OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Edge Preserving Implicit Surface Representation of Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Learning implicit surface directly from raw data recently has become a very attractive representation method for 3D reconstruction tasks due to its excellent performance. However, as the raw data quality deteriorates, the implicit functions often lead to unsatisfactory reconstruction results. To this end, we propose a novel edge-preserving implicit surface reconstruction method, which mainly consists of a differentiable Laplican regularizer and a dynamic edge sampling strategy. Among them, the differential Laplican regularizer can effectively alleviate the implicit surface unsmoothness caused by the point cloud quality deteriorates; Meanwhile, in order to reduce the excessive smoothing at the edge regions of implicit suface, we proposed a dynamic edge extract strategy for sampling near the sharp edge of point cloud, which can effectively avoid the Laplacian regularizer from smoothing all regions. Finally, we combine them with a simple regularization term for robust implicit surface reconstruction. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, experimental results show that our method significantly improves the quality of 3D reconstruction results. Moreover, we demonstrate through several experiments that our method can be conveniently and effectively applied to some point cloud analysis tasks, including point cloud edge feature extraction, normal estimation,etc.
Density-based clustering with fully-convolutional networks for crowd flow detection from drones
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Crowd analysis from drones has attracted increasing attention in recent times due to the ease of use and affordable cost of these devices. However, how this technology can provide a solution to crowd flow detection is still an unexplored research question. To this end, we propose a crowd flow detection method for video sequences shot by a drone. The method is based on a fully-convolutional network that learns to perform crowd clustering in order to detect the centroids of crowd-dense areas and track their movement in consecutive frames. The proposed method proved effective and efficient when tested on the Crowd Counting datasets of the VisDrone challenge, characterized by video sequences rather than still images. The encouraging results show that the proposed method could open up new ways of analyzing high-level crowd behavior from drones.
Study of software developers' experience using the Github Copilot Tool in the software development process
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

In software development there is a constant pressure to produce code faster and faster without compromising on quality. New tools supporting developers are created in response to this demand. Currently a new generation of such solutions is about to be launched - Artificial Intelligence driven tools. On 29 June 2021 Github Copilot was announced. It uses trained model to generate code based on human understandable language. The focus of this research was to investigate software developers' approach to this tool. For this purpose a survey containing 18 questions was prepared and shared with programmers. A total of 42 answers were gathered. The results of the research indicate that developers' opinions are divided. Most of them met Github Copilot before attending the survey. The attitude to the tool was mostly positive but not many participants were willing to use it. Concerns are caused by security issues associated with using of Github Copilot.
Everyone's Voice Matters: Quantifying Annotation Disagreement Using Demographic Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In NLP annotation, it is common to have multiple annotators label the text and then obtain the ground truth labels based on the agreement of major annotators. However, annotators are individuals with different backgrounds, and minors' opinions should not be simply ignored. As annotation tasks become subjective and topics are controversial in modern NLP tasks, we need NLP systems that can represent people's diverse voices on subjective matters and predict the level of diversity. This paper examines whether the text of the task and annotators' demographic background information can be used to estimate the level of disagreement among annotators. Particularly, we extract disagreement labels from the annotators' voting histories in the five subjective datasets, and then fine-tune language models to predict annotators' disagreement. Our results show that knowing annotators' demographic information, like gender, ethnicity, and education level, helps predict disagreements. In order to distinguish the disagreement from the inherent controversy from text content and the disagreement in the annotators' different perspectives, we simulate everyone's voices with different combinations of annotators' artificial demographics and examine its variance of the finetuned disagreement predictor. Our paper aims to improve the annotation process for more efficient and inclusive NLP systems through a novel disagreement prediction mechanism. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
Open SESAME: Fighting Botnets with Seed Reconstructions of Domain Generation Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

An important aspect of many botnets is their capability to generate pseudorandom domain names using Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs). A cyber criminal can register such domains to establish periodically changing rendezvous points with the bots. DGAs make use of seeds to generate sets of domains. Seeds can easily be changed in order to generate entirely new groups of domains while using the same underlying algorithm. While this requires very little manual effort for an adversary, security specialists typically have to manually reverse engineer new malware strains to reconstruct the seeds. Only when the seed and DGA are known, past and future domains can be generated, efficiently attributed, blocked, sinkholed or used for a take-down. Common counters in the literature consist of databases or Machine Learning (ML) based detectors to keep track of past and future domains of known DGAs and to identify DGA-generated domain names, respectively. However, database based approaches can not detect domains generated by new DGAs, and ML approaches can not generate future domain names. In this paper, we introduce SESAME, a system that combines the two above-mentioned approaches and contains a module for automatic Seed Reconstruction, which is, to our knowledge, the first of its kind. It is used to automatically classify domain names, rate their novelty, and determine the seeds of the underlying DGAs. SESAME consists of multiple DGA-specific Seed Reconstructors and is designed to work purely based on domain names, as they are easily obtainable from observing the network traffic. We evaluated our approach on 20.8 gigabytes of DNS-lookups. Thereby, we identified 17 DGAs, of which 4 were entirely new to us.
