OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Change Guiding Network: Incorporating Change Prior to Guide Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of automated artificial intelligence algorithms and remote sensing instruments has benefited change detection (CD) tasks. However, there is still a lot of space to study for precise detection, especially the edge integrity and internal holes phenomenon of change features. In order to solve these problems, we design the Change Guiding Network (CGNet), to tackle the insufficient expression problem of change features in the conventional U-Net structure adopted in previous methods, which causes inaccurate edge detection and internal holes. Change maps from deep features with rich semantic information are generated and used as prior information to guide multi-scale feature fusion, which can improve the expression ability of change features. Meanwhile, we propose a self-attention module named Change Guide Module (CGM), which can effectively capture the long-distance dependency among pixels and effectively overcome the problem of the insufficient receptive field of traditional convolutional neural networks. On four major CD datasets, we verify the usefulness and efficiency of the CGNet, and a large number of experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of CGNet. We're going to open-source our code at https://github.com/ChengxiHAN/CGNet-CD.
Tube RRT*: Efficient Homotopic Path Planning for Swarm Robotics Passing-Through Large-Scale Obstacle Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, the concept of homotopic trajectory planning has emerged as a novel solution to navigation in large-scale obstacle environments for swarm robotics, offering a wide ranging of applications. However, it lacks an efficient homotopic path planning method in large-scale obstacle environments. This paper introduces Tube RRT*, an innovative homotopic path planning method that builds upon and improves the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm. Tube RRT* is specifically designed to generate homotopic paths, strategically considering gap volume and path length to mitigate swarm congestion and ensure agile navigation. Through comprehensive simulations and experiments, the effectiveness of Tube RRT* is validated.
OSS Myths and Facts
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

We have selected six myths about the OSS community and have tested whether they are true or not. The purpose of this report is to identify the lessons that can be learned from the development style of the OSS community and the issues that need to be addressed in order to achieve better Employee Experience (EX) in software development within companies and organizations. The OSS community has been led by a group of skilled developers known as hackers. We have great respect for the engineers and activities of the OSS community and aim to learn from them. On the other hand, it is important to recognize that having high expectations can sometimes result in misunderstandings. When there are excessive expectations and concerns, misunderstandings (referred to as myths) can arise, particularly when individuals who are not practitioners rely on hearsay to understand the practices of practitioners. We selected the myths to be tested based on a literature review and interviews. These myths are held by software development managers and customers who are not direct participants in the OSS community. We answered questions about each myth through: 1) Our own analysis of repository data, 2) A literature survey of data analysis conducted by previous studies, or 3) A combination of the two approaches.
Engaging Young Learners with Testing Using the Code Critters Mutation Game
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Everyone learns to code nowadays. Writing code, however, does not go without testing, which unfortunately rarely seems to be taught explicitly. Testing is often not deemed important enough or is just not perceived as sufficiently exciting. Testing can be exciting: In this paper, we introduce Code Critters, a serious game designed to teach testing concepts engagingly. In the style of popular tower defense games, players strategically position magical portals that need to distinguish between creatures exhibiting the behavior described by correct code from those that are mutated, and thus faulty. When placing portals, players are implicitly testing: They choose test inputs (i.e., where to place portals), as well as test oracles (i.e., what behavior to expect), and they observe test executions as the creatures wander across the landscape passing the players' portals. An empirical study involving 40 children demonstrates that they actively engage with Code Critters. Their positive feedback provides evidence that they enjoyed playing the game, and some of the children even continued to play Code Critters at home, outside the educational setting of our study.
