OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adaptive LiDAR-Radar Fusion for Outdoor Odometry Across Dense Smoke Conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robust odometry estimation in perceptually degraded environments represents a key challenge in the field of robotics. In this paper, we propose a LiDAR-radar fusion method for robust odometry for adverse environment with LiDAR degeneracy. By comparing the LiDAR point cloud with the radar static point cloud obtained through preprocessing module, it is possible to identify instances of LiDAR degeneracy to overcome perceptual limits. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in challenging conditions such as dense smoke, showcasing its ability to reliably estimate odometry and identify/remove dynamic points prone to LiDAR degeneracy.
Adaptive Line-Of-Sight guidance law based on vector fields path following for underactuated unmanned surface vehicle
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The focus of this paper is to develop a methodology that enables an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) to efficiently track a planned path. The introduction of a vector field-based adaptive line of-sight guidance law (VFALOS) for accurate trajectory tracking and minimizing the overshoot response time during USV tracking of curved paths improves the overall line-of-sight (LOS) guidance method. These improvements contribute to faster convergence to the desired path, reduce oscillations, and can mitigate the effects of persistent external disturbances. It is shown that the proposed guidance law exhibits k-exponential stability when converging to the desired path consisting of straight and curved lines. The results in the paper show that the proposed method effectively improves the accuracy of the USV tracking the desired path while ensuring the safety of the USV work.
Expectations Versus Reality: Evaluating Intrusion Detection Systems in Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Our paper provides empirical comparisons between recent IDSs to provide an objective comparison between them to help users choose the most appropriate solution based on their requirements. Our results show that no one solution is the best, but is dependent on external variables such as the types of attacks, complexity, and network environment in the dataset. For example, BoT_IoT and Stratosphere IoT datasets both capture IoT-related attacks, but the deep neural network performed the best when tested using the BoT_IoT dataset while HELAD performed the best when tested using the Stratosphere IoT dataset. So although we found that a deep neural network solution had the highest average F1 scores on tested datasets, it is not always the best-performing one. We further discuss difficulties in using IDS from literature and project repositories, which complicated drawing definitive conclusions regarding IDS selection.
Fake or JPEG? Revealing Common Biases in Generated Image Detection Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread adoption of generative image models has highlighted the urgent need to detect artificial content, which is a crucial step in combating widespread manipulation and misinformation. Consequently, numerous detectors and associated datasets have emerged. However, many of these datasets inadvertently introduce undesirable biases, thereby impacting the effectiveness and evaluation of detectors. In this paper, we emphasize that many datasets for AI-generated image detection contain biases related to JPEG compression and image size. Using the GenImage dataset, we demonstrate that detectors indeed learn from these undesired factors. Furthermore, we show that removing the named biases substantially increases robustness to JPEG compression and significantly alters the cross-generator performance of evaluated detectors. Specifically, it leads to more than 11 percentage points increase in cross-generator performance for ResNet50 and Swin-T detectors on the GenImage dataset, achieving state-of-the-art results. We provide the dataset and source codes of this paper on the anonymous website: https://www.unbiased-genimage.org
Healthcare Data Governance, Privacy, and Security -- A Conceptual Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The abundance of data has transformed the world in every aspect. It has become the core element in decision making, problem solving, and innovation in almost all areas of life, including business, science, healthcare, education, and many others. Despite all these advances, privacy and security remain critical concerns of the healthcare industry. It is important to note that healthcare data can also be a liability if it is not managed correctly. This data mismanagement can have severe consequences for patients and healthcare organisations, including patient safety, legal liability, damage to reputation, financial loss, and operational inefficiency. Healthcare organisations must comply with a range of regulations to protect patient data. We perform a classification of data governance elements or components in a manner that thoroughly assesses the healthcare data chain from a privacy and security standpoint. After deeply analysing the existing literature, we propose a conceptual privacy and security driven healthcare data governance framework.
Exploring the Boundaries of Ambient Awareness in Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Ambient awareness refers to the ability of social media users to obtain knowledge about who knows what (i.e., users' expertise) in their network, by simply being exposed to other users' content (e.g, tweets on Twitter). Previous work, based on user surveys, reveals that individuals self-report ambient awareness only for parts of their networks. However, it is unclear whether it is their limited cognitive capacity or the limited exposure to diagnostic tweets (i.e., online content) that prevents people from developing ambient awareness for their complete network. In this work, we focus on in-wall ambient awareness (IWAA) in Twitter and conduct a two-step data-driven analysis, that allows us to explore to which extent IWAA is likely, or even possible. First, we rely on reactions (e.g., likes), as strong evidence of users being aware of experts in Twitter. Unfortunately, such strong evidence can be only measured for active users, which represent the minority in the network. Thus to study the boundaries of IWAA to a larger extent, in the second part of our analysis, we instead focus on the passive exposure to content generated by other users -- which we refer to as in-wall visibility. This analysis shows that (in line with \citet{levordashka2016ambient}) only for a subset of users IWAA is plausible, while for the majority it is unlikely, if even possible, to develop IWAA. We hope that our methodology paves the way for the emergence of data-driven approaches for the study of ambient awareness.
