OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Efficient Signature-Free Validated Agreement
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Byzantine agreement enables n processes to agree on a common L-bit value, despite up to t > 0 arbitrary failures. A long line of work has been dedicated to improving the bit complexity of Byzantine agreement in synchrony. This has culminated in COOL, an error-free (deterministically secure against a computationally unbounded adversary) solution that achieves O(nL + n^2 logn) worst-case bit complexity (which is optimal for L >= n logn according to the Dolev-Reischuk lower bound). COOL satisfies strong unanimity: if all correct processes propose the same value, only that value can be decided. Strong unanimity is, however, not sufficient for today's state machine replication (SMR) and blockchain protocols. These systems value progress and require a decided value to always be valid, excluding default decisions (such as EMPTY) even in cases where there is no unanimity a priori. Validated Byzantine agreement satisfies this property (called external validity). Yet, the best error-free (or even signature-free) validated agreement solutions achieve only O(n^2L) bit complexity, a far cry from the Omega(nL + n^2) Dolev-Reishcuk lower bound. In this paper, we present two new synchronous algorithms for validated Byzantine agreement, HashExt and ErrorFreeExt, with different trade-offs. Both algorithms are (1) signature-free, (2) optimally resilient (tolerate up to t < n / 3 failures), and (3) early-stopping (terminate in O(f+1) rounds, where f <= t is the actual number of failures). On the one hand, HashExt uses only hashes and achieves O(nL + n^3 kappa) bit complexity, which is optimal for L >= n^2 kappa (where kappa is the size of a hash). On the other hand, ErrorFreeExt is error-free, using no cryptography whatsoever, and achieves O( (nL + n^2) logn ) bit complexity, which is near-optimal for any L.
Translating between SQL Dialects for Cloud Migration
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Migrations of systems from on-site premises to the cloud has been a fundamental endeavor by many industrial institutions. A crucial component of such cloud migrations is the transition of databases to be hosted online. In this work, we consider the difficulties of this migration for SQL databases. While SQL is one of the prominent methods for storing database procedures, there are a plethora of different SQL dialects (e.g., MySQL, Postgres, etc.) which can complicate migrations when the on-premise SQL dialect differs to the dialect hosted on the cloud. Tools exist by common cloud provides such as AWS and Azure to aid in translating between dialects in order to mitigate the majority of the difficulties. However, these tools do not successfully translate $100\%$ of the code. Consequently, software engineers must manually convert the remainder of the untranslated database. For large organizations, this task quickly becomes intractable and so more innovative solutions are required. We consider this challenge a novel yet vital industrial research problem for any large corporation that is considering cloud migrations. Furthermore, we introduce potential avenues of research to tackle this challenge that have yielded promising preliminary results.
Causal Graph Neural Networks for Wildfire Danger Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Wildfire forecasting is notoriously hard due to the complex interplay of different factors such as weather conditions, vegetation types and human activities. Deep learning models show promise in dealing with this complexity by learning directly from data. However, to inform critical decision making, we argue that we need models that are right for the right reasons; that is, the implicit rules learned should be grounded by the underlying processes driving wildfires. In that direction, we propose integrating causality with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that explicitly model the causal mechanism among complex variables via graph learning. The causal adjacency matrix considers the synergistic effect among variables and removes the spurious links from highly correlated impacts. Our methodology's effectiveness is demonstrated through superior performance forecasting wildfire patterns in the European boreal and mediterranean biome. The gain is especially prominent in a highly imbalanced dataset, showcasing an enhanced robustness of the model to adapt to regime shifts in functional relationships. Furthermore, SHAP values from our trained model further enhance our understanding of the model's inner workings.
A Comparison of SynDiffix Multi-table versus Single-table Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

SynDiffix is a new open-source tool for structured data synthesis. It has anonymization features that allow it to generate multiple synthetic tables while maintaining strong anonymity. Compared to the more common single-table approach, multi-table leads to more accurate data, since only the features of interest for a given analysis need be synthesized. This paper compares SynDiffix with 15 other commercial and academic synthetic data techniques using the SDNIST analysis framework, modified by us to accommodate multi-table synthetic data. The results show that SynDiffix is many times more accurate than other approaches for low-dimension tables, but somewhat worse than the best single-table techniques for high-dimension tables.
