OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Robotic warehousing operations: a learn-then-optimize approach to large-scale neighborhood search
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid deployment of robotics technologies requires dedicated optimization algorithms to manage large fleets of autonomous agents. This paper supports robotic parts-to-picker operations in warehousing by optimizing order-workstation assignments, item-pod assignments and the schedule of order fulfillment at workstations. The model maximizes throughput, while managing human workload at the workstations and congestion in the facility. We solve it via large-scale neighborhood search, with a novel learn-then-optimize approach to subproblem generation. The algorithm relies on an offline machine learning procedure to predict objective improvements based on subproblem features, and an online optimization model to generate a new subproblem at each iteration. In collaboration with Amazon Robotics, we show that our model and algorithm generate much stronger solutions for practical problems than state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our solution enhances the utilization of robotic fleets by coordinating robotic tasks for human operators to pick multiple items at once, and by coordinating robotic routes to avoid congestion in the facility.
Exploring Multiple Strategies to Improve Multilingual Coreference Resolution in CorefUD
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Coreference resolution, the task of identifying expressions in text that refer to the same entity, is a critical component in various natural language processing applications. This paper presents a novel end-to-end neural coreference resolution system utilizing the CorefUD 1.1 dataset, which spans 17 datasets across 12 languages. The proposed model is based on the standard end-to-end neural coreference resolution system. We first establish baseline models, including monolingual and cross-lingual variations, and then propose several extensions to enhance performance across diverse linguistic contexts. These extensions include cross-lingual training, incorporation of syntactic information, a Span2Head model for optimized headword prediction, and advanced singleton modeling. We also experiment with headword span representation and long-documents modeling through overlapping segments. The proposed extensions, particularly the heads-only approach, singleton modeling, and long document prediction, significantly improve performance across most datasets. We also perform zero-shot cross-lingual experiments, highlighting the potential and limitations of cross-lingual transfer in coreference resolution. Our findings contribute to the development of robust and scalable coreference systems for multilingual coreference resolution. Finally, we evaluate our model on the CorefUD 1.1 test set and surpass the best model from the CRAC 2023 shared task of comparable size by a large margin.
Ig3D: Integrating 3D Face Representations in Facial Expression Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Reconstructing 3D faces with facial geometry from single images has allowed for major advances in animation, generative models, and virtual reality. However, this ability to represent faces with their 3D features is not as fully explored by the facial expression inference (FEI) community. This study therefore aims to investigate the impacts of integrating such 3D representations into the FEI task, specifically for facial expression classification and face-based valence-arousal (VA) estimation. To accomplish this, we first assess the performance of two 3D face representations (both based on the 3D morphable model, FLAME) for the FEI tasks. We further explore two fusion architectures, intermediate fusion and late fusion, for integrating the 3D face representations with existing 2D inference frameworks. To evaluate our proposed architecture, we extract the corresponding 3D representations and perform extensive tests on the AffectNet and RAF-DB datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art AffectNet VA estimation and RAF-DB classification tasks. Moreover, our method can act as a complement to other existing methods to boost performance in many emotion inference tasks.
Enhancing Autism Spectrum Disorder Early Detection with the Parent-Child Dyads Block-Play Protocol and an Attention-enhanced GCN-xLSTM Hybrid Deep Learning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a rapidly growing neurodevelopmental disorder. Performing a timely intervention is crucial for the growth of young children with ASD, but traditional clinical screening methods lack objectivity. This study introduces an innovative approach to early detection of ASD. The contributions are threefold. First, this work proposes a novel Parent-Child Dyads Block-Play (PCB) protocol, grounded in kinesiological and neuroscientific research, to identify behavioral patterns distinguishing ASD from typically developing (TD) toddlers. Second, we have compiled a substantial video dataset, featuring 40 ASD and 89 TD toddlers engaged in block play with parents. This dataset exceeds previous efforts on both the scale of participants and the length of individual sessions. Third, our approach to action analysis in videos employs a hybrid deep learning framework, integrating a two-stream graph convolution network with attention-enhanced xLSTM (2sGCN-AxLSTM). This framework is adept at capturing dynamic interactions between toddlers and parents by extracting spatial features correlated with upper body and head movements and focusing on global contextual information of action sequences over time. By learning these global features with spatio-temporal correlations, our 2sGCN-AxLSTM effectively analyzes dynamic human behavior patterns and demonstrates an unprecedented accuracy of 89.6\% in early detection of ASD. Our approach shows strong potential for enhancing early ASD diagnosis by accurately analyzing parent-child interactions, providing a critical tool to support timely and informed clinical decision-making.
