OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Perceptions of Software Engineers Concerning the Utilization of Bots in the OSS Development Process: An Exploratory Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Software bots, extensively adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers across several activities, from automating predefined tasks to generating code that aids software engineers. However, with the growing prominence of bots, questions have emerged regarding the extension to which they truly assist or hinder software engineers in their routine tasks. To address this, an exploratory survey was conducted with 37 software engineers to gather insights into their views on the use of bots within the software development process. The findings suggest that bots are present across multiple phases of the software development lifecycle, providing daily support to professionals by enhancing productivity and facilitating task automation. Respondents stated that current bots are not sufficiently intelligent and raised new challenges and enhancements to aid bot designers in developing additional functionalities and integrations.
ResidualDroppath: Enhancing Feature Reuse over Residual Connections
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Residual connections are one of the most important components in neural network architectures for mitigating the vanishing gradient problem and facilitating the training of much deeper networks. One possible explanation for how residual connections aid deeper network training is by promoting feature reuse. However, we identify and analyze the limitations of feature reuse with vanilla residual connections. To address these limitations, we propose modifications in training methods. Specifically, we provide an additional opportunity for the model to learn feature reuse with residual connections through two types of iterations during training. The first type of iteration involves using droppath, which enforces feature reuse by randomly dropping a subset of layers. The second type of iteration focuses on training the dropped parts of the model while freezing the undropped parts. As a result, the dropped parts learn in a way that encourages feature reuse, as the model relies on the undropped parts with feature reuse in mind. Overall, we demonstrated performance improvements in models with residual connections for image classification in certain cases.
Architectural Exploration of Application-Specific Resonant SRAM Compute-in-Memory (rCiM)
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

While general-purpose computing follows Von Neumann's architecture, the data movement between memory and processor elements dictates the processor's performance. The evolving compute-in-memory (CiM) paradigm tackles this issue by facilitating simultaneous processing and storage within static random-access memory (SRAM) elements. Numerous design decisions taken at different levels of hierarchy affect the figure of merits (FoMs) of SRAM, such as power, performance, area, and yield. The absence of a rapid assessment mechanism for the impact of changes at different hierarchy levels on global FoMs poses a challenge to accurately evaluating innovative SRAM designs. This paper presents an automation tool designed to optimize the energy and latency of SRAM designs incorporating diverse implementation strategies for executing logic operations within the SRAM. The tool structure allows easy comparison across different array topologies and various design strategies to result in energy-efficient implementations. Our study involves a comprehensive comparison of over 6900+ distinct design implementation strategies for EPFL combinational benchmark circuits on the energy-recycling resonant compute-in-memory (rCiM) architecture designed using TSMC 28 nm technology. When provided with a combinational circuit, the tool aims to generate an energy-efficient implementation strategy tailored to the specified input memory and latency constraints. The tool reduces 80.9% of energy consumption on average across all benchmarks while using the six-topology implementation compared to baseline implementation of single-macro topology by considering the parallel processing capability of rCiM cache size ranging from 4KB to 192KB.
Med-Bot: An AI-Powered Assistant to Provide Accurate and Reliable Medical Information
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces Med-Bot, an AI-powered chatbot designed to provide users with accurate and reliable medical information. Utilizing advanced libraries and frameworks such as PyTorch, Chromadb, Langchain and Autogptq, Med-Bot is built to handle the complexities of natural language understanding in a healthcare context. The integration of llamaassisted data processing and AutoGPT-Q provides enhanced performance in processing and responding to queries based on PDFs of medical literature, ensuring that users receive precise and trustworthy information. This research details the methodologies employed in developing Med-Bot and evaluates its effectiveness in disseminating healthcare information.
NFRs in Medical Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The diagnostic imaging departments are under great pressure due to a growing workload. The number of required scans is growing and there is a shortage of qualified labor. AI solutions for medical imaging applications have shown great potential. However, very few diagnostic imaging models have been approved for hospital use and even fewer are being implemented at the hospitals. The most common reason why software projects fail is poor requirement engineering, especially non-functional requirements (NFRs) can be detrimental to a project. Research shows that machine learning professionals struggle to work with NFRs and that there is a need to adapt NFR frameworks to machine learning, AI-based, software. This study uses qualitative methods to interact with key stakeholders to identify which types of NFRs are important for medical imaging applications. The study was done on a single Danish hospital and found that NFRs of type Efficiency, Accuracy, Interoperability, Reliability, Usability, Adaptability, and Fairness were important to the stakeholders. Especially Efficiency since the diagnostic imaging department is trying to spend as little time as possible on each scan.
