonalities in feature representation across heterogeneous architectures. Extensive evaluations and empirical analyses across three architectures (CNNs, Transformers, and MLPs) demonstrate that LFCC achieves superior performance on the challenging benchmarks of ImageNet-1K and CIFAR-100. All codes will be publicly available.
Capacity-Maximizing Dynamic User Association in Double RIS-Aided Broadcast Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce an information-theoretic framework to dynamically pair up different reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) with wireless users with goal of maximizing the fundamental network capacity. We focus on a double RIS-aided broadcast packet network with two users. We show using a dynamic RIS-user association and an opportunistic protocol, the network capacity could be significantly enhanced and superior to other benchmarks with static associations. The results include new outer-bounds on network capacity and their achievability. We discuss the optimal RIS-user association.
Photorealistic Robotic Simulation using Unreal Engine 5 for Agricultural Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This work presents a new robotics simulation environment built upon Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) for agricultural image data generation. The simulation utilizes the state-of-the-art real-time rendering engine to provide realistic plant images which are often used in agricultural applications. This study showcases the rendering accuracy of UE5 in comparison to existing tools and assesses its positional accuracy when integrated with Robot Operating Systems (ROS). The results indicate that UE5 achieves an impressive average distance error of 0.021mm when compared to predetermined setpoints in a multi-robot setup involving two UR10 arms.
Artificial Intelligence in Industry 4.0: A Review of Integration Challenges for Industrial Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In Industry 4.0, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) generate vast data sets that can be leveraged by Artificial Intelligence (AI) for applications including predictive maintenance and production planning. However, despite the demonstrated potential of AI, its widespread adoption in sectors like manufacturing remains limited. Our comprehensive review of recent literature, including standards and reports, pinpoints key challenges: system integration, data-related issues, managing workforce-related concerns and ensuring trustworthy AI. A quantitative analysis highlights particular challenges and topics that are important for practitioners but still need to be sufficiently investigated by academics. The paper briefly discusses existing solutions to these challenges and proposes avenues for future research. We hope that this survey serves as a resource for practitioners evaluating the cost-benefit implications of AI in CPS and for researchers aiming to address these urgent challenges.
GLOCON Database: Design Decisions and User Manual (v1.0)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

GLOCON is a database of contentious events automatically extracted from national news sources from various countries in multiple languages. National news sources are utilized, and complete news archives are processed to create an event list for each source. Automation is achieved using a gold standard corpus sampled randomly from complete news archives (Yörük et al. 2022) and all annotated by at least two domain experts based on the event definition provided in Duruşan et al. (2022).