Knowledgeable Agents by Offline Reinforcement Learning from Large Language Model Rollouts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reinforcement learning (RL) trains agents to accomplish complex tasks through environmental interaction data, but its capacity is also limited by the scope of the available data. To obtain a knowledgeable agent, a promising approach is to leverage the knowledge from large language models (LLMs). Despite previous studies combining LLMs with RL, seamless integration of the two components remains challenging due to their semantic gap. This paper introduces a novel method, Knowledgeable Agents from Language Model Rollouts (KALM), which extracts knowledge from LLMs in the form of imaginary rollouts that can be easily learned by the agent through offline reinforcement learning methods. The primary challenge of KALM lies in LLM grounding, as LLMs are inherently limited to textual data, whereas environmental data often comprise numerical vectors unseen to LLMs. To address this, KALM fine-tunes the LLM to perform various tasks based on environmental data, including bidirectional translation between natural language descriptions of skills and their corresponding rollout data. This grounding process enhances the LLM's comprehension of environmental dynamics, enabling it to generate diverse and meaningful imaginary rollouts that reflect novel skills. Initial empirical evaluations on the CLEVR-Robot environment demonstrate that KALM enables agents to complete complex rephrasings of task goals and extend their capabilities to novel tasks requiring unprecedented optimal behaviors. KALM achieves a success rate of 46% in executing tasks with unseen goals, substantially surpassing the 26% success rate achieved by baseline methods. Furthermore, KALM effectively enables the LLM to comprehend environmental dynamics, resulting in the generation of meaningful imaginary rollouts that reflect novel skills and demonstrate the seamless integration of large language models and reinforcement learning.
Tangram: High-resolution Video Analytics on Serverless Platform with SLO-aware Batching
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Cloud-edge collaborative computing paradigm is a promising solution to high-resolution video analytics systems. The key lies in reducing redundant data and managing fluctuating inference workloads effectively. Previous work has focused on extracting regions of interest (RoIs) from videos and transmitting them to the cloud for processing. However, a naive Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resource configuration falls short in handling highly fluctuating workloads, leading to violations of Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and inefficient resource utilization. Besides, these methods neglect the potential benefits of RoIs batching to leverage parallel processing. In this work, we introduce Tangram, an efficient serverless cloud-edge video analytics system fully optimized for both communication and computation. Tangram adaptively aligns the RoIs into patches and transmits them to the scheduler in the cloud. The system employs a unique ``stitching'' method to batch the patches with various sizes from the edge cameras. Additionally, we develop an online SLO-aware batching algorithm that judiciously determines the optimal invoking time of the serverless function. Experiments on our prototype reveal that Tangram can reduce bandwidth consumption and computation cost up to 74.30\% and 66.35\%, respectively, while maintaining SLO violations within 5\% and the accuracy loss negligible.
Sinestesia as a model for HCI: a Systematic Review
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Synesthesia, conceived as a neuropsychological condition, may prove valuable in studying the interaction between humans and machines by analyzing the co-occurrence of sensory or cognitive responses triggered by a stimulus. In our approach, synesthesia is elevated beyond a mere perceptual-cognitive anomaly, offering insights into the reciprocal interaction between humans and the digital system, steering novel experimental design and enriching results interpretations.This review broadens the traditional scope, conventionally rooted in neuroscience and psychology, by considering how computer science can approach this condition. The interdisciplinary examination revolves around two primary viewpoints: one associating this condition with specific cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral anomalies, and the other acknowledging it as a prevalent human experience. Synesthesia, in this review, emerges as a significant model for Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The exploration of this specific condition aims to decipher how atypical pathways of perception and cognition can be encoded, empowering machines to actively engage in processing information from both the body and the environment. The authors attempt to amalgamate findings and insights from various disciplines, fostering collaboration between computer science, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.The overarching objective is to construct a comprehensive framework that elucidates how synesthesia and anomalies in information processing can be harnessed within HCI, with a particular emphasis on contributing to digital technologies for medical research and enhancing patients care and comfort. In this sense, the review endeavors also to fill the gap between theoretical understanding and practical application.
Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition with Cross-Lingual, Character-Level Neural Conditional Random Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Low-resource named entity recognition is still an open problem in NLP. Most state-of-the-art systems require tens of thousands of annotated sentences in order to obtain high performance. However, for most of the world's languages, it is unfeasible to obtain such annotation. In this paper, we present a transfer learning scheme, whereby we train character-level neural CRFs to predict named entities for both high-resource languages and low resource languages jointly. Learning character representations for multiple related languages allows transfer among the languages, improving F1 by up to 9.8 points over a loglinear CRF baseline.
Integrating Marketing Channels into Quantile Transformation and Bayesian Optimization of Ensemble Kernels for Sales Prediction with Gaussian Process Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This study introduces an innovative Gaussian Process (GP) model utilizing an ensemble kernel that integrates Radial Basis Function (RBF), Rational Quadratic, and Matérn kernels for product sales forecasting. By applying Bayesian optimization, we efficiently find the optimal weights for each kernel, enhancing the model's ability to handle complex sales data patterns. Our approach significantly outperforms traditional GP models, achieving a notable 98\% accuracy and superior performance across key metrics including Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), and Coefficient of Determination ($R^2$). This advancement underscores the effectiveness of ensemble kernels and Bayesian optimization in improving predictive accuracy, offering profound implications for machine learning applications in sales forecasting.