Evaluating the Predictive Capacity of ChatGPT for Academic Peer Review Outcomes Across Multiple Platforms
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

While previous studies have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can predict peer review outcomes to some extent, this paper builds on that by introducing two new contexts and employing a more robust method - averaging multiple ChatGPT scores. The findings that averaging 30 ChatGPT predictions, based on reviewer guidelines and using only the submitted titles and abstracts, failed to predict peer review outcomes for F1000Research (Spearman's rho=0.00). However, it produced mostly weak positive correlations with the quality dimensions of SciPost Physics (rho=0.25 for validity, rho=0.25 for originality, rho=0.20 for significance, and rho = 0.08 for clarity) and a moderate positive correlation for papers from the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (rho=0.38). Including the full text of articles significantly increased the correlation for ICLR (rho=0.46) and slightly improved it for F1000Research (rho=0.09), while it had variable effects on the four quality dimension correlations for SciPost LaTeX files. The use of chain-of-thought system prompts slightly increased the correlation for F1000Research (rho=0.10), marginally reduced it for ICLR (rho=0.37), and further decreased it for SciPost Physics (rho=0.16 for validity, rho=0.18 for originality, rho=0.18 for significance, and rho=0.05 for clarity). Overall, the results suggest that in some contexts, ChatGPT can produce weak pre-publication quality assessments. However, the effectiveness of these assessments and the optimal strategies for employing them vary considerably across different platforms, journals, and conferences. Additionally, the most suitable inputs for ChatGPT appear to differ depending on the platform.
Environmental Burden of United States Data Centers in the Artificial Intelligence Era
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid proliferation of data centers in the US - driven partly by the adoption of artificial intelligence - has set off alarm bells about the industry's environmental impact. We compiled detailed information on 2,132 US data centers operating between September 2023 and August 2024 and determined their electricity consumption, electricity sources, and attributable CO$_{2}$e emissions. Our findings reveal that data centers accounted for more than 4% of total US electricity consumption - with 56% derived from fossil fuels - generating more than 105 million tons of CO$_{2}$e (2.18% of US emissions in 2023). Data centers' carbon intensity - the amount of CO$_{2}$e emitted per unit of electricity consumed - exceeded the US average by 48%. Our data pipeline and visualization tools can be used to assess current and future environmental impacts of data centers.
ART-Rx: A Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) Controlled Adaptive Real-Time Threshold Receiver for Molecular Communication
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2024
Year: 2024

Molecular communication (MC) in microfluidic channels faces significant challenges in signal detection due to the stochastic nature of molecule propagation and dynamic, noisy environments. Conventional detection methods often struggle under varying channel conditions, leading to high bit error rates (BER) and reduced communication efficiency. This paper introduces ART-Rx, a novel Adaptive Real-Time Threshold Receiver for MC that addresses these challenges. Implemented within a conceptual system-on-chip (SoC), ART-Rx employs a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller to dynamically adjust the detection threshold based on observed errors in real time. Comprehensive simulations using MATLAB and Smoldyn compare ART-Rx's performance against a statistically optimal detection threshold across various scenarios, including different levels of interference, concentration shift keying (CSK) levels, flow velocities, transmitter-receiver distances, diffusion coefficients, and binding rates. The results demonstrate that ART-Rx significantly outperforms conventional methods, maintaining consistently low BER and bit error probabilities (BEP) even in high-noise conditions and extreme channel environments. The system exhibits exceptional robustness to interference and shows the potential to enable higher data rates in CSK modulation. Furthermore, because ART-Rx is effectively adaptable to varying environmental conditions in microfluidic channels, it offers a computationally efficient and straightforward approach to enhance signal detection in nanoscale communication systems. This approach presents a promising control theory-based solution to improve the reliability of data transmission in practical MC systems, with potential applications in healthcare, brain-machine interfaces (BMI), and the Internet of Bio-Nano Things (IoBNT).
