OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CR-Enabled NOMA Integrated Non-Terrestrial IoT Networks with Transmissive RIS
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

This work proposes a T-RIS-equipped LEO satellite communication in cognitive radio-enabled integrated NTNs. In the proposed system, a GEO satellite operates as a primary network, and a T-RIS-equipped LEO satellite operates as a secondary IoT network. The objective is to maximize the sum rate of T-RIS-equipped LEO satellite communication using downlink NOMA while ensuring the service quality of GEO cellular users. Our framework simultaneously optimizes the total transmit power of LEO, NOMA power allocation for LEO IoT (LIoT) and T-RIS phase shift design subject to the service quality of LIoT and interference temperature to the primary GEO network. To solve the non-convex sum rate maximization problem, we first adopt successive convex approximations to reduce the complexity of the formulated optimization. Then, we divide the problem into two parts, i.e., power allocation of LEO and phase shift design of T-RIS. The power allocation problem is solved using KKT conditions, while the phase shift problem is handled by Taylor approximation and semidefinite programming. Numerical results are provided to validate the proposed optimization framework.
AnomalousPatchCore: Exploring the Use of Anomalous Samples in Industrial Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual inspection, or industrial anomaly detection, is one of the most common quality control types in manufacturing. The task is to identify the presence of an anomaly given an image, e.g., a missing component on an image of a circuit board, for subsequent manual inspection. While industrial anomaly detection has seen a surge in recent years, most anomaly detection methods still utilize knowledge only from normal samples, failing to leverage the information from the frequently available anomalous samples. Additionally, they heavily rely on very general feature extractors pre-trained on common image classification datasets. In this paper, we address these shortcomings and propose the new anomaly detection system AnomalousPatchCore~(APC) based on a feature extractor fine-tuned with normal and anomalous in-domain samples and a subsequent memory bank for identifying unusual features. To fine-tune the feature extractor in APC, we propose three auxiliary tasks that address the different aspects of anomaly detection~(classification vs. localization) and mitigate the effect of the imbalance between normal and anomalous samples. Our extensive evaluation on the MVTec dataset shows that APC outperforms state-of-the-art systems in detecting anomalies, which is especially important in industrial anomaly detection given the subsequent manual inspection. In detailed ablation studies, we further investigate the properties of our APC.
Evaluating Stability of Unreflective Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Many theoretical obstacles to AI alignment are consequences of reflective stability - the problem of designing alignment mechanisms that the AI would not disable if given the option. However, problems stemming from reflective stability are not obviously present in current LLMs, leading to disagreement over whether they will need to be solved to enable safe delegation of cognitive labor. In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Priority Change (CPC) destabilization as a mechanism by which reflective stability problems may arise in future LLMs. We describe two risk factors for CPC-destabilization: 1) CPC-based stepping back and 2) preference instability. We develop preliminary evaluations for each of these risk factors, and apply them to frontier LLMs. Our findings indicate that in current LLMs, increased scale and capability are associated with increases in both CPC-based stepping back and preference instability, suggesting that CPC-destabilization may cause reflective stability problems in future LLMs.
A Permuted Autoregressive Approach to Word-Level Recognition for Urdu Digital Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This research paper introduces a novel word-level Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model specifically designed for digital Urdu text, leveraging transformer-based architectures and attention mechanisms to address the distinct challenges of Urdu script recognition, including its diverse text styles, fonts, and variations. The model employs a permuted autoregressive sequence (PARSeq) architecture, which enhances its performance by enabling context-aware inference and iterative refinement through the training of multiple token permutations. This method allows the model to adeptly manage character reordering and overlapping characters, commonly encountered in Urdu script. Trained on a dataset comprising approximately 160,000 Urdu text images, the model demonstrates a high level of accuracy in capturing the intricacies of Urdu script, achieving a CER of 0.178. Despite ongoing challenges in handling certain text variations, the model exhibits superior accuracy and effectiveness in practical applications. Future work will focus on refining the model through advanced data augmentation techniques and the integration of context-aware language models to further enhance its performance and robustness in Urdu text recognition.