Model Will Tell: Training Membership Inference for Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion models pose risks of privacy breaches and copyright disputes, primarily stemming from the potential utilization of unauthorized data during the training phase. The Training Membership Inference (TMI) task aims to determine whether a specific sample has been used in the training process of a target model, representing a critical tool for privacy violation verification. However, the increased stochasticity inherent in diffusion renders traditional shadow-model-based or metric-based methods ineffective when applied to diffusion models. Moreover, existing methods only yield binary classification labels which lack necessary comprehensibility in practical applications. In this paper, we explore a novel perspective for the TMI task by leveraging the intrinsic generative priors within the diffusion model. Compared with unseen samples, training samples exhibit stronger generative priors within the diffusion model, enabling the successful reconstruction of substantially degraded training images. Consequently, we propose the Degrade Restore Compare (DRC) framework. In this framework, an image undergoes sequential degradation and restoration, and its membership is determined by comparing it with the restored counterpart. Experimental results verify that our approach not only significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy but also provides comprehensible decision criteria, offering evidence for potential privacy violations.
Rich Semantic Knowledge Enhanced Large Language Models for Few-shot Chinese Spell Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) is a widely used technology, which plays a vital role in speech to text (STT) and optical character recognition (OCR). Most of the existing CSC approaches relying on BERT architecture achieve excellent performance. However, limited by the scale of the foundation model, BERT-based method does not work well in few-shot scenarios, showing certain limitations in practical applications. In this paper, we explore using an in-context learning method named RS-LLM (Rich Semantic based LLMs) to introduce large language models (LLMs) as the foundation model. Besides, we study the impact of introducing various Chinese rich semantic information in our framework. We found that by introducing a small number of specific Chinese rich semantic structures, LLMs achieve better performance than the BERT-based model on few-shot CSC task. Furthermore, we conduct experiments on multiple datasets, and the experimental results verified the superiority of our proposed framework.
Automatic Interactive Evaluation for Large Language Models with State Aware Patient Simulator
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in human interactions, yet their application within the medical field remains insufficiently explored. Previous works mainly focus on the performance of medical knowledge with examinations, which is far from the realistic scenarios, falling short in assessing the abilities of LLMs on clinical tasks. In the quest to enhance the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare, this paper introduces the Automated Interactive Evaluation (AIE) framework and the State-Aware Patient Simulator (SAPS), targeting the gap between traditional LLM evaluations and the nuanced demands of clinical practice. Unlike prior methods that rely on static medical knowledge assessments, AIE and SAPS provide a dynamic, realistic platform for assessing LLMs through multi-turn doctor-patient simulations. This approach offers a closer approximation to real clinical scenarios and allows for a detailed analysis of LLM behaviors in response to complex patient interactions. Our extensive experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the AIE framework, with outcomes that align well with human evaluations, underscoring its potential to revolutionize medical LLM testing for improved healthcare delivery.
Improved YOLOv5 Based on Attention Mechanism and FasterNet for Foreign Object Detection on Railway and Airway tracks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, there have been frequent incidents of foreign objects intruding into railway and Airport runways. These objects can include pedestrians, vehicles, animals, and debris. This paper introduces an improved YOLOv5 architecture incorporating FasterNet and attention mechanisms to enhance the detection of foreign objects on railways and Airport runways. This study proposes a new dataset, AARFOD (Aero and Rail Foreign Object Detection), which combines two public datasets for detecting foreign objects in aviation and railway systems.The dataset aims to improve the recognition capabilities of foreign object targets. Experimental results on this large dataset have demonstrated significant performance improvements of the proposed model over the baseline YOLOv5 model, reducing computational requirements.Improved YOLO model shows a significant improvement in precision by 1.2%, recall rate by 1.0%, and mAP@.5 by 0.6%, while mAP@.5-.95 remained unchanged. The parameters were reduced by approximately 25.12%, and GFLOPs were reduced by about 10.63%. In the ablation experiment, it is found that the FasterNet module can significantly reduce the number of parameters of the model, and the reference of the attention mechanism can slow down the performance loss caused by lightweight.
