OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Impact of Iris Pigmentation on Performance Bias in Visible Iris Verification Systems: A Comparative Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Iris recognition technology plays a critical role in biometric identification systems, but their performance can be affected by variations in iris pigmentation. In this work, we investigate the impact of iris pigmentation on the efficacy of biometric recognition systems, focusing on a comparative analysis of blue and dark irises. Data sets were collected using multiple devices, including P1, P2, and P3 smartphones [4], to assess the robustness of the systems in different capture environments [19]. Both traditional machine learning techniques and deep learning models were used, namely Open-Iris, ViT-b, and ResNet50, to evaluate performance metrics such as Equal Error Rate (EER) and True Match Rate (TMR). Our results indicate that iris recognition systems generally exhibit higher accuracy for blue irises compared to dark irises. Furthermore, we examined the generalization capabilities of these systems across different iris colors and devices, finding that while training on diverse datasets enhances recognition performance, the degree of improvement is contingent on the specific model and device used. Our analysis also identifies inherent biases in recognition performance related to iris color and cross-device variability. These findings underscore the need for more inclusive dataset collection and model refinement to reduce bias and promote equitable biometric recognition across varying iris pigmentation and device configurations.
Learning Robust Grasping Strategy Through Tactile Sensing and Adaption Skill
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robust grasping represents an essential task in robotics, necessitating tactile feedback and reactive grasping adjustments for robust grasping of objects. Previous research has extensively combined tactile sensing with grasping, primarily relying on rule-based approaches, frequently neglecting post-grasping difficulties such as external disruptions or inherent uncertainties of the object's physics and geometry. To address these limitations, this paper introduces an human-demonstration-based adaptive grasping policy base on tactile, which aims to achieve robust gripping while resisting disturbances to maintain grasp stability. Our trained model generalizes to daily objects with seven different sizes, shapes, and textures. Experimental results demonstrate that our method performs well in dynamic and force interaction tasks and exhibits excellent generalization ability.
Gendered Words and Grant Rates: A Textual Analysis of Disparate Outcomes in the Patent System
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Text is a vehicle to convey information that reflects the writer's linguistic style and communicative patterns. By studying these attributes, we can discover latent insights about the author and their underlying message. This article uses such an approach to better understand patent applications and their inventors. While prior research focuses on patent metadata, we employ machine learning and natural language processing to extract hidden information from the words in patent applications. Through these methods, we find that inventor gender can often be identified from textual attributes - even without knowing the inventor's name. This ability to discern gender through text suggests that anonymized patent examination - often proposed as a solution to mitigate disparities in patent grant rates - may not fully address gendered outcomes in securing a patent. Our study also investigates whether objective features of a patent application can predict if it will be granted. Using a classifier algorithm, we correctly predicted whether a patent was granted over 60% of the time. Further analysis emphasized that writing style - like vocabulary and sentence complexity - disproportionately influenced grant predictions relative to other attributes such as inventor gender and subject matter keywords. Lastly, we examine whether women disproportionately invent in technological areas with higher rejection rates. Using a clustering algorithm, applications were allocated into groups with related subject matter. We found that 85% of female-dominated clusters have abnormally high rejection rates, compared to only 45% for male-dominated groupings. These findings highlight complex interactions between textual choices, gender, and success in securing a patent. They also raise questions about whether current proposals will be sufficient to achieve gender equity and efficiency in the patent system.
Towards More Accurate Fake Detection on Images Generated from Advanced Generative and Neural Rendering Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The remarkable progress in neural-network-driven visual data generation, especially with neural rendering techniques like Neural Radiance Fields and 3D Gaussian splatting, offers a powerful alternative to GANs and diffusion models. These methods can produce high-fidelity images and lifelike avatars, highlighting the need for robust detection methods. In response, an unsupervised training technique is proposed that enables the model to extract comprehensive features from the Fourier spectrum magnitude, thereby overcoming the challenges of reconstructing the spectrum due to its centrosymmetric properties. By leveraging the spectral domain and dynamically combining it with spatial domain information, we create a robust multimodal detector that demonstrates superior generalization capabilities in identifying challenging synthetic images generated by the latest image synthesis techniques. To address the absence of a 3D neural rendering-based fake image database, we develop a comprehensive database that includes images generated by diverse neural rendering techniques, providing a robust foundation for evaluating and advancing detection methods.