Machine Learning for Methane Detection and Quantification from Space - A survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Methane ($CH_4$) is a potent anthropogenic greenhouse gas, contributing 86 times more to global warming than Carbon Dioxide ($CO_2$) over 20 years, and it also acts as an air pollutant. Given its high radiative forcing potential and relatively short atmospheric lifetime (9$\pm$1 years), methane has important implications for climate change, therefore, cutting methane emissions is crucial for effective climate change mitigation. This work expands existing information on operational methane point source detection sensors in the Short-Wave Infrared (SWIR) bands. It reviews the state-of-the-art for traditional as well as Machine Learning (ML) approaches. The architecture and data used in such ML models will be discussed separately for methane plume segmentation and emission rate estimation. Traditionally, experts rely on labor-intensive manually adjusted methods for methane detection. However, ML approaches offer greater scalability. Our analysis reveals that ML models outperform traditional methods, particularly those based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which are based on the U-net and transformer architectures. These ML models extract valuable information from methane-sensitive spectral data, enabling a more accurate detection. Challenges arise when comparing these methods due to variations in data, sensor specifications, and evaluation metrics. To address this, we discuss existing datasets and metrics, providing an overview of available resources and identifying open research problems. Finally, we explore potential future advances in ML, emphasizing approaches for model comparability, large dataset creation, and the European Union's forthcoming methane strategy.
Faster Cycle Detection in the Congested Clique
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We provide a fast distributed algorithm for detecting $h$-cycles in the \textsf{Congested Clique} model, whose running time decreases as the number of $h$-cycles in the graph increases. In undirected graphs, constant-round algorithms are known for cycles of even length. Our algorithm greatly improves upon the state of the art for odd values of $h$. Moreover, our running time applies also to directed graphs, in which case the improvement is for all values of $h$. Further, our techniques allow us to obtain a triangle detection algorithm in the quantum variant of this model, which is faster than prior work. A key technical contribution we develop to obtain our fast cycle detection algorithm is a new algorithm for computing the product of many pairs of small matrices in parallel, which may be of independent interest.
muPRL: A Mutation Testing Pipeline for Deep Reinforcement Learning based on Real Faults
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly adopted to train agents that can deal with complex sequential tasks, such as driving an autonomous vehicle or controlling a humanoid robot. Correspondingly, novel approaches are needed to ensure that RL agents have been tested adequately before going to production. Among them, mutation testing is quite promising, especially under the assumption that the injected faults (mutations) mimic the real ones. In this paper, we first describe a taxonomy of real RL faults obtained by repository mining. Then, we present the mutation operators derived from such real faults and implemented in the tool muPRL. Finally, we discuss the experimental results, showing that muPRL is effective at discriminating strong from weak test generators, hence providing useful feedback to developers about the adequacy of the generated test scenarios.
Empowering Sign Language Communication: Integrating Sentiment and Semantics for Facial Expression Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Translating written sentences from oral languages to a sequence of manual and non-manual gestures plays a crucial role in building a more inclusive society for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Facial expressions (non-manual), in particular, are responsible for encoding the grammar of the sentence to be spoken, applying punctuation, pronouns, or emphasizing signs. These non-manual gestures are closely related to the semantics of the sentence being spoken and also to the utterance of the speaker's emotions. However, most Sign Language Production (SLP) approaches are centered on synthesizing manual gestures and do not focus on modeling the speakers expression. This paper introduces a new method focused in synthesizing facial expressions for sign language. Our goal is to improve sign language production by integrating sentiment information in facial expression generation. The approach leverages a sentence sentiment and semantic features to sample from a meaningful representation space, integrating the bias of the non-manual components into the sign language production process. To evaluate our method, we extend the Frechet Gesture Distance (FGD) and propose a new metric called Frechet Expression Distance (FED) and apply an extensive set of metrics to assess the quality of specific regions of the face. The experimental results showed that our method achieved state of the art, being superior to the competitors on How2Sign and PHOENIX14T datasets. Moreover, our architecture is based on a carefully designed graph pyramid that makes it simpler, easier to train, and capable of leveraging emotions to produce facial expressions.
FRAMER/Miu: Tagged Pointer-based Capability and Fundamental Cost of Memory Safety & Coherence (Position Paper)
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Ensuring system correctness, such as memory safety, can eliminate security vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit in the first place. However, high and unpredictable performance degradation remains a primary challenge. Recognizing that it is extremely difficult to achieve complete system correctness for production deployment, researchers make trade-offs between performance, detection coverage, interoperability, precision, and detection timing. This research strikes a balance between comprehensive system protection and the costs required to obtain it, identifies the desirable roles of software and hardware, and presents a tagged pointer-based capability system as a stand-alone software solution and a prototype for future hardware design. This paper presents follow-up plans for the FRAMER/Miu generic framework to achieve these goals.