Have Faith in Faithfulness: Going Beyond Circuit Overlap When Finding Model Mechanisms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Many recent language model (LM) interpretability studies have adopted the circuits framework, which aims to find the minimal computational subgraph, or circuit, that explains LM behavior on a given task. Most studies determine which edges belong in a LM's circuit by performing causal interventions on each edge independently, but this scales poorly with model size. Edge attribution patching (EAP), gradient-based approximation to interventions, has emerged as a scalable but imperfect solution to this problem. In this paper, we introduce a new method - EAP with integrated gradients (EAP-IG) - that aims to better maintain a core property of circuits: faithfulness. A circuit is faithful if all model edges outside the circuit can be ablated without changing the model's performance on the task; faithfulness is what justifies studying circuits, rather than the full model. Our experiments demonstrate that circuits found using EAP are less faithful than those found using EAP-IG, even though both have high node overlap with circuits found previously using causal interventions. We conclude more generally that when using circuits to compare the mechanisms models use to solve tasks, faithfulness, not overlap, is what should be measured.
D-PAD: Deep-Shallow Multi-Frequency Patterns Disentangling for Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In time series forecasting, effectively disentangling intricate temporal patterns is crucial. While recent works endeavor to combine decomposition techniques with deep learning, multiple frequencies may still be mixed in the decomposed components, e.g., trend and seasonal. Furthermore, frequency domain analysis methods, e.g., Fourier and wavelet transforms, have limitations in resolution in the time domain and adaptability. In this paper, we propose D-PAD, a deep-shallow multi-frequency patterns disentangling neural network for time series forecasting. Specifically, a multi-component decomposing (MCD) block is introduced to decompose the series into components with different frequency ranges, corresponding to the "shallow" aspect. A decomposition-reconstruction-decomposition (D-R-D) module is proposed to progressively extract the information of frequencies mixed in the components, corresponding to the "deep" aspect. After that, an interaction and fusion (IF) module is used to further analyze the components. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that D-PAD achieves the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the best baseline by an average of 9.48% and 7.15% in MSE and MAE, respectively.
Learning the Optimal Power Flow: Environment Design Matters
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

To solve the optimal power flow (OPF) problem, reinforcement learning (RL) emerges as a promising new approach. However, the RL-OPF literature is strongly divided regarding the exact formulation of the OPF problem as an RL environment. In this work, we collect and implement diverse environment design decisions from the literature regarding training data, observation space, episode definition, and reward function choice. In an experimental analysis, we show the significant impact of these environment design options on RL-OPF training performance. Further, we derive some first recommendations regarding the choice of these design decisions. The created environment framework is fully open-source and can serve as a benchmark for future research in the RL-OPF field.
Illuminating Blind Spots of Language Models with Targeted Agent-in-the-Loop Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models (LMs) have achieved impressive accuracy across a variety of tasks but remain vulnerable to high-confidence misclassifications, also referred to as unknown unknowns (UUs). These UUs cluster into blind spots in the feature space, leading to significant risks in high-stakes applications. This is particularly relevant for smaller, lightweight LMs that are more susceptible to such errors. While the identification of UUs has been extensively studied, their mitigation remains an open challenge, including how to use identified UUs to eliminate unseen blind spots. In this work, we propose a novel approach to address blind spot mitigation through the use of intelligent agents -- either humans or large LMs -- as teachers to characterize UU-type errors. By leveraging the generalization capabilities of intelligent agents, we identify patterns in high-confidence misclassifications and use them to generate targeted synthetic samples to improve model robustness and reduce blind spots. We conduct an extensive evaluation of our method on three classification tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing the number of UUs, all while maintaining a similar level of accuracy. We find that the effectiveness of human computation has a high ceiling but is highly dependent on familiarity with the underlying task. Moreover, the cost gap between humans and LMs surpasses an order of magnitude, as LMs attain human-like generalization and generation performance while being more scalable.