Reducing ADC Front-end Costs During Training of On-sensor Printed Multilayer Perceptrons
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Printed electronics technology offers a cost-effectiveand fully-customizable solution to computational needs beyondthe capabilities of traditional silicon technologies, offering ad-vantages such as on-demand manufacturing and conformal, low-cost hardware. However, the low-resolution fabrication of printedelectronics, which results in large feature sizes, poses a challengefor integrating complex designs like those of machine learn-ing (ML) classification systems. Current literature optimizes onlythe Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) circuit within the classificationsystem, while the cost of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs)is overlooked. Printed applications frequently require on-sensorprocessing, yet while the digital classifier has been extensivelyoptimized, the analog-to-digital interfacing, specifically the ADCs,dominates the total area and energy consumption. In this work,we target digital printed MLP classifiers and we propose thedesign of customized ADCs per MLP's input which involvesminimizing the distinct represented numbers for each input,simplifying thus the ADC's circuitry. Incorporating this ADCoptimization in the MLP training, enables eliminating ADC levelsand the respective comparators, while still maintaining highclassification accuracy. Our approach achieves 11.2x lower ADCarea for less than 5% accuracy drop across varying MLPs.
MVKTrans: Multi-View Knowledge Transfer for Robust Multiomics Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The distinct characteristics of multiomics data, including complex interactions within and across biological layers and disease heterogeneity (e.g., heterogeneity in etiology and clinical symptoms), drive us to develop novel designs to address unique challenges in multiomics prediction. In this paper, we propose the multi-view knowledge transfer learning (MVKTrans) framework, which transfers intra- and inter-omics knowledge in an adaptive manner by reviewing data heterogeneity and suppressing bias transfer, thereby enhancing classification performance. Specifically, we design a graph contrastive module that is trained on unlabeled data to effectively learn and transfer the underlying intra-omics patterns to the supervised task. This unsupervised pretraining promotes learning general and unbiased representations for each modality, regardless of the downstream tasks. In light of the varying discriminative capacities of modalities across different diseases and/or samples, we introduce an adaptive and bi-directional cross-omics distillation module. This module automatically identifies richer modalities and facilitates dynamic knowledge transfer from more informative to less informative omics, thereby enabling a more robust and generalized integration. Extensive experiments on four real biomedical datasets demonstrate the superior performance and robustness of MVKTrans compared to the state-of-the-art. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Yaolab-fantastic/MVKTrans.
Balancing Speed and Stability: The Trade-offs of FP8 vs. BF16 Training in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention due to their human-like language understanding and generation capabilities, as well as their applicability across various domains. These models, characterized by their massive scale and extensive training data, continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in natural language processing. The Llama 3 series, for instance, exemplifies this trend with its flagship model boasting 405 billion parameters trained on 15.6 trillion tokens. The immense computational demands associated with training such models have spurred ongoing research into optimizing the efficiency of the training process, particularly through the use of lower-precision formats. NVIDIA's H100 GPU, which introduces support for FP8 in addition to the more conventional FP16 and BF16 formats, has emerged as a focal point in this optimization effort. Preliminary studies suggest that FP8 could offer substantial reductions in training time without sacrificing model performance when compared to BF16, making it a promising candidate for large-scale model training. However, the broader implications of adopting FP8, particularly in terms of training stability and downstream task performance, have yet to be fully understood. In this study, we delve into the practical trade-offs involved in adopting FP8 over BF16 for training LLMs.
QCG-Rerank: Chunks Graph Rerank with Query Expansion in Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Tourism Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates the issue of hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating information retrieval techniques. However, in the tourism domain, since the query is usually brief and the content in the database is diverse, existing RAG may contain a significant amount of irrelevant or contradictory information contents after retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose the QCG-Rerank model. This model first performs an initial retrieval to obtain candidate chunks and then enhances semantics by extracting critical information to expand the original query. Next, we utilize the expanded query and candidate chunks to calculate similarity scores as the initial transition probability and construct the chunks graph. Subsequently, We iteratively compute the transition probabilities based on an initial estimate until convergence. The chunks with the highest score are selected and input into the LLMs to generate responses. We evaluate the model on Cultour, IIRC, StrategyQA, HotpotQA, SQuAD, and MuSiQue datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the QCG-Rerank method.
