OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Exposure Image Fusion via Distilled 3D LUT Grid with Editable Mode
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the rising imaging resolution of handheld devices, existing multi-exposure image fusion algorithms struggle to generate a high dynamic range image with ultra-high resolution in real-time. Apart from that, there is a trend to design a manageable and editable algorithm as the different needs of real application scenarios. To tackle these issues, we introduce 3D LUT technology, which can enhance images with ultra-high-definition (UHD) resolution in real time on resource-constrained devices. However, since the fusion of information from multiple images with different exposure rates is uncertain, and this uncertainty significantly trials the generalization power of the 3D LUT grid. To address this issue and ensure a robust learning space for the model, we propose using a teacher-student network to model the uncertainty on the 3D LUT grid.Furthermore, we provide an editable mode for the multi-exposure image fusion algorithm by using the implicit representation function to match the requirements in different scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is highly competitive in efficiency and accuracy.
Semantic Convergence: Harmonizing Recommender Systems via Two-Stage Alignment and Behavioral Semantic Tokenization
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs), endowed with exceptional reasoning capabilities, are adept at discerning profound user interests from historical behaviors, thereby presenting a promising avenue for the advancement of recommendation systems. However, a notable discrepancy persists between the sparse collaborative semantics typically found in recommendation systems and the dense token representations within LLMs. In our study, we propose a novel framework that harmoniously merges traditional recommendation models with the prowess of LLMs. We initiate this integration by transforming ItemIDs into sequences that align semantically with the LLMs space, through the proposed Alignment Tokenization module. Additionally, we design a series of specialized supervised learning tasks aimed at aligning collaborative signals with the subtleties of natural language semantics. To ensure practical applicability, we optimize online inference by pre-caching the top-K results for each user, reducing latency and improving effciency. Extensive experimental evidence indicates that our model markedly improves recall metrics and displays remarkable scalability of recommendation systems.
Toward Efficient Data-Free Unlearning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine unlearning without access to real data distribution is challenging. The existing method based on data-free distillation achieved unlearning by filtering out synthetic samples containing forgetting information but struggled to distill the retaining-related knowledge efficiently. In this work, we analyze that such a problem is due to over-filtering, which reduces the synthesized retaining-related information. We propose a novel method, Inhibited Synthetic PostFilter (ISPF), to tackle this challenge from two perspectives: First, the Inhibited Synthetic, by reducing the synthesized forgetting information; Second, the PostFilter, by fully utilizing the retaining-related information in synthesized samples. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ISPF effectively tackles the challenge and outperforms existing methods.
MATCHED: Multimodal Authorship-Attribution To Combat Human Trafficking in Escort-Advertisement Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Human trafficking (HT) remains a critical issue, with traffickers increasingly leveraging online escort advertisements (ads) to advertise victims anonymously. Existing detection methods, including Authorship Attribution (AA), often center on text-based analyses and neglect the multimodal nature of online escort ads, which typically pair text with images. To address this gap, we introduce MATCHED, a multimodal dataset of 27,619 unique text descriptions and 55,115 unique images collected from the Backpage escort platform across seven U.S. cities in four geographical regions. Our study extensively benchmarks text-only, vision-only, and multimodal baselines for vendor identification and verification tasks, employing multitask (joint) training objectives that achieve superior classification and retrieval performance on in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. Integrating multimodal features further enhances this performance, capturing complementary patterns across text and images. While text remains the dominant modality, visual data adds stylistic cues that enrich model performance. Moreover, text-image alignment strategies like CLIP and BLIP2 struggle due to low semantic overlap and vague connections between the modalities of escort ads, with end-to-end multimodal training proving more robust. Our findings emphasize the potential of multimodal AA (MAA) to combat HT, providing LEAs with robust tools to link ads and disrupt trafficking networks.
Object Style Diffusion for Generalized Object Detection in Urban Scene
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Object detection is a critical task in computer vision, with applications in various domains such as autonomous driving and urban scene monitoring. However, deep learning-based approaches often demand large volumes of annotated data, which are costly and difficult to acquire, particularly in complex and unpredictable real-world environments. This dependency significantly hampers the generalization capability of existing object detection techniques. To address this issue, we introduce a novel single-domain object detection generalization method, named GoDiff, which leverages a pre-trained model to enhance generalization in unseen domains. Central to our approach is the Pseudo Target Data Generation (PTDG) module, which employs a latent diffusion model to generate pseudo-target domain data that preserves source domain characteristics while introducing stylistic variations. By integrating this pseudo data with source domain data, we diversify the training dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a cross-style instance normalization technique to blend style features from different domains generated by the PTDG module, thereby increasing the detector's robustness. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only enhances the generalization ability of existing detectors but also functions as a plug-and-play enhancement for other single-domain generalization methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in autonomous driving scenarios.
