OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Astrocyte-Enabled Advancements in Spiking Neural Networks for Large Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Within the complex neuroarchitecture of the brain, astrocytes play crucial roles in development, structure, and metabolism. These cells regulate neural activity through tripartite synapses, directly impacting cognitive processes such as learning and memory. Despite the growing recognition of astrocytes' significance, traditional Spiking Neural Network (SNN) models remain predominantly neuron-centric, overlooking the profound influence of astrocytes on neural dynamics. Inspired by these biological insights, we have developed an Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Unit (AM-SU), an innovative framework that integrates neuron-astrocyte interactions into the computational paradigm, demonstrating wide applicability across various hardware platforms. Our Astrocyte-Modulated Spiking Neural Network (AstroSNN) exhibits exceptional performance in tasks involving memory retention and natural language generation, particularly in handling long-term dependencies and complex linguistic structures. The design of AstroSNN not only enhances its biological authenticity but also introduces novel computational dynamics, enabling more effective processing of complex temporal dependencies. Furthermore, AstroSNN shows low latency, high throughput, and reduced memory usage in practical applications, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained environments. By successfully integrating astrocytic dynamics into intelligent neural networks, our work narrows the gap between biological plausibility and neural modeling, laying the groundwork for future biologically-inspired neural computing research that includes both neurons and astrocytes.
Multimodal Sentiment Analysis: Perceived vs Induced Sentiments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Social media has created a global network where people can easily access and exchange vast information. This information gives rise to a variety of opinions, reflecting both positive and negative viewpoints. GIFs stand out as a multimedia format offering a visually engaging way for users to communicate. In this research, we propose a multimodal framework that integrates visual and textual features to predict the GIF sentiment. It also incorporates attributes including face emotion detection and OCR generated captions to capture the semantic aspects of the GIF. The developed classifier achieves an accuracy of 82.7% on Twitter GIFs, which is an improvement over state-of-the-art models. Moreover, we have based our research on the ReactionGIF dataset, analysing the variance in sentiment perceived by the author and sentiment induced in the reader
I Open at the Close: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Evaluation of Open Streets Initiatives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The open streets initiative "opens" streets to pedestrians and bicyclists by closing them to cars and trucks. The initiative, adopted by many cities across North America, increases community space in urban environments. But could open streets also make cities safer and less congested? We study this question by framing the choice of which streets to open as a reinforcement learning problem. In order to simulate the impact of opening streets, we first compare models for predicting vehicle collisions given network and temporal data. We find that a recurrent graph neural network, leveraging the graph structure and the short-term temporal dependence of the data, gives the best predictive performance. Then, with the ability to simulate collisions and traffic, we frame a reinforcement learning problem to find which streets to open. We compare the streets in the NYC Open Streets program to those proposed by a Q-learning algorithm. We find that the streets proposed by the Q-learning algorithm have reliably better outcomes, while streets in the program have similar outcomes to randomly selected streets. We present our work as a step toward principally choosing which streets to open for safer and less congested cities. All our code and data are available on Github.
A Response to Glaze Purification via IMPRESS
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Recent work proposed a new mechanism to remove protective perturbation added by Glaze in order to again enable mimicry of art styles from images protected by Glaze. Despite promising results shown in the original paper, our own tests with the authors' code demonstrated several limitations of the proposed purification approach. The main limitations are 1) purification has a limited effect when tested on artists that are not well-known historical artists already embedded in original training data, 2) problems in evaluation metrics, and 3) collateral damage on mimicry result for clean images. We believe these limitations should be carefully considered in order to understand real world usability of the purification attack.
How Does Perception Affect Safety: New Metrics and Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Perception serves as a critical component in the functionality of autonomous agents. However, the intricate relationship between perception metrics and robotic metrics remains unclear, leading to ambiguity in the development and fine-tuning of perception algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for quantifying this relationship, taking into account factors such as detection rate, detection quality, and latency. Furthermore, we introduce two novel metrics for Human-Robot Collaboration safety predicated upon perception metrics: Critical Collision Probability (CCP) and Average Collision Probability (ACP). To validate the utility of these metrics in facilitating algorithm development and tuning, we develop an attentive processing strategy that focuses exclusively on key input features. This approach significantly reduces computational time while preserving a similar level of accuracy. Experimental results indicate that the implementation of this strategy in an object detector leads to a maximum reduction of 30.091% in inference time and 26.534% in total time per frame. Additionally, the strategy lowers the CCP and ACP in a baseline model by 11.252% and 13.501%, respectively. The source code will be made publicly available in the final proof version of the manuscript.