AI-Driven Human-Autonomy Teaming in Tactical Operations: Proposed Framework, Challenges, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, particularly machine learning techniques, are rapidly transforming tactical operations by augmenting human decision-making capabilities. This paper explores AI-driven Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) as a transformative approach, focusing on how it empowers human decision-making in complex environments. While trust and explainability continue to pose significant challenges, our exploration focuses on the potential of AI-driven HAT to transform tactical operations. By improving situational awareness and supporting more informed decision-making, AI-driven HAT can enhance the effectiveness and safety of such operations. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework that addresses the key components of AI-driven HAT, including trust and transparency, optimal function allocation between humans and AI, situational awareness, and ethical considerations. The proposed framework can serve as a foundation for future research and development in the field. By identifying and discussing critical research challenges and knowledge gaps in this framework, our work aims to guide the advancement of AI-driven HAT for optimizing tactical operations. We emphasize the importance of developing scalable and ethical AI-driven HAT systems that ensure seamless human-machine collaboration, prioritize ethical considerations, enhance model transparency through Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, and effectively manage the cognitive load of human operators.
Modeling human decomposition: a Bayesian approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Environmental and individualistic variables affect the rate of human decomposition in complex ways. These effects complicate the estimation of the postmortem interval (PMI) based on observed decomposition characteristics. In this work, we develop a generative probabilistic model for decomposing human remains based on PMI and a wide range of environmental and individualistic variables. This model explicitly represents the effect of each variable, including PMI, on the appearance of each decomposition characteristic, allowing for direct interpretation of model effects and enabling the use of the model for PMI inference and optimal experimental design. In addition, the probabilistic nature of the model allows for the integration of expert knowledge in the form of prior distributions. We fit this model to a diverse set of 2,529 cases from the GeoFOR dataset. We demonstrate that the model accurately predicts 24 decomposition characteristics with an ROC AUC score of 0.85. Using Bayesian inference techniques, we invert the decomposition model to predict PMI as a function of the observed decomposition characteristics and environmental and individualistic variables, producing an R-squared measure of 71%. Finally, we demonstrate how to use the fitted model to design future experiments that maximize the expected amount of new information about the mechanisms of decomposition using the Expected Information Gain formalism.
Leveraging Propagated Infection to Crossfire Mutants
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Mutation testing was proposed to identify weaknesses in test suites by repeatedly generating artificially faulty versions of the software (mutants) and determining if the test suite is sufficient to detect them (kill them). When the tests are insufficient, each surviving mutant provides an opportunity to improve the test suite. We conducted a study and found that many such surviving mutants (up to 84% for the subjects of our study) are detectable by simply augmenting existing tests with additional assertions, or assertion amplification. Moreover, we find that many of these mutants are detectable by multiple existing tests, giving developers options for how to detect them. To help with these challenges, we created a technique that performs memory-state analysis to identify candidate assertions that developers can use to detect the surviving mutants. Additionally, we build upon prior research that identifies ``crossfiring'' opportunities -- tests that coincidentally kill multiple mutants. To this end, we developed a theoretical model that describes the varying granularities that crossfiring can occur in the existing test suite, which provide opportunities and options for how to kill surviving mutants. We operationalize this model to an accompanying technique that optimizes the assertion amplification of the existing tests to crossfire multiple mutants with fewer added assertions, optionally concentrated within fewer tests. Our experiments show that we can kill all surviving mutants that are detectable with existing test data with only 1.1% of the identified assertion candidates, and increasing by a factor of 6x, on average, the number of killed mutants from amplified tests, over tests that do not crossfire.
Face De-identification: State-of-the-art Methods and Comparative Studies
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread use of image acquisition technologies, along with advances in facial recognition, has raised serious privacy concerns. Face de-identification usually refers to the process of concealing or replacing personal identifiers, which is regarded as an effective means to protect the privacy of facial images. A significant number of methods for face de-identification have been proposed in recent years. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art face de-identification methods, categorized into three levels: pixel-level, representation-level, and semantic-level techniques. We systematically evaluate these methods based on two key criteria, the effectiveness of privacy protection and preservation of image utility, highlighting their advantages and limitations. Our analysis includes qualitative and quantitative comparisons of the main algorithms, demonstrating that deep learning-based approaches, particularly those using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and diffusion models, have achieved significant advancements in balancing privacy and utility. Experimental results reveal that while recent methods demonstrate strong privacy protection, trade-offs remain in visual fidelity and computational complexity. This survey not only summarizes the current landscape but also identifies key challenges and future research directions in face de-identification.