Pitfalls and Outlooks in Using COMET
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The COMET metric has blazed a trail in the machine translation community, given its strong correlation with human judgements of translation quality. Its success stems from being a modified pre-trained multilingual model finetuned for quality assessment. However, it being a machine learning model also gives rise to a new set of pitfalls that may not be widely known. We investigate these unexpected behaviours from three aspects: 1) technical: obsolete software versions and compute precision; 2) data: empty content, language mismatch, and translationese at test time as well as distribution and domain biases in training; 3) usage and reporting: multi-reference support and model referencing in the literature. All of these problems imply that COMET scores are not comparable between papers or even technical setups and we put forward our perspective on fixing each issue. Furthermore, we release the sacreCOMET package that can generate a signature for the software and model configuration as well as an appropriate citation. The goal of this work is to help the community make more sound use of the COMET metric.
An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper examines the potential of the Fediverse, a federated network of social media and content platforms, to counter the centralization and dominance of commercial platforms on the social Web. We gather evidence from the technology powering the Fediverse (especially the ActivityPub protocol), current statistical data regarding Fediverse user distribution over instances, and the status of two older, similar, decentralized technologies: e-mail and the Web. Our findings suggest that Fediverse will face significant challenges in fulfilling its decentralization promises, potentially hindering its ability to positively impact the social Web on a large scale.
Multi-Feature Aggregation in Diffusion Models for Enhanced Face Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Super-resolution algorithms often struggle with images from surveillance environments due to adverse conditions such as unknown degradation, variations in pose, irregular illumination, and occlusions. However, acquiring multiple images, even of low quality, is possible with surveillance cameras. In this work, we develop an algorithm based on diffusion models that utilize a low-resolution image combined with features extracted from multiple low-quality images to generate a super-resolved image while minimizing distortions in the individual's identity. Unlike other algorithms, our approach recovers facial features without explicitly providing attribute information or without the need to calculate a gradient of a function during the reconstruction process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time multi-features combined with low-resolution images are used as conditioners to generate more reliable super-resolution images using stochastic differential equations. The FFHQ dataset was employed for training, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in facial recognition and verification metrics when evaluated on the CelebA and Quis-Campi datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/marcelowds/fasr
Panoptic Perception for Autonomous Driving: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Panoptic perception represents a forefront advancement in autonomous driving technology, unifying multiple perception tasks into a singular, cohesive framework to facilitate a thorough understanding of the vehicle's surroundings. This survey reviews typical panoptic perception models for their unique inputs and architectures and compares them to performance, responsiveness, and resource utilization. It also delves into the prevailing challenges faced in panoptic perception and explores potential trajectories for future research. Our goal is to furnish researchers in autonomous driving with a detailed synopsis of panoptic perception, positioning this survey as a pivotal reference in the ever-evolving landscape of autonomous driving technologies.
SCAN-Edge: Finding MobileNet-speed Hybrid Networks for Diverse Edge Devices via Hardware-Aware Evolutionary Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Designing low-latency and high-efficiency hybrid networks for a variety of low-cost commodity edge devices is both costly and tedious, leading to the adoption of hardware-aware neural architecture search (NAS) for finding optimal architectures. However, unifying NAS for a wide range of edge devices presents challenges due to the variety of hardware designs, supported operations, and compilation optimizations. Existing methods often fix the search space of architecture choices (e.g., activation, convolution, or self-attention) and estimate latency using hardware-agnostic proxies (e.g., FLOPs), which fail to achieve proclaimed latency across various edge devices. To address this issue, we propose SCAN-Edge, a unified NAS framework that jointly searches for self-attention, convolution, and activation to accommodate the wide variety of edge devices, including CPU-, GPU-, and hardware accelerator-based systems. To handle the large search space, SCAN-Edge relies on with a hardware-aware evolutionary algorithm that improves the quality of the search space to accelerate the sampling process. Experiments on large-scale datasets demonstrate that our hybrid networks match the actual MobileNetV2 latency for 224x224 input resolution on various commodity edge devices.