A Comparative Study of Discrete Speech Tokens for Semantic-Related Tasks with Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the rise of Speech Large Language Models (Speech LLMs), there has been growing interest in discrete speech tokens for their ability to integrate with text-based tokens seamlessly. Compared to most studies that focus on continuous speech features, although discrete-token based LLMs have shown promising results on certain tasks, the performance gap between these two paradigms is rarely explored. In this paper, we present a fair and thorough comparison between discrete and continuous features across a variety of semantic-related tasks using a light-weight LLM (Qwen1.5-0.5B). Our findings reveal that continuous features generally outperform discrete tokens, particularly in tasks requiring fine-grained semantic understanding. Moreover, this study goes beyond surface-level comparison by identifying key factors behind the under-performance of discrete tokens, such as limited token granularity and inefficient information retention. To enhance the performance of discrete tokens, we explore potential aspects based on our analysis. We hope our results can offer new insights into the opportunities for advancing discrete speech tokens in Speech LLMs.
Process-aware Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Humans naturally follow distinct patterns when conducting their daily activities, which are driven by established practices and processes, such as production workflows, social norms and daily routines. Human activity recognition (HAR) algorithms usually use neural networks or machine learning techniques to analyse inherent relationships within the data. However, these approaches often overlook the contextual information in which the data are generated, potentially limiting their effectiveness. We propose a novel approach that incorporates process information from context to enhance the HAR performance. Specifically, we align probabilistic events generated by machine learning models with process models derived from contextual information. This alignment adaptively weighs these two sources of information to optimise HAR accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves better accuracy and Macro F1-score compared to baseline models.
Designing a Virtual Reality Training Apprenticeship for Cold Spray Advanced Manufacturing
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Apprenticeship and training programs in advanced manufacturing frequently encounter safety and accessibility concerns due to using heavy machinery. Virtual Reality (VR) training addresses such constraints while maintaining the spatial and procedural learning requirements of such training. However, designing effective VR training is challenging because advanced manufacturing processes are complex and require experts to train novices for a long time. This paper presents a VR Training Apprenticeship (VRTA) tailored for cold spray, which we carefully designed to teach novices step-by-step this particular advanced manufacturing process. To assess its effectiveness, we conducted an exploratory study ($n = 22$). We evaluated user experience (UX) measures in the form of quantitative scales, users' qualitative insights, and task performance with real-world machinery after the VR training. We discuss how the VRTA design contributed to the effectiveness and the challenges of considering VR training for advanced manufacturing.
CamemBERT 2.0: A Smarter French Language Model Aged to Perfection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

French language models, such as CamemBERT, have been widely adopted across industries for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, with models like CamemBERT seeing over 4 million downloads per month. However, these models face challenges due to temporal concept drift, where outdated training data leads to a decline in performance, especially when encountering new topics and terminology. This issue emphasizes the need for updated models that reflect current linguistic trends. In this paper, we introduce two new versions of the CamemBERT base model-CamemBERTav2 and CamemBERTv2-designed to address these challenges. CamemBERTav2 is based on the DeBERTaV3 architecture and makes use of the Replaced Token Detection (RTD) objective for better contextual understanding, while CamemBERTv2 is built on RoBERTa, which uses the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective. Both models are trained on a significantly larger and more recent dataset with longer context length and an updated tokenizer that enhances tokenization performance for French. We evaluate the performance of these models on both general-domain NLP tasks and domain-specific applications, such as medical field tasks, demonstrating their versatility and effectiveness across a range of use cases. Our results show that these updated models vastly outperform their predecessors, making them valuable tools for modern NLP systems. All our new models, as well as intermediate checkpoints, are made openly available on Huggingface.
A Decidable Case of Query Determinacy: Project-Select Views
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Query determinacy is decidable for project-select views and a project-select-join query with no self joins, as long as the selection predicates are in a first-order theory for which satisfiability is decidable.
Enhancing Lie Detection Accuracy: A Comparative Study of Classic ML, CNN, and GCN Models using Audio-Visual Features
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

Inaccuracies in polygraph tests often lead to wrongful convictions, false information, and bias, all of which have significant consequences for both legal and political systems. Recently, analyzing facial micro-expressions has emerged as a method for detecting deception; however, current models have not reached high accuracy and generalizability. The purpose of this study is to aid in remedying these problems. The unique multimodal transformer architecture used in this study improves upon previous approaches by using auditory inputs, visual facial micro-expressions, and manually transcribed gesture annotations, moving closer to a reliable non-invasive lie detection model. Visual and auditory features were extracted using the Vision Transformer and OpenSmile models respectively, which were then concatenated with the transcriptions of participants micro-expressions and gestures. Various models were trained for the classification of lies and truths using these processed and concatenated features. The CNN Conv1D multimodal model achieved an average accuracy of 95.4%. However, further research is still required to create higher-quality datasets and even more generalized models for more diverse applications.
