OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Latent Entity Expansion for Document Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Despite considerable progress in neural relevance ranking techniques, search engines still struggle to process complex queries effectively - both in terms of precision and recall. Sparse and dense Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) approaches have the potential to overcome limitations in recall, but are only effective with high precision in the top ranks. In this work, we tackle the problem of search over complex queries using three complementary techniques. First, we demonstrate that applying a strong neural re-ranker before sparse or dense PRF can improve the retrieval effectiveness by 5-8%. This improvement in PRF effectiveness can be attributed directly to improving the precision of the feedback set. Second, we propose an enhanced expansion model, Latent Entity Expansion (LEE), which applies fine-grained word and entity-based relevance modelling incorporating localized features. Specifically, we find that by including both words and entities for expansion achieve a further 2-8% improvement in NDCG. Our analysis also demonstrated that LEE is largely robust to its parameters across datasets and performs well on entity-centric queries. And third, we include an 'adaptive' component in the retrieval process, which iteratively refines the re-ranking pool during scoring using the expansion model and avoids re-ranking additional documents. We find that this combination of techniques achieves the best NDCG, MAP and R@1000 results on the TREC Robust 2004 and CODEC document datasets, demonstrating a significant advancement in expansion effectiveness.
Deep Ensemble for Rotorcraft Attitude Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Historically, the rotorcraft community has experienced a higher fatal accident rate than other aviation segments, including commercial and general aviation. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and the application of these technologies in different areas of our lives are both intriguing and encouraging. When developed appropriately for the aviation domain, AI techniques provide an opportunity to help design systems that can address rotorcraft safety challenges. Our recent work demonstrated that AI algorithms could use video data from onboard cameras and correctly identify different flight parameters from cockpit gauges, e.g., indicated airspeed. These AI-based techniques provide a potentially cost-effective solution, especially for small helicopter operators, to record the flight state information and perform post-flight analyses. We also showed that carefully designed and trained AI systems could accurately predict rotorcraft attitude (i.e., pitch and yaw) from outside scenes (images or video data). Ordinary off-the-shelf video cameras were installed inside the rotorcraft cockpit to record the outside scene, including the horizon. The AI algorithm could correctly identify rotorcraft attitude at an accuracy in the range of 80\%. In this work, we combined five different onboard camera viewpoints to improve attitude prediction accuracy to 94\%. In this paper, five onboard camera views included the pilot windshield, co-pilot windshield, pilot Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) display, co-pilot EFIS display, and the attitude indicator gauge. Using video data from each camera view, we trained various convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which achieved prediction accuracy in the range of 79\% % to 90\% %. We subsequently ensembled the learned knowledge from all CNNs and achieved an ensembled accuracy of 93.3\%.
Learning Nuclei Representations with Masked Image Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Masked image modelling (MIM) is a powerful self-supervised representation learning paradigm, whose potential has not been widely demonstrated in medical image analysis. In this work, we show the capacity of MIM to capture rich semantic representations of Haemotoxylin & Eosin (H&E)-stained images at the nuclear level. Inspired by Bidirectional Encoder representation from Image Transformers (BEiT), we split the images into smaller patches and generate corresponding discrete visual tokens. In addition to the regular grid-based patches, typically used in visual Transformers, we introduce patches of individual cell nuclei. We propose positional encoding of the irregular distribution of these structures within an image. We pre-train the model in a self-supervised manner on H&E-stained whole-slide images of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, where cell nuclei have been segmented. The pre-training objective is to recover the original discrete visual tokens of the masked image on the one hand, and to reconstruct the visual tokens of the masked object instances on the other. Coupling these two pre-training tasks allows us to build powerful, context-aware representations of nuclei. Our model generalizes well and can be fine-tuned on downstream classification tasks, achieving improved cell classification accuracy on PanNuke dataset by more than 5% compared to current instance segmentation methods.
Generative AI for Programming Education: Benchmarking ChatGPT, GPT-4, and Human Tutors
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing computing education by powering next-generation educational technologies for introductory programming. Recent works have studied these models for different scenarios relevant to programming education; however, these works are limited for several reasons, as they typically consider already outdated models or only specific scenario(s). Consequently, there is a lack of a systematic study that benchmarks state-of-the-art models for a comprehensive set of programming education scenarios. In our work, we systematically evaluate two models, ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) and GPT-4, and compare their performance with human tutors for a variety of scenarios. We evaluate using five introductory Python programming problems and real-world buggy programs from an online platform, and assess performance using expert-based annotations. Our results show that GPT-4 drastically outperforms ChatGPT (based on GPT-3.5) and comes close to human tutors' performance for several scenarios. These results also highlight settings where GPT-4 still struggles, providing exciting future directions on developing techniques to improve the performance of these models.
