OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Spatiotemporal Stealthy Backdoor Attack against Cooperative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies have shown that cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (c-MADRL) is under the threat of backdoor attacks. Once a backdoor trigger is observed, it will perform abnormal actions leading to failures or malicious goals. However, existing proposed backdoors suffer from several issues, e.g., fixed visual trigger patterns lack stealthiness, the backdoor is trained or activated by an additional network, or all agents are backdoored. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel backdoor attack against c-MADRL, which attacks the entire multi-agent team by embedding the backdoor only in a single agent. Firstly, we introduce adversary spatiotemporal behavior patterns as the backdoor trigger rather than manual-injected fixed visual patterns or instant status and control the attack duration. This method can guarantee the stealthiness and practicality of injected backdoors. Secondly, we hack the original reward function of the backdoored agent via reward reverse and unilateral guidance during training to ensure its adverse influence on the entire team. We evaluate our backdoor attacks on two classic c-MADRL algorithms VDN and QMIX, in a popular c-MADRL environment SMAC. The experimental results demonstrate that our backdoor attacks are able to reach a high attack success rate (91.6\%) while maintaining a low clean performance variance rate (3.7\%).
SURGIVID: Annotation-Efficient Surgical Video Object Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Surgical scenes convey crucial information about the quality of surgery. Pixel-wise localization of tools and anatomical structures is the first task towards deeper surgical analysis for microscopic or endoscopic surgical views. This is typically done via fully-supervised methods which are annotation greedy and in several cases, demanding medical expertise. Considering the profusion of surgical videos obtained through standardized surgical workflows, we propose an annotation-efficient framework for the semantic segmentation of surgical scenes. We employ image-based self-supervised object discovery to identify the most salient tools and anatomical structures in surgical videos. These proposals are further refined within a minimally supervised fine-tuning step. Our unsupervised setup reinforced with only 36 annotation labels indicates comparable localization performance with fully-supervised segmentation models. Further, leveraging surgical phase labels as weak labels can better guide model attention towards surgical tools, leading to $\sim 2\%$ improvement in tool localization. Extensive ablation studies on the CaDIS dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed solution in discovering relevant surgical objects with minimal or no supervision.
Bridging Paintings and Music -- Exploring Emotion based Music Generation through Paintings
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly enhanced generative tasks involving music and images, employing both unimodal and multimodal approaches. This research develops a model capable of generating music that resonates with the emotions depicted in visual arts, integrating emotion labeling, image captioning, and language models to transform visual inputs into musical compositions. Addressing the scarcity of aligned art and music data, we curated the Emotion Painting Music Dataset, pairing paintings with corresponding music for effective training and evaluation. Our dual-stage framework converts images to text descriptions of emotional content and then transforms these descriptions into music, facilitating efficient learning with minimal data. Performance is evaluated using metrics such as Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD), Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), Inception Score (IS), and KL divergence, with audio-emotion text similarity confirmed by the pre-trained CLAP model to demonstrate high alignment between generated music and text. This synthesis tool bridges visual art and music, enhancing accessibility for the visually impaired and opening avenues in educational and therapeutic applications by providing enriched multi-sensory experiences.
TSELM: Target Speaker Extraction using Discrete Tokens and Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

We propose TSELM, a novel target speaker extraction network that leverages discrete tokens and language models. TSELM utilizes multiple discretized layers from WavLM as input tokens and incorporates cross-attention mechanisms to integrate target speaker information. Language models are employed to capture the sequence dependencies, while a scalable HiFi-GAN is used to reconstruct the audio from the tokens. By applying a cross-entropy loss, TSELM models the probability distribution of output tokens, thus converting the complex regression problem of audio generation into a classification task. Experimental results show that TSELM achieves excellent results in speech quality and comparable results in speech intelligibility.
An Optimal Algorithm for Sorting Pattern-Avoiding Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We present a deterministic comparison-based algorithm that sorts sequences avoiding a fixed permutation $π$ in linear time, even if $π$ is a priori unkown. Moreover, the dependence of the multiplicative constant on the pattern $π$ matches the information-theoretic lower bound. A crucial ingredient is an algorithm for performing efficient multi-way merge based on the Marcus-Tardos theorem. As a direct corollary, we obtain a linear-time algorithm for sorting permutations of bounded twin-width.