Discovering and Explaining Driver Behaviour under HoS Regulations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

World wide transport authorities are imposing complex Hours of Service regulations to drivers, which constraint the amount of working, driving and resting time when delivering a service. As a consequence, transport companies are responsible not only of scheduling driving plans aligned with laws that define the legal behaviour of a driver, but also of monitoring and identifying as soon as possible problematic patterns that can incur in costs due to sanctions. Transport experts are frequently in charge of many drivers and lack time to analyse the vast amount of data recorded by the onboard sensors, and companies have grown accustomed to pay sanctions rather than predict and forestall wrongdoings. This paper exposes an application for summarising raw driver activity logs according to these regulations and for explaining driver behaviour in a human readable format. The system employs planning, constraint, and clustering techniques to extract and describe what the driver has been doing while identifying infractions and the activities that originate them. Furthermore, it groups drivers based on similar driving patterns. An experimentation in real world data indicates that recurring driving patterns can be clustered from short basic driving sequences to whole drivers working days.
Institutionalization of Digital Trade in the Russian Federation: Countdown
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The institutionalization of digital trade is one of the most important directions in the formation of the information society in the Russian Federation. The studies reflect the emerging lag in the Russian economy readiness index to support online shopping. The author analyzes the reasons for the lag in the context of the institutional features of the development of digital trade. As the main obstacle that reduces the economic efficiency and competitiveness of digital trade, insufficient attention of the state to the formation of innovative institutions of the digital market is highlighted.
Forgetful Active Learning with Switch Events: Efficient Sampling for Out-of-Distribution Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper considers deep out-of-distribution active learning. In practice, fully trained neural networks interact randomly with out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs and map aberrant samples randomly within the model representation space. Since data representations are direct manifestations of the training distribution, the data selection process plays a crucial role in outlier robustness. For paradigms such as active learning, this is especially challenging since protocols must not only improve performance on the training distribution most effectively but further render a robust representation space. However, existing strategies directly base the data selection on the data representation of the unlabeled data which is random for OOD samples by definition. For this purpose, we introduce forgetful active learning with switch events (FALSE) - a novel active learning protocol for out-of-distribution active learning. Instead of defining sample importance on the data representation directly, we formulate "informativeness" with learning difficulty during training. Specifically, we approximate how often the network "forgets" unlabeled samples and query the most "forgotten" samples for annotation. We report up to 4.5\% accuracy improvements in over 270 experiments, including four commonly used protocols, two OOD benchmarks, one in-distribution benchmark, and three different architectures.
On the Optimal Fixed-Price Mechanism in Bilateral Trade
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We study the problem of social welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where two agents, a buyer and a seller, trade an indivisible item. We consider arguably the simplest form of mechanisms -- the fixed-price mechanisms, where the designer offers trade at a fixed price to the seller and buyer. Besides the simple form, fixed-price mechanisms are also the only DSIC and budget balanced mechanisms in bilateral trade. We obtain improved approximation ratios of fixed-price mechanisms in different settings. In the full prior information setting where the designer has access to the value distributions of both the seller and buyer, we show that the optimal fixed-price mechanism can achieve at least $0.72$ of the optimal welfare, and no fixed-price mechanism can achieve more than $0.7381$ of the optimal welfare. Prior to our result the state of the art approximation ratio was $1 - 1/e + 0.0001 \approx 0.632$. Interestingly, we further show that the optimal approximation ratio achievable with full prior information is identical to the optimal approximation ratio obtainable with only one-sided prior information. We further consider two limited information settings. In the first one, the designer is only given the mean of the buyer's (or the seller's) value. We show that with such minimal information, one can already design a fixed-price mechanism that achieves $2/3$ of the optimal social welfare, which surpasses the previous state of the art ratio even when the designer has access to the full prior information. Furthermore, $2/3$ is the optimal attainable ratio in this setting. In the second one, we assume that the designer has sample access to the value distributions. We propose a new family mechanisms called order statistic mechanisms and provide a complete characterization of their approximation ratios for any fixed number of samples.