Network Inference in Public Administration: Questions, Challenges, and Models of Causality
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Descriptive and inferential social network analysis has become common in public administration studies of network governance and management. A large literature has developed in two broad categories: antecedents of network structure, and network effects and outcomes. A new topic is emerging on network interventions that applies knowledge of network formation and effects to actively intervene in the social context of interaction. Yet, the question remains how might scholars deploy and determine the impact of network interventions. Inferential network analysis has primarily focused on statistical simulations of network distributions to produce probability estimates on parameters of interest in observed networks, e.g. ERGMs. There is less attention to design elements for causal inference in the network context, such as experimental interventions, randomization, control and comparison networks, and spillovers. We advance a number of important questions for network research, examine important inferential challenges and other issues related to inference in networks, and focus on a set of possible network inference models. We categorize models of network inference into (i) observational studies of networks, using descriptive and stochastic methods that lack intervention, randomization, or comparison networks; (ii) simulation studies that leverage computational resources for generating inference; (iii) natural network experiments, with unintentional network-based interventions; (iv) network field experiments, with designed interventions accompanied by comparison networks; and (v) laboratory experiments that design and implement randomization to treatment and control networks. The article offers a guide to network researchers interested in questions, challenges, and models of inference for network analysis in public administration.
Plausible-Parrots @ MSP2023: Enhancing Semantic Plausibility Modeling using Entity and Event Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of injecting external knowledge to a large language model (LLM) to identify semantic plausibility of simple events. Specifically, we enhance the LLM with fine-grained entity types, event types and their definitions extracted from an external knowledge base. These knowledge are injected into our system via designed templates. We also augment the data to balance the label distribution and adapt the task setting to real world scenarios in which event mentions are expressed as natural language sentences. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the injected knowledge on modeling semantic plausibility of events. An error analysis further emphasizes the importance of identifying non-trivial entity and event types.
Different Victims, Same Layout: Email Visual Similarity Detection for Enhanced Email Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In the pursuit of an effective spam detection system, the focus has often been on identifying known spam patterns either through rule-based detection systems or machine learning (ML) solutions that rely on keywords. However, both systems are susceptible to evasion techniques and zero-day attacks that can be achieved at low cost. Therefore, an email that bypassed the defense system once can do it again in the following days, even though rules are updated or the ML models are retrained. The recurrence of failures to detect emails that exhibit layout similarities to previously undetected spam is concerning for customers and can erode their trust in a company. Our observations show that threat actors reuse email kits extensively and can bypass detection with little effort, for example, by making changes to the content of emails. In this work, we propose an email visual similarity detection approach, named Pisco, to improve the detection capabilities of an email threat defense system. We apply our proof of concept to some real-world samples received from different sources. Our results show that email kits are being reused extensively and visually similar emails are sent to our customers at various time intervals. Therefore, this method could be very helpful in situations where detection engines that rely on textual features and keywords are bypassed, an occurrence our observations show happens frequently.
An Empirical Study of Scaling Laws for Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present a limited empirical study of scaling laws for transfer learning in transformer models. More specifically, we examine a scaling law that incorporates a "transfer gap" term, indicating the effectiveness of pre-training on one distribution when optimizing for downstream performance on another distribution. When the transfer gap is low, pre-training is a cost-effective strategy for improving downstream performance. Conversely, when the gap is high, collecting high-quality fine-tuning data becomes relatively more cost effective. Fitting the scaling law to experiments from diverse datasets reveals significant variations in the transfer gap across distributions. In theory, the scaling law can inform optimal data allocation strategies and highlights how the scarcity of downstream data can bottleneck performance. Our findings contribute to a principled way to measure transfer learning efficiency and understand how data availability affects capabilities.