UNIT: Unsupervised Online Instance Segmentation through Time
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Online object segmentation and tracking in Lidar point clouds enables autonomous agents to understand their surroundings and make safe decisions. Unfortunately, manual annotations for these tasks are prohibitively costly. We tackle this problem with the task of class-agnostic unsupervised online instance segmentation and tracking. To that end, we leverage an instance segmentation backbone and propose a new training recipe that enables the online tracking of objects. Our network is trained on pseudo-labels, eliminating the need for manual annotations. We conduct an evaluation using metrics adapted for temporal instance segmentation. Computing these metrics requires temporally-consistent instance labels. When unavailable, we construct these labels using the available 3D bounding boxes and semantic labels in the dataset. We compare our method against strong baselines and demonstrate its superiority across two different outdoor Lidar datasets.
Dynamic Simultaneous Multithreaded Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the Dynamic Simultaneous Multi-threaded Architecture (DSMT). DSMT efficiently exe-cutes multiple threads from a single program on a SMT processor core. To accomplish this, threads are generated dynamically from a predictable flow of control and then executed speculatively. Data obtained during the single context non-speculative execution phase of DSMT is used as a hint to speculate the posterior behavior of multiple threads. DSMT employs simple mechanisms based on state bits that keep track of inter-thread dependencies in registers and memory, synchronize thread execution, and control recovery from misspeculation. Moreover, DSMT utilizes a novel greedy policy for choosing those sections of code which provide the highest performance based on their past execution history. The DSMT architecture was simulated with a new cycle-accurate, execution-driven simulator. Our simulation results show that DSMT has very good potential to improve SMT performance, even when only a single program is available. However, we found that dynamic thread behavior together with fre-quent misspeculation may also produce diminishing re-turns in performance. Therefore, the challenge is to max-imize the amount of thread-level parallelism that DSMT is capable of exploiting and at the same time reduce the fre-quency of misspeculations.
Multi-granularity Score-based Generative Framework Enables Efficient Inverse Design of Complex Organics
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

Efficiently retrieving an enormous chemical library to design targeted molecules is crucial for accelerating drug discovery, organic chemistry, and optoelectronic materials. Despite the emergence of generative models to produce novel drug-like molecules, in a more realistic scenario, the complexity of functional groups (e.g., pyrene, acenaphthylene, and bridged-ring systems) and extensive molecular scaffolds remain challenging obstacles for the generation of complex organics. Traditionally, the former demands an extra learning process, e.g., molecular pre-training, and the latter requires expensive computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose OrgMol-Design, a multi-granularity framework for efficiently designing complex organics. Our OrgMol-Design is composed of a score-based generative model via fragment prior for diverse coarse-grained scaffold generation and a chemical-rule-aware scoring model for fine-grained molecular structure design, circumventing the difficulty of intricate substructure learning without losing connection details among fragments. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in four real-world and more challenging benchmarks covering broader scientific domains, outperforming advanced molecule generative models. Additionally, it delivers a substantial speedup and graphics memory reduction compared to diffusion-based graph models. Our results also demonstrate the importance of leveraging fragment prior for a generalized molecule inverse design model.
UGAD: Universal Generative AI Detector utilizing Frequency Fingerprints
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the wake of a fabricated explosion image at the Pentagon, an ability to discern real images from fake counterparts has never been more critical. Our study introduces a novel multi-modal approach to detect AI-generated images amidst the proliferation of new generation methods such as Diffusion models. Our method, UGAD, encompasses three key detection steps: First, we transform the RGB images into YCbCr channels and apply an Integral Radial Operation to emphasize salient radial features. Secondly, the Spatial Fourier Extraction operation is used for a spatial shift, utilizing a pre-trained deep learning network for optimal feature extraction. Finally, the deep neural network classification stage processes the data through dense layers using softmax for classification. Our approach significantly enhances the accuracy of differentiating between real and AI-generated images, as evidenced by a 12.64% increase in accuracy and 28.43% increase in AUC compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
InterACT: Inter-dependency Aware Action Chunking with Hierarchical Attention Transformers for Bimanual Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Bimanual manipulation presents unique challenges compared to unimanual tasks due to the complexity of coordinating two robotic arms. In this paper, we introduce InterACT: Inter-dependency aware Action Chunking with Hierarchical Attention Transformers, a novel imitation learning framework designed specifically for bimanual manipulation. InterACT leverages hierarchical attention mechanisms to effectively capture inter-dependencies between dual-arm joint states and visual inputs. The framework comprises a Hierarchical Attention Encoder, which processes multi-modal inputs through segment-wise and cross-segment attention mechanisms, and a Multi-arm Decoder that generates each arm's action predictions in parallel, while sharing information between the arms through synchronization blocks by providing the other arm's intermediate output as context. Our experiments, conducted on various simulated and real-world bimanual manipulation tasks, demonstrate that InterACT outperforms existing methods. Detailed ablation studies further validate the significance of key components, including the impact of CLS tokens, cross-segment encoders, and synchronization blocks on task performance. We provide supplementary materials and videos on our project page.