Neural Shadow Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

We present a neural extension of basic shadow mapping for fast, high quality hard and soft shadows. We compare favorably to fast pre-filtering shadow mapping, all while producing visual results on par with ray traced hard and soft shadows. We show that combining memory bandwidth-aware architecture specialization and careful temporal-window training leads to a fast, compact and easy-to-train neural shadowing method. Our technique is memory bandwidth conscious, eliminates the need for post-process temporal anti-aliasing or denoising, and supports scenes with dynamic view, emitters and geometry while remaining robust to unseen objects.
Improving Reliability of Spiking Neural Networks through Fault Aware Threshold Voltage Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Spiking neural networks have made breakthroughs in computer vision by lending themselves to neuromorphic hardware. However, the neuromorphic hardware lacks parallelism and hence, limits the throughput and hardware acceleration of SNNs on edge devices. To address this problem, many systolic-array SNN accelerators (systolicSNNs) have been proposed recently, but their reliability is still a major concern. In this paper, we first extensively analyze the impact of permanent faults on the SystolicSNNs. Then, we present a novel fault mitigation method, i.e., fault-aware threshold voltage optimization in retraining (FalVolt). FalVolt optimizes the threshold voltage for each layer in retraining to achieve the classification accuracy close to the baseline in the presence of faults. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed mitigation, we classify both static (i.e., MNIST) and neuromorphic datasets (i.e., N-MNIST and DVS Gesture) on a 256x256 systolicSNN with stuck-at faults. We empirically show that the classification accuracy of a systolicSNN drops significantly even at extremely low fault rates (as low as 0.012\%). Our proposed FalVolt mitigation method improves the performance of systolicSNNs by enabling them to operate at fault rates of up to 60\%, with a negligible drop in classification accuracy (as low as 0.1\%). Our results show that FalVolt is 2x faster compared to other state-of-the-art techniques common in artificial neural networks (ANNs), such as fault-aware pruning and retraining without threshold voltage optimization.
DriCon: On-device Just-in-Time Context Characterization for Unexpected Driving Events
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Driving is a complex task carried out under the influence of diverse spatial objects and their temporal interactions. Therefore, a sudden fluctuation in driving behavior can be due to either a lack of driving skill or the effect of various on-road spatial factors such as pedestrian movements, peer vehicles' actions, etc. Therefore, understanding the context behind a degraded driving behavior just-in-time is necessary to ensure on-road safety. In this paper, we develop a system called \ourmethod{} that exploits the information acquired from a dashboard-mounted edge-device to understand the context in terms of micro-events from a diverse set of on-road spatial factors and in-vehicle driving maneuvers taken. \ourmethod{} uses the live in-house testbed and the largest publicly available driving dataset to generate human interpretable explanations against the unexpected driving events. Also, it provides a better insight with an improved similarity of $80$\% over $50$ hours of driving data than the existing driving behavior characterization techniques.
An Approach to Stochastic Dynamic Games with Asymmetric Information and Hidden Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

We consider in discrete time, a general class of sequential stochastic dynamic games with asymmetric information with the following features. The underlying system has Markovian dynamics controlled by the agents' joint actions. Each agent's instantaneous utility depends on the current system state and the agents' joint actions. At each time instant each agent makes a private noisy observation of the current system state and the agents' actions in the previous time instant. In addition, at each time instant all agents have a common noisy observation of the current system state and their actions in the previous time instant. Each agent's actions are part of his private information. The objective is to determine Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (BNE) strategy profiles that are based on a compressed version of the agents' information and can be sequentially computed; such BNE strategy profiles may not always exist. We present an approach/methodology that achieves the above-stated objective, along with an instance of a game where BNE strategy profiles with the above-mentioned characteristics exist. We show that the methodology also works for the case where the agents have no common observations.