Towards Responsible Governing AI Proliferation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper argues that existing governance mechanisms for mitigating risks from AI systems are based on the `Big Compute' paradigm -- a set of assumptions about the relationship between AI capabilities and infrastructure -- that may not hold in the future. To address this, the paper introduces the `Proliferation' paradigm, which anticipates the rise of smaller, decentralized, open-sourced AI models which are easier to augment, and easier to train without being detected. It posits that these developments are both probable and likely to introduce both benefits and novel risks that are difficult to mitigate through existing governance mechanisms. The final section explores governance strategies to address these risks, focusing on access governance, decentralized compute oversight, and information security. Whilst these strategies offer potential solutions, the paper acknowledges their limitations and cautions developers to weigh benefits against developments that could lead to a `vulnerable world'.
IDEQ: an improved diffusion model for the TSP
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

We investigate diffusion models to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. Building on the recent DIFUSCO and T2TCO approaches, we propose IDEQ. IDEQ improves the quality of the solutions by leveraging the constrained structure of the state space of the TSP. Another key component of IDEQ consists in replacing the last stages of DIFUSCO curriculum learning by considering a uniform distribution over the Hamiltonian tours whose orbits by the 2-opt operator converge to the optimal solution as the training objective. Our experiments show that IDEQ improves the state of the art for such neural network based techniques on synthetic instances. More importantly, our experiments show that IDEQ performs very well on the instances of the TSPlib, a reference benchmark in the TSP community: it closely matches the performance of the best heuristics, LKH3, being even able to obtain better solutions than LKH3 on 2 instances of the TSPlib defined on 1577 and 3795 cities. IDEQ obtains 0.3% optimality gap on TSP instances made of 500 cities, and 0.5% on TSP instances with 1000 cities. This sets a new SOTA for neural based methods solving the TSP. Moreover, IDEQ exhibits a lower variance and better scales-up with the number of cities with regards to DIFUSCO and T2TCO.
Domain-adaptative Continual Learning for Low-resource Tasks: Evaluation on Nepali
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Continual learning has emerged as an important research direction due to the infeasibility of retraining large language models (LLMs) from scratch in the event of new data availability. Of great interest is the domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) paradigm, which focuses on continually training a pre-trained language model to adapt it to a domain it was not originally trained on. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of DAPT in a low-resource setting, namely the Nepali language. We use synthetic data to continue training Llama 3 8B to adapt it to the Nepali language in a 4-bit QLoRA setting. We evaluate the adapted model on its performance, forgetting, and knowledge acquisition. We compare the base model and the final model on their Nepali generation abilities, their performance on popular benchmarks, and run case-studies to probe their linguistic knowledge in Nepali. We see some unsurprising forgetting in the final model, but also surprisingly find that increasing the number of shots during evaluation yields better percent increases in the final model (as high as 19.29% increase) compared to the base model (4.98%), suggesting latent retention. We also explore layer-head self-attention heatmaps to establish dependency resolution abilities of the final model in Nepali.
Energy-Based Preference Model Offers Better Offline Alignment than the Bradley-Terry Preference Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Since the debut of DPO, it has been shown that aligning a target LLM with human preferences via the KL-constrained RLHF loss is mathematically equivalent to a special kind of reward modeling task. Concretely, the task requires: 1) using the target LLM to parameterize the reward model, and 2) tuning the reward model so that it has a 1:1 linear relationship with the true reward. However, we identify a significant issue: the DPO loss might have multiple minimizers, of which only one satisfies the required linearity condition. The problem arises from a well-known issue of the underlying Bradley-Terry preference model: it does not always have a unique maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). Consequently,the minimizer of the RLHF loss might be unattainable because it is merely one among many minimizers of the DPO loss. As a better alternative, we propose an energy-based model (EBM) that always has a unique MLE, inherently satisfying the linearity requirement. To approximate the MLE in practice, we propose a contrastive loss named Energy Preference Alignment (EPA), wherein each positive sample is contrasted against one or more strong negatives as well as many free weak negatives. Theoretical properties of our EBM enable the approximation error of EPA to almost surely vanish when a sufficient number of negatives are used. Empirically, we demonstrate that EPA consistently delivers better performance on open benchmarks compared to DPO, thereby showing the superiority of our EBM.