IDKM: Memory Efficient Neural Network Quantization via Implicit, Differentiable k-Means
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Compressing large neural networks with minimal performance loss is crucial to enabling their deployment on edge devices. (Cho et al., 2022) proposed a weight quantization method that uses an attention-based clustering algorithm called differentiable $k$-means (DKM). Despite achieving state-of-the-art results, DKM's performance is constrained by its heavy memory dependency. We propose an implicit, differentiable $k$-means algorithm (IDKM), which eliminates the major memory restriction of DKM. Let $t$ be the number of $k$-means iterations, $m$ be the number of weight-vectors, and $b$ be the number of bits per cluster address. IDKM reduces the overall memory complexity of a single $k$-means layer from $\mathcal{O}(t \cdot m \cdot 2^b)$ to $\mathcal{O}( m \cdot 2^b)$. We also introduce a variant, IDKM with Jacobian-Free-Backpropagation (IDKM-JFB), for which the time complexity of the gradient calculation is independent of $t$ as well. We provide a proof of concept of our methods by showing that, under the same settings, IDKM achieves comparable performance to DKM with less compute time and less memory. We also use IDKM and IDKM-JFB to quantize a large neural network, Resnet18, on hardware where DKM cannot train at all.
A Foundational Multimodal Vision Language AI Assistant for Human Pathology
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The field of computational pathology has witnessed remarkable progress in the development of both task-specific predictive models and task-agnostic self-supervised vision encoders. However, despite the explosive growth of generative artificial intelligence (AI), there has been limited study on building general purpose, multimodal AI assistants tailored to pathology. Here we present PathChat, a vision-language generalist AI assistant for human pathology using an in-house developed foundational vision encoder pretrained on 100 million histology images from over 100,000 patient cases and 1.18 million pathology image-caption pairs. The vision encoder is then combined with a pretrained large language model and the whole system is finetuned on over 250,000 diverse disease agnostic visual language instructions. We compare PathChat against several multimodal vision language AI assistants as well as GPT4V, which powers the commercially available multimodal general purpose AI assistant ChatGPT-4. When relevant clinical context is provided with the histology image, PathChat achieved a diagnostic accuracy of 87% on multiple-choice questions based on publicly available cases of diverse tissue origins and disease models. Additionally, using open-ended questions and human expert evaluation, we found that overall PathChat produced more accurate and pathologist-preferable responses to diverse queries related to pathology. As an interactive and general vision language AI assistant that can flexibly handle both visual and natural language inputs, PathChat can potentially find impactful applications in pathology education, research, and human-in-the-loop clinical decision making.
Stable Rivers: A Case Study in the Application of Text-to-Image Generative Models for Earth Sciences
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Text-to-image (TTI) generative models can be used to generate photorealistic images from a given text-string input. These models offer great potential to mitigate challenges to the uptake of machine learning in the earth sciences. However, the rapid increase in their use has raised questions about fairness and biases, with most research to-date focusing on social and cultural areas rather than domain-specific considerations. We conducted a case study for the earth sciences, focusing on the field of fluvial geomorphology, where we evaluated subject-area specific biases in the training data and downstream model performance of Stable Diffusion (v1.5). In addition to perpetuating Western biases, we found that the training data over-represented scenic locations, such as famous rivers and waterfalls, and showed serious under- and over-representation of many morphological and environmental terms. Despite biased training data, we found that with careful prompting, the Stable Diffusion model was able to generate photorealistic synthetic river images reproducing many important environmental and morphological characteristics. Furthermore, conditional control techniques, such as the use of condition maps with ControlNet were effective for providing additional constraints on output images. Despite great potential for the use of TTI models in the earth sciences field, we advocate for caution in sensitive applications, and advocate for domain-specific reviews of training data and image generation biases to mitigate perpetuation of existing biases.
Exploring Popularity Bias in Session-based Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Existing work has revealed that large-scale offline evaluation of recommender systems for user-item interactions is prone to bias caused by the deployed system itself, as a form of closed loop feedback. Many adopt the \textit{propensity} concept to analyze or mitigate this empirical issue. In this work, we extend the analysis to session-based setup and adapted propensity calculation to the unique characteristics of session-based recommendation tasks. Our experiments incorporate neural models and KNN-based models, and cover both the music and the e-commerce domain. We study the distributions of propensity and different stratification techniques on different datasets and find that propensity-related traits are actually dataset-specific. We then leverage the effect of stratification and achieve promising results compared to the original models.