From "Made In" to Mukokuseki: Exploring the Visual Perception of National Identity in Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

People read human characteristics into the design of social robots, a visual process with socio-cultural implications. One factor may be nationality, a complex social characteristic that is linked to ethnicity, culture, and other factors of identity that can be embedded in the visual design of robots. Guided by social identity theory (SIT), we explored the notion of "mukokuseki," a visual design characteristic defined by the absence of visual cues to national and ethnic identity in Japanese cultural exports. In a two-phase categorization study (n=212), American (n=110) and Japanese (n=92) participants rated a random selection of nine robot stimuli from America and Japan, plus multinational Pepper. We found evidence of made-in and two kinds of mukokuseki effects. We offer suggestions for the visual design of mukokuseki robots that may interact with people from diverse backgrounds. Our findings have implications for robots and social identity, the viability of robotic exports, and the use of robots internationally.
Cross Fusion RGB-T Tracking with Bi-directional Adapter
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Many state-of-the-art RGB-T trackers have achieved remarkable results through modality fusion. However, these trackers often either overlook temporal information or fail to fully utilize it, resulting in an ineffective balance between multi-modal and temporal information. To address this issue, we propose a novel Cross Fusion RGB-T Tracking architecture (CFBT) that ensures the full participation of multiple modalities in tracking while dynamically fusing temporal information. The effectiveness of CFBT relies on three newly designed cross spatio-temporal information fusion modules: Cross Spatio-Temporal Augmentation Fusion (CSTAF), Cross Spatio-Temporal Complementarity Fusion (CSTCF), and Dual-Stream Spatio-Temporal Adapter (DSTA). CSTAF employs a cross-attention mechanism to enhance the feature representation of the template comprehensively. CSTCF utilizes complementary information between different branches to enhance target features and suppress background features. DSTA adopts the adapter concept to adaptively fuse complementary information from multiple branches within the transformer layer, using the RGB modality as a medium. These ingenious fusions of multiple perspectives introduce only less than 0.3\% of the total modal parameters, but they indeed enable an efficient balance between multi-modal and temporal information. Extensive experiments on three popular RGB-T tracking benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Improving Time Series Classification with Representation Soft Label Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Previous research has indicated that deep neural network based models for time series classification (TSC) tasks are prone to overfitting. This issue can be mitigated by employing strategies that prevent the model from becoming overly confident in its predictions, such as label smoothing and confidence penalty. Building upon the concept of label smoothing, we propose a novel approach to generate more reliable soft labels, which we refer to as representation soft label smoothing. We apply label smoothing, confidence penalty, and our method representation soft label smoothing to several TSC models and compare their performance with baseline method which only uses hard labels for training. Our results demonstrate that the use of these enhancement techniques yields competitive results compared to the baseline method. Importantly, our method demonstrates strong performance across models with varying structures and complexities.
Generative Modeling Perspective for Control and Reasoning in Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Heralded by the initial success in speech recognition and image classification, learning-based approaches with neural networks, commonly referred to as deep learning, have spread across various fields. A primitive form of a neural network functions as a deterministic mapping from one vector to another, parameterized by trainable weights. This is well suited for point estimation in which the model learns a one-to-one mapping (e.g., mapping a front camera view to a steering angle) that is required to solve the task of interest. Although learning such a deterministic, one-to-one mapping is effective, there are scenarios where modeling \emph{multimodal} data distributions, namely learning one-to-many relationships, is helpful or even necessary. In this thesis, we adopt a generative modeling perspective on robotics problems. Generative models learn and produce samples from multimodal distributions, rather than performing point estimation. We will explore the advantages this perspective offers for three topics in robotics.
PIB: Prioritized Information Bottleneck Framework for Collaborative Edge Video Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Collaborative edge sensing systems, particularly in collaborative perception systems in autonomous driving, can significantly enhance tracking accuracy and reduce blind spots with multi-view sensing capabilities. However, their limited channel capacity and the redundancy in sensory data pose significant challenges, affecting the performance of collaborative inference tasks. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Prioritized Information Bottleneck (PIB) framework for collaborative edge video analytics. We first propose a priority-based inference mechanism that jointly considers the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the camera's coverage area of the region of interest (RoI). To enable efficient inference, PIB reduces video redundancy in both spatial and temporal domains and transmits only the essential information for the downstream inference tasks. This eliminates the need to reconstruct videos on the edge server while maintaining low latency. Specifically, it derives compact, task-relevant features by employing the deterministic information bottleneck (IB) method, which strikes a balance between feature informativeness and communication costs. Given the computational challenges caused by IB-based objectives with high-dimensional data, we resort to variational approximations for feasible optimization. Compared to TOCOM-TEM, JPEG, and HEVC, PIB achieves an improvement of up to 15.1\% in mean object detection accuracy (MODA) and reduces communication costs by 66.7% when edge cameras experience poor channel conditions.
