OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
IMPACT:InMemory ComPuting Architecture Based on Y-FlAsh Technology for Coalesced Tsetlin Machine Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing demand for processing large volumes of data for machine learning models has pushed data bandwidth requirements beyond the capability of traditional von Neumann architecture. In-memory computing (IMC) has recently emerged as a promising solution to address this gap by enabling distributed data storage and processing at the micro-architectural level, significantly reducing both latency and energy. In this paper, we present the IMPACT: InMemory ComPuting Architecture Based on Y-FlAsh Technology for Coalesced Tsetlin Machine Inference, underpinned on a cutting-edge memory device, Y-Flash, fabricated on a 180 nm CMOS process. Y-Flash devices have recently been demonstrated for digital and analog memory applications, offering high yield, non-volatility, and low power consumption. The IMPACT leverages the Y-Flash array to implement the inference of a novel machine learning algorithm: coalesced Tsetlin machine (CoTM) based on propositional logic. CoTM utilizes Tsetlin automata (TA) to create Boolean feature selections stochastically across parallel clauses. The IMPACT is organized into two computational crossbars for storing the TA and weights. Through validation on the MNIST dataset, IMPACT achieved 96.3% accuracy. The IMPACT demonstrated improvements in energy efficiency, e.g., 2.23X over CNN-based ReRAM, 2.46X over Neuromorphic using NOR-Flash, and 2.06X over DNN-based PCM, suited for modern ML inference applications.
DIFEM: Key-points Interaction based Feature Extraction Module for Violence Recognition in Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Violence detection in surveillance videos is a critical task for ensuring public safety. As a result, there is increasing need for efficient and lightweight systems for automatic detection of violent behaviours. In this work, we propose an effective method which leverages human skeleton key-points to capture inherent properties of violence, such as rapid movement of specific joints and their close proximity. At the heart of our method is our novel Dynamic Interaction Feature Extraction Module (DIFEM) which captures features such as velocity, and joint intersections, effectively capturing the dynamics of violent behavior. With the features extracted by our DIFEM, we use various classification algorithms such as Random Forest, Decision tree, AdaBoost and k-Nearest Neighbor. Our approach has substantially lesser amount of parameter expense than the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods employing deep learning techniques. We perform extensive experiments on three standard violence recognition datasets, showing promising performance in all three datasets. Our proposed method surpasses several SOTA violence recognition methods.
Branch Target Buffer Reverse Engineering on Arm
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

The Branch Target Buffer (BTB) plays a critical role in efficient CPU branch prediction. Understanding the design and implementation of the BTB provides valuable insights for both compiler design and the mitigation of hardware attacks such as Spectre. However, the proprietary nature of dominant CPUs, such as those from Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, means that specific BTB implementation details are not publicly available. To address this limitation, several previous works have successfully reverse-engineered BTB information, including capacity and associativity, primarily targeting Intel's x86 processors. However, to our best knowledge, no research has attempted to reverse-engineer and expose the BTB implementation of ARM processors. This project aims to fill the gap by exploring the BTB of ARM processors. Specifically, we investigate whether existing reverse-engineering techniques developed for Intel BTB can be adapted for ARM. We reproduce the x86 methodology and identify specific PMU events for ARM to facilitate the reverse engineering process. In our experiment, we investigated our ARM CPU, i.e., the quad-core Cortex-A72 of the Raspberry Pi 4B. Our results show that the BTB capacity is 4K, the set index starts from the 5th bit and ends with the 15th bit of the PC (11 bits in total), and there are 2 ways in each set. The source code can be find at https://github.com/stefan1wan/BTB_ARM_RE.
Upcycling Noise for Federated Unlearning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In Federated Learning (FL), multiple clients collaboratively train a model without sharing raw data. This paradigm can be further enhanced by Differential Privacy (DP) to protect local data from information inference attacks and is thus termed DPFL. An emerging privacy requirement, ``the right to be forgotten'' for clients, poses new challenges to DPFL but remains largely unexplored. Despite numerous studies on federated unlearning (FU), they are inapplicable to DPFL because the noise introduced by the DP mechanism compromises their effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we propose Federated Unlearning with Indistinguishability (FUI) to unlearn the local data of a target client in DPFL for the first time. FUI consists of two main steps: local model retraction and global noise calibration, resulting in an unlearning model that is statistically indistinguishable from the retrained model. Specifically, we demonstrate that the noise added in DPFL can endow the unlearning model with a certain level of indistinguishability after local model retraction, and then fortify the degree of unlearning through global noise calibration. Additionally, for the efficient and consistent implementation of the proposed FUI, we formulate a two-stage Stackelberg game to derive optimal unlearning strategies for both the server and the target client. Privacy and convergence analyses confirm theoretical guarantees, while experimental results based on four real-world datasets illustrate that our proposed FUI achieves superior model performance and higher efficiency compared to mainstream FU schemes. Simulation results further verify the optimality of the derived unlearning strategies.