Mobile App Security Trends and Topics: An Examination of Questions From Stack Overflow
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The widespread use of smartphones and tablets has made society heavily reliant on mobile applications (apps) for accessing various resources and services. These apps often handle sensitive personal, financial, and health data, making app security a critical concern for developers. While there is extensive research on software security topics like malware and vulnerabilities, less is known about the practical security challenges mobile app developers face and the guidance they seek. In this study, we mine Stack Overflow for questions on mobile app security, which we analyze using quantitative and qualitative techniques. The findings reveal that Stack Overflow is a major resource for developers seeking help with mobile app security, especially for Android apps, and identifies seven main categories of security questions: Secured Communications, Database, App Distribution Service, Encryption, Permissions, File-Specific, and General Security. Insights from this research can inform the development of tools, techniques, and resources by the research and vendor community to better support developers in securing their mobile apps.
Repr Types: One Abstraction to Rule Them All
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

The choice of how to represent an abstract type can have a major impact on the performance of a program, yet mainstream compilers cannot perform optimizations at such a high level. When dealing with optimizations of data type representations, an important feature is having extensible representation-flexible data types; the ability for a programmer to add new abstract types and operations, as well as concrete implementations of these, without modifying the compiler or a previously defined library. Many research projects support high-level optimizations through static analysis, instrumentation, or benchmarking, but they are all restricted in at least one aspect of extensibility. This paper presents a new approach to representation-flexible data types without such restrictions and which still finds efficient optimizations. Our approach centers around a single built-in type $\texttt{repr}$ and function overloading with cost annotations for operation implementations. We evaluate our approach (i) by defining a universal collection type as a library, a single type for all conventional collections, and (ii) by designing and implementing a representation-flexible graph library. Programs using $\texttt{repr}$ types are typically faster than programs with idiomatic representation choices -- sometimes dramatically so -- as long as the compiler finds good implementations for all operations. Our compiler performs the analysis efficiently by finding optimized solutions quickly and by reusing previous results to avoid recomputations.
A SUBSET-SUM Characterisation of the A-Hierarchy
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The A-hierarchy is a parametric analogue of the polynomial hierarchy in the context of paramterised complexity theory. We give a new characterisation of the A-hierarchy in terms of a generalisation of the SUBSET-SUM problem.
Multiplex Graph Contrastive Learning with Soft Negatives
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) seeks to learn nodal or graph representations that contain maximal consistent information from graph-structured data. While node-level contrasting modes are dominating, some efforts commence to explore consistency across different scales. Yet, they tend to lose consistent information and be contaminated by disturbing features. Here, we introduce MUX-GCL, a novel cross-scale contrastive learning paradigm that utilizes multiplex representations as effective patches. While this learning mode minimizes contaminating noises, a commensurate contrasting strategy using positional affinities further avoids information loss by correcting false negative pairs across scales. Extensive downstream experiments demonstrate that MUX-GCL yields multiple state-of-the-art results on public datasets. Our theoretical analysis further guarantees the new objective function as a stricter lower bound of mutual information of raw input features and output embeddings, which rationalizes this paradigm. Code is available at https://github.com/MUX-GCL/Code.
