OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
The Role of Generative AI in Software Development Productivity: A Pilot Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

With software development increasingly reliant on innovative technologies, there is a growing interest in exploring the potential of generative AI tools to streamline processes and enhance productivity. In this scenario, this paper investigates the integration of generative AI tools within software development, focusing on understanding their uses, benefits, and challenges to software professionals, in particular, looking at aspects of productivity. Through a pilot case study involving software practitioners working in different roles, we gathered valuable experiences on the integration of generative AI tools into their daily work routines. Our findings reveal a generally positive perception of these tools in individual productivity while also highlighting the need to address identified limitations. Overall, our research sets the stage for further exploration into the evolving landscape of software development practices with the integration of generative AI tools.
Learning to Approximate Particle Smoothing Trajectories via Diffusion Generative Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Learning dynamical systems from sparse observations is critical in numerous fields, including biology, finance, and physics. Even if tackling such problems is standard in general information fusion, it remains challenging for contemporary machine learning models, such as diffusion models. We introduce a method that integrates conditional particle filtering with ancestral sampling and diffusion models, enabling the generation of realistic trajectories that align with observed data. Our approach uses a smoother based on iterating a conditional particle filter with ancestral sampling to first generate plausible trajectories matching observed marginals, and learns the corresponding diffusion model. This approach provides both a generative method for high-quality, smoothed trajectories under complex constraints, and an efficient approximation of the particle smoothing distribution for classical tracking problems. We demonstrate the approach in time-series generation and interpolation tasks, including vehicle tracking and single-cell RNA sequencing data.
Designing Reconfigurable Interconnection Network of Heterogeneous Chiplets Using Kalman Filter
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Heterogeneous chiplets have been proposed for accelerating high-performance computing tasks. Integrated inside one package, CPU and GPU chiplets can share a common interconnection network that can be implemented through the interposer. However, CPU and GPU applications have very different traffic patterns in general. Without effective management of the network resource, some chiplets can suffer significant performance degradation because the network bandwidth is taken away by communication-intensive applications. Therefore, techniques need to be developed to effectively manage the shared network resources. In a chiplet-based system, resource management needs to not only react in real-time but also be cost-efficient. In this work, we propose a reconfigurable network architecture, leveraging Kalman Filter to make accurate predictions on network resources needed by the applications and then adaptively change the resource allocation. Using our design, the network bandwidth can be fairly allocated to avoid starvation or performance degradation. Our evaluation results show that the proposed reconfigurable interconnection network can dynamically react to the changes in traffic demand of the chiplets and improve the system performance with low cost and design complexity.
ContextFlow++: Generalist-Specialist Flow-based Generative Models with Mixed-Variable Context Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Normalizing flow-based generative models have been widely used in applications where the exact density estimation is of major importance. Recent research proposes numerous methods to improve their expressivity. However, conditioning on a context is largely overlooked area in the bijective flow research. Conventional conditioning with the vector concatenation is limited to only a few flow types. More importantly, this approach cannot support a practical setup where a set of context-conditioned (specialist) models are trained with the fixed pretrained general-knowledge (generalist) model. We propose ContextFlow++ approach to overcome these limitations using an additive conditioning with explicit generalist-specialist knowledge decoupling. Furthermore, we support discrete contexts by the proposed mixed-variable architecture with context encoders. Particularly, our context encoder for discrete variables is a surjective flow from which the context-conditioned continuous variables are sampled. Our experiments on rotated MNIST-R, corrupted CIFAR-10C, real-world ATM predictive maintenance and SMAP unsupervised anomaly detection benchmarks show that the proposed ContextFlow++ offers faster stable training and achieves higher performance metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gudovskiy/contextflow.
A Multi-Graph Convolutional Neural Network Model for Short-Term Prediction of Turning Movements at Signalized Intersections
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Traffic flow forecasting is a crucial first step in intelligent and proactive traffic management. Traffic flow parameters are volatile and uncertain, making traffic flow forecasting a difficult task if the appropriate forecasting model is not used. Additionally, the non-Euclidean data structure of traffic flow parameters is challenging to analyze from both spatial and temporal perspectives. State-of-the-art deep learning approaches use pure convolution, recurrent neural networks, and hybrid methods to achieve this objective efficiently. However, many of the approaches in the literature rely on complex architectures that can be difficult to train. This complexity also adds to the black-box nature of deep learning. This study introduces a novel deep learning architecture, referred to as the multigraph convolution neural network (MGCNN), for turning movement prediction at intersections. The proposed architecture combines a multigraph structure, built to model temporal variations in traffic data, with a spectral convolution operation to support modeling the spatial variations in traffic data over the graphs. The proposed model was tested using twenty days of flow and traffic control data collected from an arterial in downtown Chattanooga, TN, with ten signalized intersections. The model's ability to perform short-term predictions over 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 minutes into the future was evaluated against four baseline state-of-the-art models. The results showed that our proposed model is superior to the other baseline models in predicting turning movements with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.9
Intelligent Text-Conditioned Music Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) is a multimodal neural network trained on (text, image) pairs to predict the most relevant text caption given an image. It has been used extensively in image generation by connecting its output with a generative model such as VQGAN, with the most notable example being OpenAI's DALLE-2. In this project, we apply a similar approach to bridge the gap between natural language and music. Our model is split into two steps: first, we train a CLIP-like model on pairs of text and music over contrastive loss to align a piece of music with its most probable text caption. Then, we combine the alignment model with a music decoder to generate music. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at text-conditioned deep music generation. Our experiments show that it is possible to train the text-music alignment model using contrastive loss and train a decoder to generate music from text prompts.
COS-Mix: Cosine Similarity and Distance Fusion for Improved Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