Towards 3D Acceleration for low-power Mixture-of-Experts and Multi-Head Attention Spiking Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking Neural Networks(SNNs) provide a brain-inspired and event-driven mechanism that is believed to be critical to unlock energy-efficient deep learning. The mixture-of-experts approach mirrors the parallel distributed processing of nervous systems, introducing conditional computation policies and expanding model capacity without scaling up the number of computational operations. Additionally, spiking mixture-of-experts self-attention mechanisms enhance representation capacity, effectively capturing diverse patterns of entities and dependencies between visual or linguistic tokens. However, there is currently a lack of hardware support for highly parallel distributed processing needed by spiking transformers, which embody a brain-inspired computation. This paper introduces the first 3D hardware architecture and design methodology for Mixture-of-Experts and Multi-Head Attention spiking transformers. By leveraging 3D integration with memory-on-logic and logic-on-logic stacking, we explore such brain-inspired accelerators with spatially stackable circuitry, demonstrating significant optimization of energy efficiency and latency compared to conventional 2D CMOS integration.
SAME: Learning Generic Language-Guided Visual Navigation with State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The academic field of learning instruction-guided visual navigation can be generally categorized into high-level category-specific search and low-level language-guided navigation, depending on the granularity of language instruction, in which the former emphasizes the exploration process, while the latter concentrates on following detailed textual commands. Despite the differing focuses of these tasks, the underlying requirements of interpreting instructions, comprehending the surroundings, and inferring action decisions remain consistent. This paper consolidates diverse navigation tasks into a unified and generic framework -- we investigate the core difficulties of sharing general knowledge and exploiting task-specific capabilities in learning navigation and propose a novel State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts (SAME) model that effectively enables an agent to infer decisions based on different-granularity language and dynamic observations. Powered by SAME, we present a versatile agent capable of addressing seven navigation tasks simultaneously that outperforms or achieves highly comparable performance to task-specific agents.
WavFusion: Towards wav2vec 2.0 Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Speech emotion recognition (SER) remains a challenging yet crucial task due to the inherent complexity and diversity of human emotions. To address this problem, researchers attempt to fuse information from other modalities via multimodal learning. However, existing multimodal fusion techniques often overlook the intricacies of cross-modal interactions, resulting in suboptimal feature representations. In this paper, we propose WavFusion, a multimodal speech emotion recognition framework that addresses critical research problems in effective multimodal fusion, heterogeneity among modalities, and discriminative representation learning. By leveraging a gated cross-modal attention mechanism and multimodal homogeneous feature discrepancy learning, WavFusion demonstrates improved performance over existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Our work highlights the importance of capturing nuanced cross-modal interactions and learning discriminative representations for accurate multimodal SER. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets (IEMOCAP and MELD) demonstrate that WavFusion succeeds over the state-of-the-art strategies on emotion recognition.
Electrocardiogram (ECG) Based Cardiac Arrhythmia Detection and Classification using Machine Learning Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence, specifically Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), have opened new prospects in medical sciences for improved diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of severe health conditions. This paper focuses on the development of an ML model with high predictive accuracy to classify arrhythmic electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The ECG signals datasets utilized in this study were sourced from the PhysioNet and MIT-BIH databases. The research commenced with binary classification, where an optimized Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model yielded excellent results in differentiating normal and atrial fibrillation signals. A pivotal aspect of this research was a survey among medical professionals, which not only validated the practicality of AI-based ECG classifiers but also identified areas for improvement, including accuracy and the inclusion of more arrhythmia types. These insights drove the development of an advanced Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) system capable of classifying five different types of ECG signals with better accuracy and precision. The CNN model's robust performance was ensured through rigorous stratified 5-fold cross validation. A web portal was also developed to demonstrate real-world utility, offering access to the trained model for real-time classification. This study highlights the potential applications of such models in remote health monitoring, predictive healthcare, assistive diagnostic tools, and simulated environments for educational training and interdisciplinary collaboration between data scientists and medical personnel.