Service-Oriented AoI Modeling and Analysis for Non-Terrestrial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

To achieve truly seamless global intelligent connectivity, non-terrestrial networks (NTN) mainly composed of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites and drones are recognized as important components of the future 6G network architecture. Meanwhile, the rapid advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the proliferation of numerous applications with stringent requirements for timely information delivery. The Age of Information (AoI), a critical performance metric for assessing the freshness of data in information update systems, has gained significant importance in this context. However, existing modeling and analysis work on AoI mainly focuses on terrestrial networks, and the distribution characteristics of ground nodes and the high dynamics of satellites have not been fully considered, which poses challenges for more accurate evaluation. Against this background, we model the ground nodes as a hybrid distribution of Poisson point process (PPP) and Poisson cluster process (PCP) to capture the impact of ground node distribution on the AoI of status update packet transmission supported by UAVs and satellites in NTN, and the visibility and cross-traffic characteristics of satellites are additionally considered. We derived the average AoI for the system in these two different situations and examined the impact of various network parameters on AoI performance.
Evaluating the Accuracy of the Labeling System in Web of Science for the Sustainable Development Goals
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

Monitoring and fostering research aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is crucial for formulating evidence-based policies, identifying best practices, and promoting global collaboration. The key step is developing a labeling system to map research publications to their related SDGs. The SDGs labeling system integrated in Web of Science (WoS), which assigns citation topics instead of individual publication to SDGs, has emerged as a promising tool.However we still lack of a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of WoS labeling system. By comparing with the Bergon approach, we systematically assessed the relatedness between citation topics and SDGs. Our analysis identified 15% of topics showing low relatedness to their assigned SDGs at a 1% threshold. Notably, SDGs such as '11 Cities', '07 Energy', and '13 Climate' exhibited higher percentages of low related topics. In addition, we revealed that certain topics are significantly underrepresented in their relevant SDGs, particularly for '02 Hunger', '12 Consumption', and '15 Land'. This study underscores the critical need for continual refinement and validation of SDGs labeling systems in WoS.
Time varying channel estimation for RIS assisted network with outdated CSI: Looking beyond coherence time
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The channel estimation (CE) overhead for unstructured multipath-rich channels increases linearly with the number of reflective elements of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). This results in a significant portion of the channel coherence time being spent on CE, reducing data communication time. Furthermore, due to the mobility of the user equipment (UE) and the time consumed during CE, the estimated channel state information (CSI) may become outdated during actual data communication. In recent studies, the timing for CE has been primarily determined based on the coherence time interval, which is dependent on the velocity of the UE. However, the effect of the current channel condition and pathloss of the UEs can also be utilized to control the duration between successive CE to reduce the overhead while still maintaining the quality of service. Furthermore, for muti-user systems, the appropriate coherence time intervals of different users may be different depending on their velocities. Therefore CE carried out ignoring the difference in coherence time of different UEs may result in the estimated CSI being detrimentally outdated for some users. In contrast, others may not have sufficient time for data communication. To this end, based on the throughput analysis on outdated CSI, an algorithm has been designed to dynamically predict the next time instant for CE after the current CSI acquisition. In the first step, optimal RIS phase shifts to maximise channel gain is computed. Based on this and the amount of degradation of SINR due to outdated CSI, transmit powers are allocated for the UEs and finally the next time instant for CE is predicted such that the aggregated throughput is maximized. Simulation results confirm that our proposed algorithm outperforms the coherence time-based strategies.
Deep Feature Embedding for Tabular Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Tabular data learning has extensive applications in deep learning but its existing embedding techniques are limited in numerical and categorical features such as the inability to capture complex relationships and engineering. This paper proposes a novel deep embedding framework with leverages lightweight deep neural networks to generate effective feature embeddings for tabular data in machine learning research. For numerical features, a two-step feature expansion and deep transformation technique is used to capture copious semantic information. For categorical features, a unique identification vector for each entity is referred by a compact lookup table with a parameterized deep embedding function to uniform the embedding size dimensions, and transformed into a embedding vector using deep neural network. Experiments are conducted on real-world datasets for performance evaluation.