Algebraic Invariants of Codes on Weighted Projective Planes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Weighted projective spaces are natural generalizations of projective spaces with a rich structure. Projective Reed-Muller codes are error-correcting codes that played an important role in reliably transmitting information on digital communication channels. In this case study, we explore the power of commutative and homological algebraic techniques to study weighted projective Reed-Muller (WPRM) codes on weighted projective spaces of the form $\mathbb{P}(1,1,a)$. We compute minimal free resolutions and thereby obtain Hilbert series for the vanishing ideal of the $\mathbb{F}_q$-rational points, and compute main parameters for these codes.
TransfQMix: Transformers for Leveraging the Graph Structure of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Coordination is one of the most difficult aspects of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). One reason is that agents normally choose their actions independently of one another. In order to see coordination strategies emerging from the combination of independent policies, the recent research has focused on the use of a centralized function (CF) that learns each agent's contribution to the team reward. However, the structure in which the environment is presented to the agents and to the CF is typically overlooked. We have observed that the features used to describe the coordination problem can be represented as vertex features of a latent graph structure. Here, we present TransfQMix, a new approach that uses transformers to leverage this latent structure and learn better coordination policies. Our transformer agents perform a graph reasoning over the state of the observable entities. Our transformer Q-mixer learns a monotonic mixing-function from a larger graph that includes the internal and external states of the agents. TransfQMix is designed to be entirely transferable, meaning that same parameters can be used to control and train larger or smaller teams of agents. This enables to deploy promising approaches to save training time and derive general policies in MARL, such as transfer learning, zero-shot transfer, and curriculum learning. We report TransfQMix's performances in the Spread and StarCraft II environments. In both settings, it outperforms state-of-the-art Q-Learning models, and it demonstrates effectiveness in solving problems that other methods can not solve.
A Constrained-Optimization Approach to the Execution of Prioritized Stacks of Learned Multi-Robot Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a constrained-optimization formulation for the prioritized execution of learned robot tasks. The framework lends itself to the execution of tasks encoded by value functions, such as tasks learned using the reinforcement learning paradigm. The tasks are encoded as constraints of a convex optimization program by using control Lyapunov functions. Moreover, an additional constraint is enforced in order to specify relative priorities between the tasks. The proposed approach is showcased in simulation using a team of mobile robots executing coordinated multi-robot tasks.
Towards Reconciling Usability and Usefulness of Explainable AI Methodologies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Interactive Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents are becoming increasingly prevalent in society. However, application of such systems without understanding them can be problematic. Black-box AI systems can lead to liability and accountability issues when they produce an incorrect decision. Explainable AI (XAI) seeks to bridge the knowledge gap, between developers and end-users, by offering insights into how an AI algorithm functions. Many modern algorithms focus on making the AI model "transparent", i.e. unveil the inherent functionality of the agent in a simpler format. However, these approaches do not cater to end-users of these systems, as users may not possess the requisite knowledge to understand these explanations in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore, to be able to develop suitable XAI methods, we need to understand the factors which influence subjective perception and objective usability. In this paper, we present a novel user-study which studies four differing XAI modalities commonly employed in prior work for explaining AI behavior, i.e. Decision Trees, Text, Programs. We study these XAI modalities in the context of explaining the actions of a self-driving car on a highway, as driving is an easily understandable real-world task and self-driving cars is a keen area of interest within the AI community. Our findings highlight internal consistency issues wherein participants perceived language explanations to be significantly more usable, however participants were better able to objectively understand the decision making process of the car through a decision tree explanation. Our work also provides further evidence of importance of integrating user-specific and situational criteria into the design of XAI systems. Our findings show that factors such as computer science experience, and watching the car succeed or fail can impact the perception and usefulness of the explanation.
In BLOOM: Creativity and Affinity in Artificial Lyrics and Art
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We apply a large multilingual language model (BLOOM-176B) in open-ended generation of Chinese song lyrics, and evaluate the resulting lyrics for coherence and creativity using human reviewers. We find that current computational metrics for evaluating large language model outputs (MAUVE) have limitations in evaluation of creative writing. We note that the human concept of creativity requires lyrics to be both comprehensible and distinctive -- and that humans assess certain types of machine-generated lyrics to score more highly than real lyrics by popular artists. Inspired by the inherently multimodal nature of album releases, we leverage a Chinese-language stable diffusion model to produce high-quality lyric-guided album art, demonstrating a creative approach for an artist seeking inspiration for an album or single. Finally, we introduce the MojimLyrics dataset, a Chinese-language dataset of popular song lyrics for future research.