Governing Through the Cloud: The Intermediary Role of Compute Providers in AI Regulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

As jurisdictions around the world take their first steps toward regulating the most powerful AI systems, such as the EU AI Act and the US Executive Order 14110, there is a growing need for effective enforcement mechanisms that can verify compliance and respond to violations. We argue that compute providers should have legal obligations and ethical responsibilities associated with AI development and deployment, both to provide secure infrastructure and to serve as intermediaries for AI regulation. Compute providers can play an essential role in a regulatory ecosystem via four key capacities: as securers, safeguarding AI systems and critical infrastructure; as record keepers, enhancing visibility for policymakers; as verifiers of customer activities, ensuring oversight; and as enforcers, taking actions against rule violations. We analyze the technical feasibility of performing these functions in a targeted and privacy-conscious manner and present a range of technical instruments. In particular, we describe how non-confidential information, to which compute providers largely already have access, can provide two key governance-relevant properties of a computational workload: its type-e.g., large-scale training or inference-and the amount of compute it has consumed. Using AI Executive Order 14110 as a case study, we outline how the US is beginning to implement record keeping requirements for compute providers. We also explore how verification and enforcement roles could be added to establish a comprehensive AI compute oversight scheme. We argue that internationalization will be key to effective implementation, and highlight the critical challenge of balancing confidentiality and privacy with risk mitigation as the role of compute providers in AI regulation expands.
PRAGO: Differentiable Multi-View Pose Optimization From Objectness Detections
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Robustly estimating camera poses from a set of images is a fundamental task which remains challenging for differentiable methods, especially in the case of small and sparse camera pose graphs. To overcome this challenge, we propose Pose-refined Rotation Averaging Graph Optimization (PRAGO). From a set of objectness detections on unordered images, our method reconstructs the rotational pose, and in turn, the absolute pose, in a differentiable manner benefiting from the optimization of a sequence of geometrical tasks. We show how our objectness pose-refinement module in PRAGO is able to refine the inherent ambiguities in pairwise relative pose estimation without removing edges and avoiding making early decisions on the viability of graph edges. PRAGO then refines the absolute rotations through iterative graph construction, reweighting the graph edges to compute the final rotational pose, which can be converted into absolute poses using translation averaging. We show that PRAGO is able to outperform non-differentiable solvers on small and sparse scenes extracted from 7-Scenes achieving a relative improvement of 21% for rotations while achieving similar translation estimates.
Zero-shot and Few-shot Generation Strategies for Artificial Clinical Records
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The challenge of accessing historical patient data for clinical research, while adhering to privacy regulations, is a significant obstacle in medical science. An innovative approach to circumvent this issue involves utilising synthetic medical records that mirror real patient data without compromising individual privacy. The creation of these synthetic datasets, particularly without using actual patient data to train Large Language Models (LLMs), presents a novel solution as gaining access to sensitive patient information to train models is also a challenge. This study assesses the capability of the Llama 2 LLM to create synthetic medical records that accurately reflect real patient information, employing zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies for comparison against fine-tuned methodologies that do require sensitive patient data during training. We focus on generating synthetic narratives for the History of Present Illness section, utilising data from the MIMIC-IV dataset for comparison. In this work introduce a novel prompting technique that leverages a chain-of-thought approach, enhancing the model's ability to generate more accurate and contextually relevant medical narratives without prior fine-tuning. Our findings suggest that this chain-of-thought prompted approach allows the zero-shot model to achieve results on par with those of fine-tuned models, based on Rouge metrics evaluation.
Deep Learning for In-Orbit Cloud Segmentation and Classification in Hyperspectral Satellite Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This article explores the latest Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for cloud detection aboard hyperspectral satellites. The performance of the latest 1D CNN (1D-Justo-LiuNet) and two recent 2D CNNs (nnU-net and 2D-Justo-UNet-Simple) for cloud segmentation and classification is assessed. Evaluation criteria include precision and computational efficiency for in-orbit deployment. Experiments utilize NASA's EO-1 Hyperion data, with varying spectral channel numbers after Principal Component Analysis. Results indicate that 1D-Justo-LiuNet achieves the highest accuracy, outperforming 2D CNNs, while maintaining compactness with larger spectral channel sets, albeit with increased inference times. However, the performance of 1D CNN degrades with significant channel reduction. In this context, the 2D-Justo-UNet-Simple offers the best balance for in-orbit deployment, considering precision, memory, and time costs. While nnU-net is suitable for on-ground processing, deployment of lightweight 1D-Justo-LiuNet is recommended for high-precision applications. Alternatively, lightweight 2D-Justo-UNet-Simple is recommended for balanced costs between timing and precision in orbit.