SoVAR: Building Generalizable Scenarios from Accident Reports for Autonomous Driving Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) have undergone remarkable development and are increasingly employed in safety-critical applications. However, recently reported data on fatal accidents involving ADSs suggests that the desired level of safety has not yet been fully achieved. Consequently, there is a growing need for more comprehensive and targeted testing approaches to ensure safe driving. Scenarios from real-world accident reports provide valuable resources for ADS testing, including critical scenarios and high-quality seeds. However, existing scenario reconstruction methods from accident reports often exhibit limited accuracy in information extraction. Moreover, due to the diversity and complexity of road environments, matching current accident information with the simulation map data for reconstruction poses significant challenges. In this paper, we design and implement SoVAR, a tool for automatically generating road-generalizable scenarios from accident reports. SoVAR utilizes well-designed prompts with linguistic patterns to guide the large language model in extracting accident information from textual data. Subsequently, it formulates and solves accident-related constraints in conjunction with the extracted accident information to generate accident trajectories. Finally, SoVAR reconstructs accident scenarios on various map structures and converts them into test scenarios to evaluate its capability to detect defects in industrial ADSs. We experiment with SoVAR, using accident reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's database to generate test scenarios for the industrial-grade ADS Apollo. The experimental findings demonstrate that SoVAR can effectively generate generalized accident scenarios across different road structures. Furthermore, the results confirm that SoVAR identified 5 distinct safety violation types that contributed to the crash of Baidu Apollo.
SimMAT: Exploring Transferability from Vision Foundation Models to Any Image Modality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Foundation models like ChatGPT and Sora that are trained on a huge scale of data have made a revolutionary social impact. However, it is extremely challenging for sensors in many different fields to collect similar scales of natural images to train strong foundation models. To this end, this work presents a simple and effective framework SimMAT to study an open problem: the transferability from vision foundation models trained on natural RGB images to other image modalities of different physical properties (e.g., polarization). SimMAT consists of a modality-agnostic transfer layer (MAT) and a pretrained foundation model. We apply SimMAT to a representative vision foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM) to support any evaluated new image modality. Given the absence of relevant benchmarks, we construct a new benchmark to evaluate the transfer learning performance. Our experiments confirm the intriguing potential of transferring vision foundation models in enhancing other sensors' performance. Specifically, SimMAT can improve the segmentation performance (mIoU) from 22.15% to 53.88% on average for evaluated modalities and consistently outperforms other baselines. We hope that SimMAT can raise awareness of cross-modal transfer learning and benefit various fields for better results with vision foundation models.
Linear Complementary Dual Codes Constructed from Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, Linear Complementary Dual (LCD) codes have garnered substantial interest within coding theory research due to their diverse applications and favorable attributes. This paper directs its attention to the construction of binary and ternary LCD codes leveraging curiosity-driven reinforcement learning (RL). By establishing reward and devising well-reasoned mappings from actions to states, it aims to facilitate the successful synthesis of binary or ternary LCD codes. Experimental results indicate that LCD codes constructed using RL exhibit slightly superior error-correction performance compared to those conventionally constructed LCD codes and those developed via standard RL methodologies. The paper introduces novel binary and ternary LCD codes with enhanced minimum distance bounds. Finally, it showcases how Random Network Distillation aids agents in exploring beyond local optima, enhancing the overall performance of the models without compromising convergence.
Collaborating for Success: Optimizing System Efficiency and Resilience Under Agile Industrial Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Designing an efficient and resilient human-robot collaboration strategy that not only upholds the safety and ergonomics of shared workspace but also enhances the performance and agility of collaborative setup presents significant challenges concerning environment perception and robot control. In this research, we introduce a novel approach for collaborative environment monitoring and robot motion regulation to address this multifaceted problem. Our study proposes novel computation and division of safety monitoring zones, adhering to ISO 13855 and TS 15066 standards, utilizing 2D lasers information. These zones are not only configured in the standard three-layer arrangement but are also expanded into two adjacent quadrants, thereby enhancing system uptime and preventing unnecessary deadlocks. Moreover, we also leverage 3D visual information to track dynamic human articulations and extended intrusions. Drawing upon the fused sensory data from 2D and 3D perceptual spaces, our proposed hierarchical controller stably regulates robot velocity, validated using Lasalle in-variance principle. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces task execution time and system response delay, resulting in improved efficiency and resilience within collaborative settings.