News Verifiers Showdown: A Comparative Performance Evaluation of ChatGPT 3.5, ChatGPT 4.0, Bing AI, and Bard in News Fact-Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This study aimed to evaluate the proficiency of prominent Large Language Models (LLMs), namely OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5 and 4.0, Google's Bard(LaMDA), and Microsoft's Bing AI in discerning the truthfulness of news items using black box testing. A total of 100 fact-checked news items, all sourced from independent fact-checking agencies, were presented to each of these LLMs under controlled conditions. Their responses were classified into one of three categories: True, False, and Partially True/False. The effectiveness of the LLMs was gauged based on the accuracy of their classifications against the verified facts provided by the independent agencies. The results showed a moderate proficiency across all models, with an average score of 65.25 out of 100. Among the models, OpenAI's GPT-4.0 stood out with a score of 71, suggesting an edge in newer LLMs' abilities to differentiate fact from deception. However, when juxtaposed against the performance of human fact-checkers, the AI models, despite showing promise, lag in comprehending the subtleties and contexts inherent in news information. The findings highlight the potential of AI in the domain of fact-checking while underscoring the continued importance of human cognitive skills and the necessity for persistent advancements in AI capabilities. Finally, the experimental data produced from the simulation of this work is openly available on Kaggle.
Blockchain-based Federated Learning for Decentralized Energy Management Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

The Internet of Energy (IoE) is a distributed paradigm that leverages smart networks and distributed system technologies to enable decentralized energy systems. In contrast to the traditional centralized energy systems, distributed Energy Internet systems comprise multiple components and communication requirements that demand innovative technologies for decentralization, reliability, efficiency, and security. Recent advances in blockchain architectures, smart contracts, and distributed federated learning technologies have opened up new opportunities for realizing decentralized Energy Internet services. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis and classification of state-of-the-art solutions that employ blockchain, smart contracts, and federated learning for the IoE domains. Specifically, we identify four representative system models and discuss their key aspects. These models demonstrate the diverse ways in which blockchain, smart contracts, and federated learning can be integrated to support the main domains of IoE, namely distributed energy trading and sharing, smart microgrid energy networks, and electric and connected vehicle management. Furthermore, we provide a detailed comparison of the different levels of decentralization, the advantages of federated learning, and the benefits of using blockchain for the IoE systems. Additionally, we identify open issues and areas for future research for integrating federated learning and blockchain in the Internet of Energy domains.
Classification and Explanation of Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack Detection using Machine Learning and Shapley Additive Explanation (SHAP) Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

DDoS attacks involve overwhelming a target system with a large number of requests or traffic from multiple sources, disrupting the normal traffic of a targeted server, service, or network. Distinguishing between legitimate traffic and malicious traffic is a challenging task. It is possible to classify legitimate traffic and malicious traffic and analysis the network traffic by using machine learning and deep learning techniques. However, an inter-model explanation implemented to classify a traffic flow whether is benign or malicious is an important investigation of the inner working theory of the model to increase the trustworthiness of the model. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) can explain the decision-making of the machine learning models that can be classified and identify DDoS traffic. In this context, we proposed a framework that can not only classify legitimate traffic and malicious traffic of DDoS attacks but also use SHAP to explain the decision-making of the classifier model. To address this concern, we first adopt feature selection techniques to select the top 20 important features based on feature importance techniques (e.g., XGB-based SHAP feature importance). Following that, the Multi-layer Perceptron Network (MLP) part of our proposed model uses the optimized features of the DDoS attack dataset as inputs to classify legitimate and malicious traffic. We perform extensive experiments with all features and selected features. The evaluation results show that the model performance with selected features achieves above 99\% accuracy. Finally, to provide interpretability, XAI can be adopted to explain the model performance between the prediction results and features based on global and local explanations by SHAP, which can better explain the results achieved by our proposed framework.