The Garden of Forking Paths: Observing Dynamic Parameters Distribution in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

A substantial gap persists in understanding the reasons behind the exceptional performance of the Transformer architecture in NLP. A particularly unexplored area involves the mechanistic description of how the distribution of parameters evolves over time during training. In this work we suggest that looking at the time evolution of the statistic distribution of model parameters, and specifically at bifurcation effects, can help understanding the model quality, potentially reducing training costs and evaluation efforts and empirically showing the reasons behind the effectiveness of weights sparsification.
VLOGGER: Multimodal Diffusion for Embodied Avatar Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We propose VLOGGER, a method for audio-driven human video generation from a single input image of a person, which builds on the success of recent generative diffusion models. Our method consists of 1) a stochastic human-to-3d-motion diffusion model, and 2) a novel diffusion-based architecture that augments text-to-image models with both spatial and temporal controls. This supports the generation of high quality video of variable length, easily controllable through high-level representations of human faces and bodies. In contrast to previous work, our method does not require training for each person, does not rely on face detection and cropping, generates the complete image (not just the face or the lips), and considers a broad spectrum of scenarios (e.g. visible torso or diverse subject identities) that are critical to correctly synthesize humans who communicate. We also curate MENTOR, a new and diverse dataset with 3d pose and expression annotations, one order of magnitude larger than previous ones (800,000 identities) and with dynamic gestures, on which we train and ablate our main technical contributions. VLOGGER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in three public benchmarks, considering image quality, identity preservation and temporal consistency while also generating upper-body gestures. We analyze the performance of VLOGGER with respect to multiple diversity metrics, showing that our architectural choices and the use of MENTOR benefit training a fair and unbiased model at scale. Finally we show applications in video editing and personalization.
3DFIRES: Few Image 3D REconstruction for Scenes with Hidden Surface
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces 3DFIRES, a novel system for scene-level 3D reconstruction from posed images. Designed to work with as few as one view, 3DFIRES reconstructs the complete geometry of unseen scenes, including hidden surfaces. With multiple view inputs, our method produces full reconstruction within all camera frustums. A key feature of our approach is the fusion of multi-view information at the feature level, enabling the production of coherent and comprehensive 3D reconstruction. We train our system on non-watertight scans from large-scale real scene dataset. We show it matches the efficacy of single-view reconstruction methods with only one input and surpasses existing techniques in both quantitative and qualitative measures for sparse-view 3D reconstruction.
Using Sequential Runtime Distributions for the Parallel Speedup Prediction of SAT Local Search
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the scalability and parallelization of local search algorithms for the Satisfiability problem. We propose a framework to estimate the parallel performance of a given algorithm by analyzing the runtime behavior of its sequential version. Indeed, by approximating the runtime distribution of the sequential process with statistical methods, the runtime behavior of the parallel process can be predicted by a model based on order statistics. We apply this approach to study the parallel performance of two SAT local search solvers, namely Sparrow and CCASAT, and compare the predicted performances to the results of an actual experimentation on parallel hardware up to 384 cores. We show that the model is accurate and predicts performance close to the empirical data. Moreover, as we study different types of instances (random and crafted), we observe that the local search solvers exhibit different behaviors and that their runtime distributions can be approximated by two types of distributions: exponential (shifted and non-shifted) and lognormal.
Ontologia para monitorar a deficiência mental em seus déficts no processamento da informação por declínio cognitivo e evitar agressões psicológicas e físicas em ambientes educacionais com ajuda da I.A*
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The intention of this article is to propose the use of artificial intelligence to detect through analysis by UFO ontology the emergence of verbal and physical aggression related to psychosocial deficiencies and their provoking agents, in an attempt to prevent catastrophic consequences within school environments.
Learning-Enhanced Neighborhood Selection for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) is a universal approach that is broadly applicable and has proven to be highly efficient in practice for solving optimization problems. We propose to integrate machine learning (ML) into LNS to assist in deciding which parts of the solution should be destroyed and repaired in each iteration of LNS. We refer to our new approach as Learning-Enhanced Neighborhood Selection (LENS for short). Our approach is universally applicable, i.e., it can be applied to any LNS algorithm to amplify the workings of the destroy algorithm. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of LENS on the fundamental Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW). We implemented an LNS algorithm for VRPTW and collected data on generated novel training instances derived from well-known, extensively utilized benchmark datasets. We trained our LENS approach with this data and compared the experimental results of our approach with two benchmark algorithms: a random neighborhood selection method to show that LENS learns to make informed choices and an oracle neighborhood selection method to demonstrate the potential of our LENS approach. With LENS, we obtain results that significantly improve the quality of the solutions.