Securing Graph Neural Networks in MLaaS: A Comprehensive Realization of Query-based Integrity Verification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The deployment of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) within Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has opened up new attack surfaces and an escalation in security concerns regarding model-centric attacks. These attacks can directly manipulate the GNN model parameters during serving, causing incorrect predictions and posing substantial threats to essential GNN applications. Traditional integrity verification methods falter in this context due to the limitations imposed by MLaaS and the distinct characteristics of GNN models. In this research, we introduce a groundbreaking approach to protect GNN models in MLaaS from model-centric attacks. Our approach includes a comprehensive verification schema for GNN's integrity, taking into account both transductive and inductive GNNs, and accommodating varying pre-deployment knowledge of the models. We propose a query-based verification technique, fortified with innovative node fingerprint generation algorithms. To deal with advanced attackers who know our mechanisms in advance, we introduce randomized fingerprint nodes within our design. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method can detect five representative adversarial model-centric attacks, displaying 2 to 4 times greater efficiency compared to baselines.
Segment-Based Formal Verification of WiFi Fragmentation and Power Save Mode
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The IEEE 802.11 family of standards, better known as WiFi, is a widely used protocol utilized by billions of users. Previous works on WiFi formal verification have mostly focused on the four-way handshake and other security aspects. However, recent works have uncovered severe vulnerabilities in functional aspects of WiFi, which can cause information leakage for billions of devices. No formal analysis method exists able to reason on the functional aspects of the WiFi protocol. In this paper, we take the first steps in addressing this gap and present an extensive formal analysis of the functional aspects of the WiFi protocol, more specifically, the fragmentation and the power-save-mode process. To achieve this, we design a novel segment-based formal verification process and introduce a practical threat model (i.e. MAC spoofing) in Tamarin to reason about the various capabilities of the attacker. To this end, we verify 68 properties extracted from WiFi protocol specification, find 3 vulnerabilities from the verification, verify 3 known attacks, and discover 2 new issues. These vulnerabilities and issues affect 14 commercial devices out of 17 tested cases, showing the prevalence and impact of the issues. Apart from this, we show that the proposed countermeasures indeed are sufficient to address the issues. We hope our results and analysis will help vendors adopt the countermeasures and motivate further research into the verification of the functional aspects of the WiFi protocol.
Mutual-Learning Knowledge Distillation for Nighttime UAV Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Nighttime unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking has been facilitated with indispensable plug-and-play low-light enhancers. However, the introduction of low-light enhancers increases the extra computational burden for the UAV, significantly hindering the development of real-time UAV applications. Meanwhile, these state-of-the-art (SOTA) enhancers lack tight coupling with the advanced daytime UAV tracking approach. To solve the above issues, this work proposes a novel mutual-learning knowledge distillation framework for nighttime UAV tracking, i.e., MLKD. This framework is constructed to learn a compact and fast nighttime tracker via knowledge transferring from the teacher and knowledge sharing among various students. Specifically, an advanced teacher based on a SOTA enhancer and a superior tracking backbone is adopted for guiding the student based only on the tight coupling-aware tracking backbone to directly extract nighttime object features. To address the biased learning of a single student, diverse lightweight students with different distillation methods are constructed to focus on various aspects of the teacher's knowledge. Moreover, an innovative mutual-learning room is designed to elect the superior student candidate to assist the remaining students frame-by-frame in the training phase. Furthermore, the final best student, i.e., MLKD-Track, is selected through the testing dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of MLKD and MLKD-Track. The practicality of the MLKD-Track is verified in real-world tests with different challenging situations. The code is available at https://github.com/lyfeng001/MLKD.
Plant Disease Recognition Datasets in the Age of Deep Learning: Challenges and Opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Plant disease recognition has witnessed a significant improvement with deep learning in recent years. Although plant disease datasets are essential and many relevant datasets are public available, two fundamental questions exist. First, how to differentiate datasets and further choose suitable public datasets for specific applications? Second, what kinds of characteristics of datasets are desired to achieve promising performance in real-world applications? To address the questions, this study explicitly propose an informative taxonomy to describe potential plant disease datasets. We further provide several directions for future, such as creating challenge-oriented datasets and the ultimate objective deploying deep learning in real-world applications with satisfactory performance. In addition, existing related public RGB image datasets are summarized. We believe that this study will contributing making better datasets and that this study will contribute beyond plant disease recognition such as plant species recognition. To facilitate the community, our project is public https://github.com/xml94/PPDRD with the information of relevant public datasets.