A Hybrid System for Systematic Generalization in Simple Arithmetic Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Solving symbolic reasoning problems that require compositionality and systematicity is considered one of the key ingredients of human intelligence. However, symbolic reasoning is still a great challenge for deep learning models, which often cannot generalize the reasoning pattern to out-of-distribution test cases. In this work, we propose a hybrid system capable of solving arithmetic problems that require compositional and systematic reasoning over sequences of symbols. The model acquires such a skill by learning appropriate substitution rules, which are applied iteratively to the input string until the expression is completely resolved. We show that the proposed system can accurately solve nested arithmetical expressions even when trained only on a subset including the simplest cases, significantly outperforming both a sequence-to-sequence model trained end-to-end and a state-of-the-art large language model.
A Neural Separation Algorithm for the Rounded Capacity Inequalities
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The cutting plane method is a key technique for successful branch-and-cut and branch-price-and-cut algorithms that find the exact optimal solutions for various vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Among various cuts, the rounded capacity inequalities (RCIs) are the most fundamental. To generate RCIs, we need to solve the separation problem, whose exact solution takes a long time to obtain; therefore, heuristic methods are widely used. We design a learning-based separation heuristic algorithm with graph coarsening that learns the solutions of the exact separation problem with a graph neural network (GNN), which is trained with small instances of 50 to 100 customers. We embed our separation algorithm within the cutting plane method to find a lower bound for the capacitated VRP (CVRP) with up to 1,000 customers. We compare the performance of our approach with CVRPSEP, a popular separation software package for various cuts used in solving VRPs. Our computational results show that our approach finds better lower bounds than CVRPSEP for large-scale problems with 400 or more customers, while CVRPSEP shows strong competency for problems with less than 400 customers.
Diagnosis Uncertain Models For Medical Risk Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a patient risk models which has access to patient features such as vital signs, lab values, and prior history but does not have access to a patient's diagnosis. For example, this occurs in a model deployed at intake time for triage purposes. We show that such `all-cause' risk models have good generalization across diagnoses but have a predictable failure mode. When the same lab/vital/history profiles can result from diagnoses with different risk profiles (e.g. E.coli vs. MRSA) the risk estimate is a probability weighted average of these two profiles. This leads to an under-estimation of risk for rare but highly risky diagnoses. We propose a fix for this problem by explicitly modeling the uncertainty in risk prediction coming from uncertainty in patient diagnoses. This gives practitioners an interpretable way to understand patient risk beyond a single risk number.
Topology-Aware Resilient Routing Protocol for FANETs: An Adaptive Q-Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Flying ad hoc networks (FANETs) play a crucial role in numerous military and civil applications since it shortens mission duration and enhances coverage significantly compared with a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Whereas, designing an energy-efficient FANET routing protocol with a high packet delivery rate (PDR) and low delay is challenging owing to the dynamic topology changes. In this article, we propose a topology-aware resilient routing strategy based on adaptive Q-learning (TARRAQ) to accurately capture topology changes with low overhead and make routing decisions in a distributed and autonomous way. First, we analyze the dynamic behavior of UAV nodes via the queuing theory, and then the closed-form solutions of neighbors' change rate (NCR) and neighbors' change interarrival time (NCIT) distribution are derived. Based on the real-time NCR and NCIT, a resilient sensing interval (SI) is determined by defining the expected sensing delay of network events. Besides, we also present an adaptive Q-learning approach that enables UAVs to make distributed, autonomous, and adaptive routing decisions, where the above SI ensures that the action space can be updated in time at a low cost. The simulation results verify the accuracy of the topology dynamic analysis model and also prove that our TARRAQ outperforms the Q-learning-based topology-aware routing (QTAR), mobility prediction-based virtual routing (MPVR), and greedy perimeter stateless routing based on energy-efficient hello (EE-Hello) in terms of 25.23%, 20.24%, and 13.73% lower overhead, 9.41%, 14.77%, and 16.70% higher PDR, and 5.12%, 15.65%, and 11.31% lower energy consumption, respectively.