Privacy at a Price: Exploring its Dual Impact on AI Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The worldwide adoption of machine learning (ML) and deep learning models, particularly in critical sectors, such as healthcare and finance, presents substantial challenges in maintaining individual privacy and fairness. These two elements are vital to a trustworthy environment for learning systems. While numerous studies have concentrated on protecting individual privacy through differential privacy (DP) mechanisms, emerging research indicates that differential privacy in machine learning models can unequally impact separate demographic subgroups regarding prediction accuracy. This leads to a fairness concern, and manifests as biased performance. Although the prevailing view is that enhancing privacy intensifies fairness disparities, a smaller, yet significant, subset of research suggests the opposite view. In this article, with extensive evaluation results, we demonstrate that the impact of differential privacy on fairness is not monotonous. Instead, we observe that the accuracy disparity initially grows as more DP noise (enhanced privacy) is added to the ML process, but subsequently diminishes at higher privacy levels with even more noise. Moreover, implementing gradient clipping in the differentially private stochastic gradient descent ML method can mitigate the negative impact of DP noise on fairness. This mitigation is achieved by moderating the disparity growth through a lower clipping threshold.
A Distributed Scalable Cross-chain State Channel Scheme Based on Recursive State Synchronization
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

As cross-chain technology continues to advance, the scale of cross-chain transactions is experiencing significant expansion. To improve scalability, researchers have turned to the study of cross-chain state channels. However, most of the existing schemes rely on trusted parties to support channel operations. To address this issue, we present Interpipe: a distributed cross-chain state channel scheme. Specifically, we propose a real-time cross-chain synchronization scheme to ensure consistent operations between two blockchains to a cross-chain state channel. Moreover, we propose a batch transaction proof scheme based on recursive SNARK to meet the cross-chain verification needs of large-scale users. Based on the above designs, Interpipe offers protocols for opening, updating, closing, and disputing operations to cross-chain state channels. Security analysis shows that Interpipe has consistency and resistance, and experimental results demonstrate that a cross-chain state channel can be nearly as efficient as an existing intra-chain state channel.
Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction for Judicial Cases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we explore the application of cognitive intelligence in legal knowledge, focusing on the development of judicial artificial intelligence. Utilizing natural language processing (NLP) as the core technology, we propose a method for the automatic construction of case knowledge graphs for judicial cases. Our approach centers on two fundamental NLP tasks: entity recognition and relationship extraction. We compare two pre-trained models for entity recognition to establish their efficacy. Additionally, we introduce a multi-task semantic relationship extraction model that incorporates translational embedding, leading to a nuanced contextualized case knowledge representation. Specifically, in a case study involving a "Motor Vehicle Traffic Accident Liability Dispute," our approach significantly outperforms the baseline model. The entity recognition F1 score improved by 0.36, while the relationship extraction F1 score increased by 2.37. Building on these results, we detail the automatic construction process of case knowledge graphs for judicial cases, enabling the assembly of knowledge graphs for hundreds of thousands of judgments. This framework provides robust semantic support for applications of judicial AI, including the precise categorization and recommendation of related cases.
VFMM3D: Releasing the Potential of Image by Vision Foundation Model for Monocular 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Due to its cost-effectiveness and widespread availability, monocular 3D object detection, which relies solely on a single camera during inference, holds significant importance across various applications, including autonomous driving and robotics. Nevertheless, directly predicting the coordinates of objects in 3D space from monocular images poses challenges. Therefore, an effective solution involves transforming monocular images into LiDAR-like representations and employing a LiDAR-based 3D object detector to predict the 3D coordinates of objects. The key step in this method is accurately converting the monocular image into a reliable point cloud form. In this paper, we present VFMM3D, an innovative framework that leverages the capabilities of Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to accurately transform single-view images into LiDAR point cloud representations. VFMM3D utilizes the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and Depth Anything Model (DAM) to generate high-quality pseudo-LiDAR data enriched with rich foreground information. Specifically, the Depth Anything Model (DAM) is employed to generate dense depth maps. Subsequently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) is utilized to differentiate foreground and background regions by predicting instance masks. These predicted instance masks and depth maps are then combined and projected into 3D space to generate pseudo-LiDAR points. Finally, any object detectors based on point clouds can be utilized to predict the 3D coordinates of objects. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two challenging 3D object detection datasets, KITTI and Waymo. Our VFMM3D establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. Additionally, experimental results demonstrate the generality of VFMM3D, showcasing its seamless integration into various LiDAR-based 3D object detectors.