T-Edge: Trusted Heterogeneous Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Heterogeneous computing, which incorporates GPUs, NPUs, and FPGAs, is increasingly utilized to improve the efficiency of computer systems. However, this shift has given rise to significant security and privacy concerns, especially when the execution platform is remote. One way to tackle these challenges is to establish a trusted and isolated environment for remote program execution, while maintaining minimal overhead and flexibility. While CPU-based trusted execution has been extensively explored and found commercial success, extension to heterogeneous computing systems remains a challenge. This paper proposes a practical trusted execution environment design for ARM/FPGA System-on-Chip platforms, leveraging TrustZone's unique characteristics. The design features a dedicated security controller within the ARM TrustZone, overseeing FPGA reconfiguration and managing communication between CPU cores and FPGA fabrics. This design involves a provisioning service that enables application users to establish trust in the FPGA fabric within cloud-based computing resources provided by the platform owner, running applications developed by third-party developers and hardware manufactured by the device manufacturer. To ensure the security of our proposed system, we employ an automated protocol verifier, ProVerif, to validate its compliance with essential security requirements. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practicality of our system model by implementing a prototype application on the Xilinx MPSoC development board.
Memorizing SAM: 3D Medical Segment Anything Model with Memorizing Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Segment Anything Models (SAMs) have gained increasing attention in medical image analysis due to their zero-shot generalization capability in segmenting objects of unseen classes and domains when provided with appropriate user prompts. Addressing this performance gap is important to fully leverage the pre-trained weights of SAMs, particularly in the domain of volumetric medical image segmentation, where accuracy is important but well-annotated 3D medical data for fine-tuning is limited. In this work, we investigate whether introducing the memory mechanism as a plug-in, specifically the ability to memorize and recall internal representations of past inputs, can improve the performance of SAM with limited computation cost. To this end, we propose Memorizing SAM, a novel 3D SAM architecture incorporating a memory Transformer as a plug-in. Unlike conventional memorizing Transformers that save the internal representation during training or inference, our Memorizing SAM utilizes existing highly accurate internal representation as the memory source to ensure the quality of memory. We evaluate the performance of Memorizing SAM in 33 categories from the TotalSegmentator dataset, which indicates that Memorizing SAM can outperform state-of-the-art 3D SAM variant i.e., FastSAM3D with an average Dice increase of 11.36% at the cost of only 4.38 millisecond increase in inference time. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/swedfr/memorizingSAM
On Explaining Knowledge Distillation: Measuring and Visualising the Knowledge Transfer Process
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge distillation (KD) remains challenging due to the opaque nature of the knowledge transfer process from a Teacher to a Student, making it difficult to address certain issues related to KD. To address this, we proposed UniCAM, a novel gradient-based visual explanation method, which effectively interprets the knowledge learned during KD. Our experimental results demonstrate that with the guidance of the Teacher's knowledge, the Student model becomes more efficient, learning more relevant features while discarding those that are not relevant. We refer to the features learned with the Teacher's guidance as distilled features and the features irrelevant to the task and ignored by the Student as residual features. Distilled features focus on key aspects of the input, such as textures and parts of objects. In contrast, residual features demonstrate more diffused attention, often targeting irrelevant areas, including the backgrounds of the target objects. In addition, we proposed two novel metrics: the feature similarity score (FSS) and the relevance score (RS), which quantify the relevance of the distilled knowledge. Experiments on the CIFAR10, ASIRRA, and Plant Disease datasets demonstrate that UniCAM and the two metrics offer valuable insights to explain the KD process.
What If: Causal Analysis with Graph Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Graphs are expressive abstractions representing more effectively relationships in data and enabling data science tasks. They are also a widely adopted paradigm in causal inference focusing on causal directed acyclic graphs. Causal DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) are manually curated by domain experts, but they are never validated, stored and integrated as data artifacts in a graph data management system. In this paper, we delineate our vision to align these two paradigms, namely causal analysis and property graphs, the latter being the cornerstone of modern graph databases. To articulate this vision, a paradigm shift is required leading to rethinking property graph data models with hypernodes and structural equations, graph query semantics and query constructs, and the definition of graph views to account for causality operators. Moreover, several research problems and challenges arise aiming at automatically extracting causal models from the underlying graph observational data, aligning and integrating disparate causal graph models into unified ones along with their maintenance upon the changes in the underlying data. The above vision will allow to make graph databases aware of causal knowledge and pave the way to data-driven personalized decision-making in several scientific fields.