Continuum Damage Model for Hydrogen Embrittlement in Ferritic Steels
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Hydrogen embrittlement of metals and alloys, particularly steels, has been an important scientific and engineering challenge in the Oil and Gas industry for many years. It impacts the integrity and performance of a wide range of structures and equipment such as downhole tubulars and pipelines in sour service in the Upstream (U/S) and hydro-processing reactors in the Downstream (D/S). In addition, the rapidly growing interest in hydrogen as an energy carrier for fuel cells and mobility or as a clean fuel/heat source for hard to decarbonize industrial processes, draws attention to this key challenge of materials integrity in handling hydrogen. The fundamental understanding of failure mechanism(s) and the capability to model material behavior is important for managing the integrity and for repurposing existing infrastructure for transporting hydrogen as well as for extending the life of structures. To that extent, the present work develops a robust mathematical model to estimate the strength degradation and embrittlement due to hydrogen in steels. The model incorporates hydrogen affected constitutive response of material, within the framework of finite element method. The modified constitutive response is a Gurson plasticity based continuum damage model and incorporates two vital aspects of NVC failure theory. These key aspects are (i) hydrogen enhanced localized dislocation plasticity, and (ii) hydrogen enhanced vacancy stabilization forming nano-voids. The deformation and damage in the material is coupled with trap mediated hydrogen diffusion. Calibration of damage model parameters is performed for X65 commercial linepipe steel. Finally, capability of the damage model is demonstrated with numerical simulation of round bar tensile tests on X65 steel under hydrogen exposure. The numerical simulations are shown to be in excellent agreement with experimental results.
Fast and Modular Autonomy Software for Autonomous Racing Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous motorsports aim to replicate the human racecar driver with software and sensors. As in traditional motorsports, Autonomous Racing Vehicles (ARVs) are pushed to their handling limits in multi-agent scenarios at extremely high ($\geq 150mph$) speeds. This Operational Design Domain (ODD) presents unique challenges across the autonomy stack. The Indy Autonomous Challenge (IAC) is an international competition aiming to advance autonomous vehicle development through ARV competitions. While far from challenging what a human racecar driver can do, the IAC is pushing the state of the art by facilitating full-sized ARV competitions. This paper details the MIT-Pitt-RW Team's approach to autonomous racing in the IAC. In this work, we present our modular and fast approach to agent detection, motion planning and controls to create an autonomy stack. We also provide analysis of the performance of the software stack in single and multi-agent scenarios for rapid deployment in a fast-paced competition environment. We also cover what did and did not work when deployed on a physical system the Dallara AV-21 platform and potential improvements to address these shortcomings. Finally, we convey lessons learned and discuss limitations and future directions for improvement.
Graph Attention Inference of Network Topology in Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Accurately identifying the underlying graph structures of multi-agent systems remains a difficult challenge. Our work introduces a novel machine learning-based solution that leverages the attention mechanism to predict future states of multi-agent systems by learning node representations. The graph structure is then inferred from the strength of the attention values. This approach is applied to both linear consensus dynamics and the non-linear dynamics of Kuramoto oscillators, resulting in implicit learning of the graph by learning good agent representations. Our results demonstrate that the presented data-driven graph attention machine learning model can identify the network topology in multi-agent systems, even when the underlying dynamic model is not known, as evidenced by the F1 scores achieved in the link prediction.
PersonalizedUS: Interpretable Breast Cancer Risk Assessment with Local Coverage Uncertainty Quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Correctly assessing the malignancy of breast lesions identified during ultrasound examinations is crucial for effective clinical decision-making. However, the current "golden standard" relies on manual BI-RADS scoring by clinicians, often leading to unnecessary biopsies and a significant mental health burden on patients and their families. In this paper, we introduce PersonalizedUS, an interpretable machine learning system that leverages recent advances in conformal prediction to provide precise and personalized risk estimates with local coverage guarantees and sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values above 0.9 across various threshold levels. In particular, we identify meaningful lesion subgroups where distribution-free, model-agnostic conditional coverage holds, with approximately 90% of our prediction sets containing only the ground truth in most lesion subgroups, thus explicitly characterizing for which patients the model is most suitably applied. Moreover, we make available a curated tabular dataset of 1936 biopsied breast lesions from a recent observational multicenter study and benchmark the performance of several state-of-the-art learning algorithms. We also report a successful case study of the deployed system in the same multicenter context. Concrete clinical benefits include up to a 65% reduction in requested biopsies among BI-RADS 4a and 4b lesions, with minimal to no missed cancer cases.