Assessing the Auditability of AI-integrating Systems: A Framework and Learning Analytics Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Audits contribute to the trustworthiness of Learning Analytics (LA) systems that integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and may be legally required in the future. We argue that the efficacy of an audit depends on the auditability of the audited system. Therefore, systems need to be designed with auditability in mind. We present a framework for assessing the auditability of AI-integrating systems that consists of three parts: (1) Verifiable claims about the validity, utility and ethics of the system, (2) Evidence on subjects (data, models or the system) in different types (documentation, raw sources and logs) to back or refute claims, (3) Evidence must be accessible to auditors via technical means (APIs, monitoring tools, explainable AI, etc.). We apply the framework to assess the auditability of Moodle's dropout prediction system and a prototype AI-based LA. We find that Moodle's auditability is limited by incomplete documentation, insufficient monitoring capabilities and a lack of available test data. The framework supports assessing the auditability of AI-based LA systems in use and improves the design of auditable systems and thus of audits.
Predicting household socioeconomic position in Mozambique using satellite and household imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Many studies have predicted SocioEconomic Position (SEP) for aggregated spatial units such as villages using satellite data, but SEP prediction at the household level and other sources of imagery have not been yet explored. We assembled a dataset of 975 households in a semi-rural district in southern Mozambique, consisting of self-reported asset, expenditure, and income SEP data, as well as multimodal imagery including satellite images and a ground-based photograph survey of 11 household elements. We fine-tuned a convolutional neural network to extract feature vectors from the images, which we then used in regression analyzes to model household SEP using different sets of image types. The best prediction performance was found when modeling asset-based SEP using random forest models with all image types, while the performance for expenditure- and income-based SEP was lower. Using SHAP, we observed clear differences between the images with the largest positive and negative effects, as well as identified the most relevant household elements in the predictions. Finally, we fitted an additional reduced model using only the identified relevant household elements, which had an only slightly lower performance compared to models using all images. Our results show how ground-based household photographs allow to zoom in from an area-level to an individual household prediction while minimizing the data collection effort by using explainable machine learning. The developed workflow can be potentially integrated into routine household surveys, where the collected household imagery could be used for other purposes, such as refined asset characterization and environmental exposure assessment.
Information Need in Metaverse Recordings -- A Field Study
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Metaverse Recordings (MVRs) represent an emerging and underexplored media type within the field of Multimedia Information Retrieval (MMIR). This paper presents findings from a field study aimed at understanding the users information needs and search behaviors specific to MVR retrieval. By conducting and analyzing expert interviews, the study identifies application scenarios and highlights challenges in retrieving multimedia content from the metaverse. The results reveal existing application scenarios of MVRs and confirm the relevance of capturing time-series data from the graphical rendering process and related input-output devices, which are also highly relevant to user needs. Furthermore, the study provides a foundation for developing retrieval systems tailored to MVRs by defining use cases, user stereotypes, and specific requirements for MVR Retrieval systems. The findings contribute to a better understanding of information search behaviors in MVR Retrieval and pave the way for future research and system design in this field.
Drone Detection using Deep Neural Networks Trained on Pure Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Drone detection has benefited from improvements in deep neural networks, but like many other applications, suffers from the availability of accurate data for training. Synthetic data provides a potential for low-cost data generation and has been shown to improve data availability and quality. However, models trained on synthetic datasets need to prove their ability to perform on real-world data, known as the problem of sim-to-real transferability. Here, we present a drone detection Faster-RCNN model trained on a purely synthetic dataset that transfers to real-world data. We found that it achieves an AP_50 of 97.0% when evaluated on the MAV-Vid - a real dataset of flying drones - compared with 97.8% for an equivalent model trained on real-world data. Our results show that using synthetic data for drone detection has the potential to reduce data collection costs and improve labelling quality. These findings could be a starting point for more elaborate synthetic drone datasets. For example, realistic recreations of specific scenarios could de-risk the dataset generation of safety-critical applications such as the detection of drones at airports. Further, synthetic data may enable reliable drone detection systems, which could benefit other areas, such as unmanned traffic management systems. The code is available https://github.com/mazqtpopx/cranfield-synthetic-drone-detection alongside the datasets https://huggingface.co/datasets/mazqtpopx/cranfield-synthetic-drone-detection.