Planning by Simulation: Motion Planning with Learning-based Parallel Scenario Prediction for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Planning safe trajectories for autonomous vehicles is essential for operational safety but remains extremely challenging due to the complex interactions among traffic participants. Recent autonomous driving frameworks have focused on improving prediction accuracy to explicitly model these interactions. However, some methods overlook the significant influence of the ego vehicle's planning on the possible trajectories of other agents, which can alter prediction accuracy and lead to unsafe planning decisions. In this paper, we propose a novel motion Planning approach by Simulation with learning-based parallel scenario prediction (PS). PS deduces predictions iteratively based on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), jointly inferring scenarios that cooperate with the ego vehicle's planning set. Our method simulates possible scenes and calculates their costs after the ego vehicle executes potential actions. To balance and prune unreasonable actions and scenarios, we adopt MCTS as the foundation to explore possible future interactions encoded within the prediction network. Moreover, the query-centric trajectory prediction streamlines our scene generation, enabling a sophisticated framework that captures the mutual influence between other agents' predictions and the ego vehicle's planning. We evaluate our framework on the Argoverse 2 dataset, and the results demonstrate that our approach effectively achieves parallel ego vehicle planning.
A Polarization Image Dehazing Method Based on the Principle of Physical Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Computer vision is increasingly used in areas such as unmanned vehicles, surveillance systems and remote sensing. However, in foggy scenarios, image degradation leads to loss of target details, which seriously affects the accuracy and effectiveness of these vision tasks. Polarized light, due to the fact that its electromagnetic waves vibrate in a specific direction, is able to resist scattering and refraction effects in complex media more effectively compared to unpolarized light. As a result, polarized light has a greater ability to maintain its polarization characteristics in complex transmission media and under long-distance imaging conditions. This property makes polarized imaging especially suitable for complex scenes such as outdoor and underwater, especially in foggy environments, where higher quality images can be obtained. Based on this advantage, we propose an innovative semi-physical polarization dehazing method that does not rely on an external light source. The method simulates the diffusion process of fog and designs a diffusion kernel that corresponds to the image blurriness caused by this diffusion. By employing spatiotemporal Fourier transforms and deconvolution operations, the method recovers the state of fog droplets prior to diffusion and the light inversion distribution of objects. This approach effectively achieves dehazing and detail enhancement of the scene.
GGAvatar: Reconstructing Garment-Separated 3D Gaussian Splatting Avatars from Monocular Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Avatar modelling has broad applications in human animation and virtual try-ons. Recent advancements in this field have focused on high-quality and comprehensive human reconstruction but often overlook the separation of clothing from the body. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces GGAvatar (Garment-separated 3D Gaussian Splatting Avatar), which relies on monocular videos. Through advanced parameterized templates and unique phased training, this model effectively achieves decoupled, editable, and realistic reconstruction of clothed humans. Comparative evaluations with other costly models confirm GGAvatar's superior quality and efficiency in modelling both clothed humans and separable garments. The paper also showcases applications in clothing editing, as illustrated in Figure 1, highlighting the model's benefits and the advantages of effective disentanglement. The code is available at https://github.com/J-X-Chen/GGAvatar/.
Seeing Clearly by Layer Two: Enhancing Attention Heads to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The hallucination problem in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains a common issue. Although image tokens occupy a majority of the input sequence of MLLMs, there is limited research to explore the relationship between image tokens and hallucinations. In this paper, we analyze the distribution of attention scores for image tokens across each layer and head of the model, revealing an intriguing and common phenomenon: most hallucinations are closely linked to the pattern of attention sinks in the self-attention matrix of image tokens, where shallow layers exhibit dense attention sinks and deeper layers show sparse attention sinks. We further analyze the attention heads of different layers and find that heads with high-density attention sink in the image part play a positive role in alleviating hallucinations. In this paper, we propose a training-free method named \textcolor{red}{\textbf{E}}nhancing \textcolor{red}{\textbf{A}}ttention \textcolor{red}{\textbf{H}}eads (EAH), an approach designed to enhance the convergence of image tokens attention sinks in the shallow layers. EAH identifies the attention head that shows the vision sink in a shallow layer and extracts its attention matrix. This attention map is then broadcast to other heads in the layer, thereby strengthening the layer to pay more attention to the image itself. With extensive experiments, EAH shows significant hallucination-mitigating performance on different MLLMs and metrics, proving its effectiveness and generality.