Efficient Video Object Segmentation via Modulated Cross-Attention Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, transformer-based approaches have shown promising results for semi-supervised video object segmentation. However, these approaches typically struggle on long videos due to increased GPU memory demands, as they frequently expand the memory bank every few frames. We propose a transformer-based approach, named MAVOS, that introduces an optimized and dynamic long-term modulated cross-attention (MCA) memory to model temporal smoothness without requiring frequent memory expansion. The proposed MCA effectively encodes both local and global features at various levels of granularity while efficiently maintaining consistent speed regardless of the video length. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, LVOS, Long-Time Video, and DAVIS 2017, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed contributions leading to real-time inference and markedly reduced memory demands without any degradation in segmentation accuracy on long videos. Compared to the best existing transformer-based approach, our MAVOS increases the speed by 7.6x, while significantly reducing the GPU memory by 87% with comparable segmentation performance on short and long video datasets. Notably on the LVOS dataset, our MAVOS achieves a J&F score of 63.3% while operating at 37 frames per second (FPS) on a single V100 GPU. Our code and models will be publicly available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/MAVOS.
Semi-Supervised Image Captioning Considering Wasserstein Graph Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image captioning can automatically generate captions for the given images, and the key challenge is to learn a mapping function from visual features to natural language features. Existing approaches are mostly supervised ones, i.e., each image has a corresponding sentence in the training set. However, considering that describing images always requires a huge of manpower, we usually have limited amount of described images (i.e., image-text pairs) and a large number of undescribed images in real-world applications. Thereby, a dilemma is the "Semi-Supervised Image Captioning". To solve this problem, we propose a novel Semi-Supervised Image Captioning method considering Wasserstein Graph Matching (SSIC-WGM), which turns to adopt the raw image inputs to supervise the generated sentences. Different from traditional single modal semi-supervised methods, the difficulty of semi-supervised cross-modal learning lies in constructing intermediately comparable information among heterogeneous modalities. In this paper, SSIC-WGM adopts the successful scene graphs as intermediate information, and constrains the generated sentences from two aspects: 1) inter-modal consistency. SSIC-WGM constructs the scene graphs of the raw image and generated sentence respectively, then employs the wasserstein distance to better measure the similarity between region embeddings of different graphs. 2) intra-modal consistency. SSIC-WGM takes the data augmentation techniques for the raw images, then constrains the consistency among augmented images and generated sentences. Consequently, SSIC-WGM combines the cross-modal pseudo supervision and structure invariant measure for efficiently using the undescribed images, and learns more reasonable mapping function.
Improving Pre-trained Language Model Sensitivity via Mask Specific losses: A case study on Biomedical NER
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Adapting language models (LMs) to novel domains is often achieved through fine-tuning a pre-trained LM (PLM) on domain-specific data. Fine-tuning introduces new knowledge into an LM, enabling it to comprehend and efficiently perform a target domain task. Fine-tuning can however be inadvertently insensitive if it ignores the wide array of disparities (e.g in word meaning) between source and target domains. For instance, words such as chronic and pressure may be treated lightly in social conversations, however, clinically, these words are usually an expression of concern. To address insensitive fine-tuning, we propose Mask Specific Language Modeling (MSLM), an approach that efficiently acquires target domain knowledge by appropriately weighting the importance of domain-specific terms (DS-terms) during fine-tuning. MSLM jointly masks DS-terms and generic words, then learns mask-specific losses by ensuring LMs incur larger penalties for inaccurately predicting DS-terms compared to generic words. Results of our analysis show that MSLM improves LMs sensitivity and detection of DS-terms. We empirically show that an optimal masking rate not only depends on the LM, but also on the dataset and the length of sequences. Our proposed masking strategy outperforms advanced masking strategies such as span- and PMI-based masking.
Prioritized League Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large-scale heterogeneous multiagent systems feature various realistic factors in the real world, such as agents with diverse abilities and overall system cost. In comparison to homogeneous systems, heterogeneous systems offer significant practical advantages. Nonetheless, they also present challenges for multiagent reinforcement learning, including addressing the non-stationary problem and managing an imbalanced number of agents with different types. We propose a Prioritized Heterogeneous League Reinforcement Learning (PHLRL) method to address large-scale heterogeneous cooperation problems. PHLRL maintains a record of various policies that agents have explored during their training and establishes a heterogeneous league consisting of diverse policies to aid in future policy optimization. Furthermore, we design a prioritized policy gradient approach to compensate for the gap caused by differences in the number of different types of agents. Next, we use Unreal Engine to design a large-scale heterogeneous cooperation benchmark named Large-Scale Multiagent Operation (LSMO), which is a complex two-team competition scenario that requires collaboration from both ground and airborne agents. We use experiments to show that PHLRL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, including QTRAN and QPLEX in LSMO.