Learning Diffusions under Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

To infer a diffusion network based on observations from historical diffusion processes, existing approaches assume that observation data contain exact occurrence time of each node infection, or at least the eventual infection statuses of nodes in each diffusion process. They determine potential influence relationships between nodes by identifying frequent sequences, or statistical correlations, among node infections. In some real-world settings, such as the spread of epidemics, tracing exact infection times is often infeasible due to a high cost; even obtaining precise infection statuses of nodes is a challenging task, since observable symptoms such as headache only partially reveal a node's true status. In this work, we investigate how to effectively infer a diffusion network from observation data with uncertainty. Provided with only probabilistic information about node infection statuses, we formulate the problem of diffusion network inference as a constrained nonlinear regression w.r.t. the probabilistic data. An alternating maximization method is designed to solve this regression problem iteratively, and the improvement of solution quality in each iteration can be theoretically guaranteed. Empirical studies are conducted on both synthetic and real-world networks, and the results verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
Three-Filters-to-Normal+: Revisiting Discontinuity Discrimination in Depth-to-Normal Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This article introduces three-filters-to-normal+ (3F2N+), an extension of our previous work three-filters-to-normal (3F2N), with a specific focus on incorporating discontinuity discrimination capability into surface normal estimators (SNEs). 3F2N+ achieves this capability by utilizing a novel discontinuity discrimination module (DDM), which combines depth curvature minimization and correlation coefficient maximization through conditional random fields (CRFs). To evaluate the robustness of SNEs on noisy data, we create a large-scale synthetic surface normal (SSN) dataset containing 20 scenarios (ten indoor scenarios and ten outdoor scenarios with and without random Gaussian noise added to depth images). Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3F2N+ achieves greater performance than all other geometry-based surface normal estimators, with average angular errors of 7.85$^\circ$, 8.95$^\circ$, 9.25$^\circ$, and 11.98$^\circ$ on the clean-indoor, clean-outdoor, noisy-indoor, and noisy-outdoor datasets, respectively. We conduct three additional experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating our proposed 3F2N+ into downstream robot perception tasks, including freespace detection, 6D object pose estimation, and point cloud completion. Our source code and datasets are publicly available at https://mias.group/3F2Nplus.
Divide and Conquer: Hybrid Pre-training for Person Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Large-scale pre-training has proven to be an effective method for improving performance across different tasks. Current person search methods use ImageNet pre-trained models for feature extraction, yet it is not an optimal solution due to the gap between the pre-training task and person search task (as a downstream task). Therefore, in this paper, we focus on pre-training for person search, which involves detecting and re-identifying individuals simultaneously. Although labeled data for person search is scarce, datasets for two sub-tasks person detection and re-identification are relatively abundant. To this end, we propose a hybrid pre-training framework specifically designed for person search using sub-task data only. It consists of a hybrid learning paradigm that handles data with different kinds of supervisions, and an intra-task alignment module that alleviates domain discrepancy under limited resources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that investigates how to support full-task pre-training using sub-task data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our pre-trained model can achieve significant improvements across diverse protocols, such as person search method, fine-tuning data, pre-training data and model backbone. For example, our model improves ResNet50 based NAE by 10.3% relative improvement w.r.t. mAP. Our code and pre-trained models are released for plug-and-play usage to the person search community.
Challenges of YOLO Series for Object Detection in Extremely Heavy Rain: CALRA Simulator based Synthetic Evaluation Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, as many studies of autonomous vehicles have been achieved for levels 4 and 5, there has been also increasing interest in the advancement of perception, decision, and control technologies, which are the three major aspects of autonomous vehicles. As for the perception technologies achieving reliable maneuvering of autonomous vehicles, object detection by using diverse sensors (e.g., LiDAR, radar, and camera) should be prioritized. These sensors require to detect objects accurately and quickly in diverse weather conditions, but they tend to have challenges to consistently detect objects in bad weather conditions with rain, snow, or fog. Thus, in this study, based on the experimentally obtained raindrop data from precipitation conditions, we constructed a novel dataset that could test diverse network model in various precipitation conditions through the CARLA simulator. Consequently, based on our novel dataset, YOLO series, a one-stage-detector, was used to quantitatively verify how much object detection performance could be decreased under various precipitation conditions from normal to extreme heavy rain situations.