RefSAM3D: Adapting SAM with Cross-modal Reference for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The Segment Anything Model (SAM), originally built on a 2D Vision Transformer (ViT), excels at capturing global patterns in 2D natural images but struggles with 3D medical imaging modalities like CT and MRI. These modalities require capturing spatial information in volumetric space for tasks such as organ segmentation and tumor quantification. To address this challenge, we introduce RefSAM3D, which adapts SAM for 3D medical imaging by incorporating a 3D image adapter and cross-modal reference prompt generation. Our approach modifies the visual encoder to handle 3D inputs and enhances the mask decoder for direct 3D mask generation. We also integrate textual prompts to improve segmentation accuracy and consistency in complex anatomical scenarios. By employing a hierarchical attention mechanism, our model effectively captures and integrates information across different scales. Extensive evaluations on multiple medical imaging datasets demonstrate the superior performance of RefSAM3D over state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions advance the application of SAM in accurately segmenting complex anatomical structures in medical imaging.
Do We Need to Design Specific Diffusion Models for Different Tasks? Try ONE-PIC
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large pretrained diffusion models have demonstrated impressive generation capabilities and have been adapted to various downstream tasks. However, unlike Large Language Models (LLMs) that can learn multiple tasks in a single model based on instructed data, diffusion models always require additional branches, task-specific training strategies, and losses for effective adaptation to different downstream tasks. This task-specific fine-tuning approach brings two drawbacks. 1) The task-specific additional networks create gaps between pretraining and fine-tuning which hinders the transfer of pretrained knowledge. 2) It necessitates careful additional network design, raising the barrier to learning and implementation, and making it less user-friendly. Thus, a question arises: Can we achieve a simple, efficient, and general approach to fine-tune diffusion models? To this end, we propose ONE-PIC. It enhances the inherited generative ability in the pretrained diffusion models without introducing additional modules. Specifically, we propose In-Visual-Context Tuning, which constructs task-specific training data by arranging source images and target images into a single image. This approach makes downstream fine-tuning closer to the pertaining, allowing our model to adapt more quickly to various downstream tasks. Moreover, we propose a Masking Strategy to unify different generative tasks. This strategy transforms various downstream fine-tuning tasks into predictions of the masked portions. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method is simple and efficient which streamlines the adaptation process and achieves excellent performance with lower costs. Code is available at https://github.com/tobran/ONE-PIC.
Are there stars in Bluesky? A comparative exploratory analysis of altmetric mentions between X and Bluesky
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

This study examines the shift in the scientific community from X (formerly Twitter) to Bluesky, its impact on scientific communication, and consequently on social metrics (altmetrics). Analyzing 10,174 publications from multidisciplinary and library and information science (LIS) journals in 2024, the results reveal a notable increase in Bluesky activity for multidisciplinary journals in November 2024, likely influenced by political and platform changes, with mentions doubling or quadrupling for journals like Nature and Science. In LIS, the adoption of Bluesky is more limited and shows significant variations across journals, suggesting discipline-specific adoption patterns. However, overall engagement on Bluesky remains significantly lower than on X. While X currently dominates altmetric mentions, the observed growth on Bluesky suggests a potential shift in the future, underscoring its emerging role in academic dissemination and the challenges of adapting scholarly communication metrics across evolving platforms.
RouteNet-Fermi: Network Modeling With GNN (Analysis And Re-implementation)
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Network performance modeling presents important challenges in modern computer networks due to increasing complexity, scale, and diverse traffic patterns. While traditional approaches like queuing theory and packet-level simulation have served as foundational tools, they face limitations in modeling complex traffic behaviors and scaling to large networks. This project presents an extended implementation of RouteNet-Fermi, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture designed for network performance prediction, with additional recurrent neural network variants. We improve the the original architecture by implementing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) cells alongside the existing Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) cells implementation. This work contributes to the understanding of recurrent neural architectures in GNN-based network modeling and provides a flexible framework for future experimentation with different cell types.
Shifting NER into High Gear: The Auto-AdvER Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a case study on the development of Auto-AdvER, a specialised named entity recognition schema and dataset for text in the car advertisement genre. Developed with industry needs in mind, Auto-AdvER is designed to enhance text mining analytics in this domain and contributes a linguistically unique NER dataset. We present a schema consisting of three labels: "Condition", "Historic" and "Sales Options". We outline the guiding principles for annotation, describe the methodology for schema development, and show the results of an annotation study demonstrating inter-annotator agreement of 92% F1-Score. Furthermore, we compare the performance by using encoder-only models: BERT, DeBERTaV3 and decoder-only open and closed source Large Language Models (LLMs): Llama, Qwen, GPT-4 and Gemini. Our results show that the class of LLMs outperforms the smaller encoder-only models. However, the LLMs are costly and far from perfect for this task. We present this work as a stepping stone toward more fine-grained analysis and discuss Auto-AdvER's potential impact on advertisement analytics and customer insights, including applications such as the analysis of market dynamics and data-driven predictive maintenance. Our schema, as well as our associated findings, are suitable for both private and public entities considering named entity recognition in the automotive domain, or other specialist domains.