A Personalized Video-Based Hand Taxonomy: Application for Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Hand function is critical for our interactions and quality of life. Spinal cord injuries (SCI) can impair hand function, reducing independence. A comprehensive evaluation of function in home and community settings requires a hand grasp taxonomy for individuals with impaired hand function. Developing such a taxonomy is challenging due to unrepresented grasp types in standard taxonomies, uneven data distribution across injury levels, and limited data. This study aims to automatically identify the dominant distinct hand grasps in egocentric video using semantic clustering. Egocentric video recordings collected in the homes of 19 individual with cervical SCI were used to cluster grasping actions with semantic significance. A deep learning model integrating posture and appearance data was employed to create a personalized hand taxonomy. Quantitative analysis reveals a cluster purity of 67.6% +- 24.2% with with 18.0% +- 21.8% redundancy. Qualitative assessment revealed meaningful clusters in video content. This methodology provides a flexible and effective strategy to analyze hand function in the wild. It offers researchers and clinicians an efficient tool for evaluating hand function, aiding sensitive assessments and tailored intervention plans.
Efficient Multi-Band Temporal Video Filter for Reducing Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Although mobile robots have on-board sensors to perform navigation, their efficiency in completing paths can be enhanced by planning to avoid human interaction. Infrastructure cameras can capture human activity continuously for the purpose of compiling activity analytics to choose efficient times and routes. We describe a cascade temporal filtering method to efficiently extract short- and long-term activity in two time dimensions, isochronal and chronological, for use in global path planning and local navigation respectively. The temporal filter has application either independently, or, if object recognition is also required, it can be used as a pre-filter to perform activity-gating of the more computationally expensive neural network processing. For a testbed 32-camera network, we show how this hybrid approach can achieve over 8 times improvement in frames per second throughput and 6.5 times reduction of system power use. We also show how the cost map of static objects in the ROS robot software development framework is augmented with dynamic regions determined from the temporal filter.
Mathematical Foundation and Corrections for Full Range Head Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Numerous works concerning head pose estimation (HPE) offer algorithms or proposed neural network-based approaches for extracting Euler angles from either facial key points or directly from images of the head region. However, many works failed to provide clear definitions of the coordinate systems and Euler or Tait-Bryan angles orders in use. It is a well-known fact that rotation matrices depend on coordinate systems, and yaw, roll, and pitch angles are sensitive to their application order. Without precise definitions, it becomes challenging to validate the correctness of the output head pose and drawing routines employed in prior works. In this paper, we thoroughly examined the Euler angles defined in the 300W-LP dataset, head pose estimation such as 3DDFA-v2, 6D-RepNet, WHENet, etc, and the validity of their drawing routines of the Euler angles. When necessary, we infer their coordinate system and sequence of yaw, roll, pitch from provided code. This paper presents (1) code and algorithms for inferring coordinate system from provided source code, code for Euler angle application order and extracting precise rotation matrices and the Euler angles, (2) code and algorithms for converting poses from one rotation system to another, (3) novel formulae for 2D augmentations of the rotation matrices, and (4) derivations and code for the correct drawing routines for rotation matrices and poses. This paper also addresses the feasibility of defining rotations with right-handed coordinate system in Wikipedia and SciPy, which makes the Euler angle extraction much easier for full-range head pose research.
QuakeSet: A Dataset and Low-Resource Models to Monitor Earthquakes through Sentinel-1
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Earthquake monitoring is necessary to promptly identify the affected areas, the severity of the events, and, finally, to estimate damages and plan the actions needed for the restoration process. The use of seismic stations to monitor the strength and origin of earthquakes is limited when dealing with remote areas (we cannot have global capillary coverage). Identification and analysis of all affected areas is mandatory to support areas not monitored by traditional stations. Using social media images in crisis management has proven effective in various situations. However, they are still limited by the possibility of using communication infrastructures in case of an earthquake and by the presence of people in the area. Moreover, social media images and messages cannot be used to estimate the actual severity of earthquakes and their characteristics effectively. The employment of satellites to monitor changes around the globe grants the possibility of exploiting instrumentation that is not limited by the visible spectrum, the presence of land infrastructures, and people in the affected areas. In this work, we propose a new dataset composed of images taken from Sentinel-1 and a new series of tasks to help monitor earthquakes from a new detailed view. Coupled with the data, we provide a series of traditional machine learning and deep learning models as baselines to assess the effectiveness of ML-based models in earthquake analysis.