RAG for Effective Supply Chain Security Questionnaire Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In an era where digital security is crucial, efficient processing of security-related inquiries through supply chain security questionnaires is imperative. This paper introduces a novel approach using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to automate these responses. We developed QuestSecure, a system that interprets diverse document formats and generates precise responses by integrating large language models (LLMs) with an advanced retrieval system. Our experiments show that QuestSecure significantly improves response accuracy and operational efficiency. By employing advanced NLP techniques and tailored retrieval mechanisms, the system consistently produces contextually relevant and semantically rich responses, reducing cognitive load on security teams and minimizing potential errors. This research offers promising avenues for automating complex security management tasks, enhancing organizational security processes.
Flow Exporter Impact on Intelligent Intrusion Detection Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

High-quality datasets are critical for training machine learning models, as inconsistencies in feature generation can hinder the accuracy and reliability of threat detection. For this reason, ensuring the quality of the data in network intrusion detection datasets is important. A key component of this is using reliable tools to generate the flows and features present in the datasets. This paper investigates the impact of flow exporters on the performance and reliability of machine learning models for intrusion detection. Using HERA, a tool designed to export flows and extract features, the raw network packets of two widely used datasets, UNSW-NB15 and CIC-IDS2017, were processed from PCAP files to generate new versions of these datasets. These were compared to the original ones in terms of their influence on the performance of several models, including Random Forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and Explainable Boosting Machine. The results obtained were significant. Models trained on the HERA version of the datasets consistently outperformed those trained on the original dataset, showing improvements in accuracy and indicating a better generalisation. This highlighted the importance of flow generation in the model's ability to differentiate between benign and malicious traffic.
Dialogue with the Machine and Dialogue with the Art World: Evaluating Generative AI for Culturally-Situated Creativity
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes dialogue as a method for evaluating generative AI tools for culturally-situated creative practice, that recognizes the socially situated nature of art. Drawing on sociologist Howard Becker's concept of Art Worlds, this method expands the scope of traditional AI and creativity evaluations beyond benchmarks, user studies with crowd-workers, or focus groups conducted with artists. Our method involves two mutually informed dialogues: 1) 'dialogues with art worlds' placing artists in conversation with experts such as art historians, curators, and archivists, and 2)'dialogues with the machine,' facilitated through structured artist- and critic-led experimentation with state-of-the-art generative AI tools. We demonstrate the value of this method through a case study with artists and experts steeped in non-western art worlds, specifically the Persian Gulf. We trace how these dialogues help create culturally rich and situated forms of evaluation for representational possibilities of generative AI that mimic the reception of generative artwork in the broader art ecosystem. Putting artists in conversation with commentators also allow artists to shift their use of the tools to respond to their cultural and creative context. Our study can provide generative AI researchers an understanding of the complex dynamics of technology, human creativity and the socio-politics of art worlds, to build more inclusive machines for diverse art worlds.
Adaptive Concept Bottleneck for Foundation Models Under Distribution Shifts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Advancements in foundation models (FMs) have led to a paradigm shift in machine learning. The rich, expressive feature representations from these pre-trained, large-scale FMs are leveraged for multiple downstream tasks, usually via lightweight fine-tuning of a shallow fully-connected network following the representation. However, the non-interpretable, black-box nature of this prediction pipeline can be a challenge, especially in critical domains such as healthcare, finance, and security. In this paper, we explore the potential of Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) for transforming complex, non-interpretable foundation models into interpretable decision-making pipelines using high-level concept vectors. Specifically, we focus on the test-time deployment of such an interpretable CBM pipeline "in the wild", where the input distribution often shifts from the original training distribution. We first identify the potential failure modes of such a pipeline under different types of distribution shifts. Then we propose an adaptive concept bottleneck framework to address these failure modes, that dynamically adapts the concept-vector bank and the prediction layer based solely on unlabeled data from the target domain, without access to the source (training) dataset. Empirical evaluations with various real-world distribution shifts show that our adaptation method produces concept-based interpretations better aligned with the test data and boosts post-deployment accuracy by up to 28%, aligning the CBM performance with that of non-interpretable classification.