Systematic Investigation of Sparse Perturbed Sharpness-Aware Minimization Optimizer
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization due to complex and non-convex loss landscapes. Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a popular solution that smooths the loss landscape by minimizing the maximized change of training loss when adding a perturbation to the weight. However, indiscriminate perturbation of SAM on all parameters is suboptimal and results in excessive computation, double the overhead of common optimizers like Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). In this paper, we propose Sparse SAM (SSAM), an efficient and effective training scheme that achieves sparse perturbation by a binary mask. To obtain the sparse mask, we provide two solutions based on Fisher information and dynamic sparse training, respectively. We investigate the impact of different masks, including unstructured, structured, and $N$:$M$ structured patterns, as well as explicit and implicit forms of implementing sparse perturbation. We theoretically prove that SSAM can converge at the same rate as SAM, i.e., $O(\log T/\sqrt{T})$. Sparse SAM has the potential to accelerate training and smooth the loss landscape effectively. Extensive experimental results on CIFAR and ImageNet-1K confirm that our method is superior to SAM in terms of efficiency, and the performance is preserved or even improved with a perturbation of merely 50\% sparsity. Code is available at https://github.com/Mi-Peng/Systematic-Investigation-of-Sparse-Perturbed-Sharpness-Aware-Minimization-Optimizer.
GPT-FinRE: In-context Learning for Financial Relation Extraction using Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Relation extraction (RE) is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) that aims to identify and classify relationships between entities mentioned in text. In the financial domain, relation extraction plays a vital role in extracting valuable information from financial documents, such as news articles, earnings reports, and company filings. This paper describes our solution to relation extraction on one such dataset REFinD. The dataset was released along with shared task as a part of the Fourth Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Unstructured Data in Financial Services, co-located with SIGIR 2023. In this paper, we employed OpenAI models under the framework of in-context learning (ICL). We utilized two retrieval strategies to find top K relevant in-context learning demonstrations / examples from training data for a given test example. The first retrieval mechanism, we employed, is a learning-free dense retriever and the other system is a learning-based retriever. We were able to achieve 3rd rank overall. Our best F1-score is 0.718.
Beyond Active Engagement: The Significance of Lurkers in a Polarized Twitter Debate
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

The emergence of new public forums in the shape of online social media has introduced unprecedented challenges to public discourse, including polarization, misinformation, and the emergence of echo chambers. While existing research has extensively studied the behavior of active users within echo chambers, little attention has been given to the hidden audience, also known as lurkers, who passively consume content without actively engaging. This study aims to estimate the share of the hidden audience and investigate their interplay with the echo chamber effect. Using Twitter as a case study, we analyze a polarized political debate to understand the engagement patterns and factors influencing the hidden audience's presence. Our findings reveal a relevant fraction of users that consume content without active interaction, which underscores the importance of considering their presence in online debates. Notably, our results indicate that the engagement of the hidden audience is primarily influenced by factors such as the reliability of media sources mentioned in tweets rather than the ideological stance of the user that produced the content. These findings highlight the need for a comprehensive understanding of the hidden audience's role in online debates and how they may influence public opinion.
Class-Incremental Learning using Diffusion Model for Distillation and Replay
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Class-incremental learning aims to learn new classes in an incremental fashion without forgetting the previously learned ones. Several research works have shown how additional data can be used by incremental models to help mitigate catastrophic forgetting. In this work, following the recent breakthrough in text-to-image generative models and their wide distribution, we propose the use of a pretrained Stable Diffusion model as a source of additional data for class-incremental learning. Compared to competitive methods that rely on external, often unlabeled, datasets of real images, our approach can generate synthetic samples belonging to the same classes as the previously encountered images. This allows us to use those additional data samples not only in the distillation loss but also for replay in the classification loss. Experiments on the competitive benchmarks CIFAR100, ImageNet-Subset, and ImageNet demonstrate how this new approach can be used to further improve the performance of state-of-the-art methods for class-incremental learning on large scale datasets.
A Quic(k) Security Overview: A Literature Research on Implemented Security Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Built on top of UDP, the relatively new QUIC protocol serves as the baseline for modern web protocol stacks. Equipped with a rich feature set, the protocol is defined by a 151 pages strong IETF standard complemented by several additional documents. Enabling fast updates and feature iteration, most QUIC implementations are implemented as user space libraries leading to a large and fragmented ecosystem. This work addresses the research question, "if a complex standard with a large number of different implementations leads to an insecure ecosystem?". The relevant RFC documents were studied and "Security Consideration" items describing conceptional problems were extracted. During the research, 13 popular production ready QUIC implementations were compared by evaluating 10 security considerations from RFC9000. While related studies mostly focused on the functional part of QUIC, this study confirms that available QUIC implementations are not yet mature enough from a security point of view.