Multimodal Biometric Authentication Using Camera-Based PPG and Fingerprint Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Camera-based photoplethysmography (PPG) obtained from smartphones has shown great promise for personalized healthcare and secure authentication. This paper presents a multimodal biometric system that integrates PPG signals extracted from videos with fingerprint data to enhance the accuracy of user verification. The system requires users to place their fingertip on the camera lens for a few seconds, allowing the capture and processing of unique biometric characteristics. Our approach employs a neural network with two structured state-space model (SSM) encoders to manage the distinct modalities. Fingerprint images are transformed into pixel sequences, and along with segmented PPG waveforms, they are input into the encoders. A cross-modal attention mechanism then extracts refined feature representations, and a distribution-oriented contrastive loss function aligns these features within a unified latent space. Experimental results demonstrate the system's superior performance across various evaluation metrics in both single-session and dual-session authentication scenarios.
RSUniVLM: A Unified Vision Language Model for Remote Sensing via Granularity-oriented Mixture of Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Remote Sensing Vision-Language Models (RS VLMs) have made much progress in the tasks of remote sensing (RS) image comprehension. While performing well in multi-modal reasoning and multi-turn conversations, the existing models lack pixel-level understanding and struggle with multi-image inputs. In this work, we propose RSUniVLM, a unified, end-to-end RS VLM designed for comprehensive vision understanding across multiple granularity, including image-level, region-level, and pixel-level tasks. RSUniVLM also performs effectively in multi-image analysis, with instances of change detection and change captioning. To enhance the model's ability to capture visual information at different levels without increasing model size, we design a novel architecture called Granularity-oriented Mixture of Experts to constraint the model to about 1 billion parameters. We also construct a large-scale RS instruction-following dataset based on a variety of existing datasets in both RS and general domain, encompassing various tasks such as object localization, visual question answering, and semantic segmentation. Substantial experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of the proposed RSUniVLM up to state-of-the-art across various RS tasks. Code and model will be available at \href{https://github.com/xuliu-cyber/RSUniVLM}{here}.
Recursive Computation of Path Homology for Stratified Digraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

Stratified digraphs are popular models for feedforward neural networks. However, computation of their path homologies has been limited to low dimensions due to high computational complexity. A recursive algorithm is proposed to compute certain high-dimensional (reduced) path homologies of stratified digraphs. By recursion on matrix representations of homologies of subgraphs, the algorithm efficiently computes the full-depth path homology of a stratified digraph, i.e. homology with dimension equal to the depth of the graph. The algorithm can be used to compute full-depth persistent homologies and for acyclic digraphs, the maximal path homology, i.e., path homology with dimension equal to the maximum path length of a graph. Numerical experiments show that the algorithm has a significant advantage over the general algorithm in computation time as the depth of stratified digraph increases.
Jointly RS Image Deblurring and Super-Resolution with Adjustable-Kernel and Multi-Domain Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Remote Sensing (RS) image deblurring and Super-Resolution (SR) are common tasks in computer vision that aim at restoring RS image detail and spatial scale, respectively. However, real-world RS images often suffer from a complex combination of global low-resolution (LR) degeneration and local blurring degeneration. Although carefully designed deblurring and SR models perform well on these two tasks individually, a unified model that performs jointly RS image deblurring and super-resolution (JRSIDSR) task is still challenging due to the vital dilemma of reconstructing the global and local degeneration simultaneously. Additionally, existing methods struggle to capture the interrelationship between deblurring and SR processes, leading to suboptimal results. To tackle these issues, we give a unified theoretical analysis of RS images' spatial and blur degeneration processes and propose a dual-branch parallel network named AKMD-Net for the JRSIDSR task. AKMD-Net consists of two main branches: deblurring and super-resolution branches. In the deblurring branch, we design a pixel-adjustable kernel block (PAKB) to estimate the local and spatial-varying blur kernels. In the SR branch, a multi-domain attention block (MDAB) is proposed to capture the global contextual information enhanced with high-frequency details. Furthermore, we develop an adaptive feature fusion (AFF) module to model the contextual relationships between the deblurring and SR branches. Finally, we design an adaptive Wiener loss (AW Loss) to depress the prior noise in the reconstructed images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed AKMD-Net achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) quantitative and qualitative performance on commonly used RS image datasets. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/zpc456/AKMD-Net.