Towards Greener Nights: Exploring AI-Driven Solutions for Light Pollution Management
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This research endeavors to address the pervasive issue of light pollution through an interdisciplinary approach, leveraging data science and machine learning techniques. By analyzing extensive datasets and research findings, we aim to develop predictive models capable of estimating the degree of sky glow observed in various locations and times. Our research seeks to inform evidence-based interventions and promote responsible outdoor lighting practices to mitigate the adverse impacts of light pollution on ecosystems, energy consumption, and human well-being.
Hyperbolic Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Most previous heterogeneous graph embedding models represent elements in a heterogeneous graph as vector representations in a low-dimensional Euclidean space. However, because heterogeneous graphs inherently possess complex structures, such as hierarchical or power-law structures, distortions can occur when representing them in Euclidean space. To overcome this limitation, we propose Hyperbolic Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks (HHGAT) that learn vector representations in hyperbolic spaces with meta-path instances. We conducted experiments on three real-world heterogeneous graph datasets, demonstrating that HHGAT outperforms state-of-the-art heterogeneous graph embedding models in node classification and clustering tasks.
Improved Object-Based Style Transfer with Single Deep Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This research paper proposes a novel methodology for image-to-image style transfer on objects utilizing a single deep convolutional neural network. The proposed approach leverages the You Only Look Once version 8 (YOLOv8) segmentation model and the backbone neural network of YOLOv8 for style transfer. The primary objective is to enhance the visual appeal of objects in images by seamlessly transferring artistic styles while preserving the original object characteristics. The proposed approach's novelty lies in combining segmentation and style transfer in a single deep convolutional neural network. This approach omits the need for multiple stages or models, thus resulting in simpler training and deployment of the model for practical applications. The results of this approach are shown on two content images by applying different style images. The paper also demonstrates the ability to apply style transfer on multiple objects in the same image.
Improving Weakly-Supervised Object Localization Using Adversarial Erasing and Pseudo Label
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Weakly-supervised learning approaches have gained significant attention due to their ability to reduce the effort required for human annotations in training neural networks. This paper investigates a framework for weakly-supervised object localization, which aims to train a neural network capable of predicting both the object class and its location using only images and their image-level class labels. The proposed framework consists of a shared feature extractor, a classifier, and a localizer. The localizer predicts pixel-level class probabilities, while the classifier predicts the object class at the image level. Since image-level class labels are insufficient for training the localizer, weakly-supervised object localization methods often encounter challenges in accurately localizing the entire object region. To address this issue, the proposed method incorporates adversarial erasing and pseudo labels to improve localization accuracy. Specifically, novel losses are designed to utilize adversarially erased foreground features and adversarially erased feature maps, reducing dependence on the most discriminative region. Additionally, the proposed method employs pseudo labels to suppress activation values in the background while increasing them in the foreground. The proposed method is applied to two backbone networks (MobileNetV1 and InceptionV3) and is evaluated on three publicly available datasets (ILSVRC-2012, CUB-200-2011, and PASCAL VOC 2012). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across all evaluated metrics.
Mitigating Hallucination in Abstractive Summarization with Domain-Conditional Mutual Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

A primary challenge in abstractive summarization is hallucination -- the phenomenon where a model generates plausible text that is absent in the source text. We hypothesize that the domain (or topic) of the source text triggers the model to generate text that is highly probable in the domain, neglecting the details of the source text. To alleviate this model bias, we introduce a decoding strategy based on domain-conditional pointwise mutual information. This strategy adjusts the generation probability of each token by comparing it with the token's marginal probability within the domain of the source text. According to evaluation on the XSUM dataset, our method demonstrates improvement in terms of faithfulness and source relevance. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/qqplot/dcpmi}.