This study proposes a novel hybrid retrieval strategy for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that integrates cosine similarity and cosine distance measures to improve retrieval performance, particularly for sparse data. The traditional cosine similarity measure is widely used to capture the similarity between vectors in high-dimensional spaces. However, it has been shown that this measure can yield arbitrary results in certain scenarios. To address this limitation, we incorporate cosine distance measures to provide a complementary perspective by quantifying the dissimilarity between vectors. Our approach is experimented on proprietary data, unlike recent publications that have used open-source datasets. The proposed method demonstrates enhanced retrieval performance and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the semantic relationships between documents or items. This hybrid strategy offers a promising solution for efficiently and accurately retrieving relevant information in knowledge-intensive applications, leveraging techniques such as BM25 (sparse) retrieval , vector (Dense) retrieval, and cosine distance based retrieval to facilitate efficient information retrieval.
Generalized Exponentiated Gradient Algorithms and Their Application to On-Line Portfolio Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel family of generalized exponentiated gradient (EG) updates derived from an Alpha-Beta divergence regularization function. Collectively referred to as EGAB, the proposed updates belong to the category of multiplicative gradient algorithms for positive data and demonstrate considerable flexibility by controlling iteration behavior and performance through three hyperparameters: $α$, $β$, and the learning rate $η$. To enforce a unit $l_1$ norm constraint for nonnegative weight vectors within generalized EGAB algorithms, we develop two slightly distinct approaches. One method exploits scale-invariant loss functions, while the other relies on gradient projections onto the feasible domain. As an illustration of their applicability, we evaluate the proposed updates in addressing the online portfolio selection problem (OLPS) using gradient-based methods. Here, they not only offer a unified perspective on the search directions of various OLPS algorithms (including the standard exponentiated gradient and diverse mean-reversion strategies), but also facilitate smooth interpolation and extension of these updates due to the flexibility in hyperparameter selection. Simulation results confirm that the adaptability of these generalized gradient updates can effectively enhance the performance for some portfolios, particularly in scenarios involving transaction costs.
SimSAM: Zero-shot Medical Image Segmentation via Simulated Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The recently released Segment Anything Model (SAM) has shown powerful zero-shot segmentation capabilities through a semi-automatic annotation setup in which the user can provide a prompt in the form of clicks or bounding boxes. There is growing interest around applying this to medical imaging, where the cost of obtaining expert annotations is high, privacy restrictions may limit sharing of patient data, and model generalisation is often poor. However, there are large amounts of inherent uncertainty in medical images, due to unclear object boundaries, low-contrast media, and differences in expert labelling style. Currently, SAM is known to struggle in a zero-shot setting to adequately annotate the contours of the structure of interest in medical images, where the uncertainty is often greatest, thus requiring significant manual correction. To mitigate this, we introduce \textbf{Sim}ulated Interaction for \textbf{S}egment \textbf{A}nything \textbf{M}odel (\textsc{\textbf{SimSAM}}), an approach that leverages simulated user interaction to generate an arbitrary number of candidate masks, and uses a novel aggregation approach to output the most compatible mask. Crucially, our method can be used during inference directly on top of SAM, without any additional training requirement. Quantitatively, we evaluate our method across three publicly available medical imaging datasets, and find that our approach leads to up to a 15.5\% improvement in contour segmentation accuracy compared to zero-shot SAM. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/BenjaminTowle/SimSAM}.
Linear equations and recursively enumerable sets
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

We study connections between linear equations over various semigroups and recursively enumerable sets of positive integers. We give variants of the universal Diophantine representation of recursively enumerable sets of positive integers established by Matiyasevich. These variants use linear equations with one unkwown instead of polynomial equations with several unknowns. As a corollary we get undecidability results for linear equations over morphism semigoups and over matrix semigroups.
Hybrid Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing and Communication Exploiting Prior Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we investigate the hybrid beamforming design for a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) with hybrid analog-digital transmit antenna arrays sends dual-functional signals to communicate with a multi-antenna user and simultaneously sense the location information of a point target based on the reflected echo signals. Specifically, we aim to sense the target's unknown and random angle information by exploiting its prior distribution information, with posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB) employed as the sensing performance metric. First, we consider a sensing-only case and study the hybrid beamforming optimization to minimize the sensing PCRB. We analytically prove that hybrid beamforming can achieve the same performance as the optimized digital beamforming as long as the number of radio frequency (RF) chains is larger than 1. Then, we propose a convex relaxation based algorithm for the hybrid beamforming design with a single RF chain. Next, we study the hybrid beamforming optimization to minimize the PCRB subject to a communication rate target. Due to the intractability of the exact PCRB expression, we replace it with a tight upper bound. Although this problem is still non-convex and challenging to solve, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm for finding a high-quality suboptimal solution based on the feasible point pursuit successive convex approximation (FPP-SCA) method. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed hybrid beamforming design.
Age-Gain-Dependent Random Access for Event-Driven Periodic Updating
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper considers utilizing the knowledge of age gains to reduce the network average age of information (AoI) in random access with event-driven periodic updating for the first time. Built on the form of slotted ALOHA, we require each device to determine its age gain threshold and transmission probability in an easily implementable decentralized manner, so that the unavoided contention can be limited to devices with age gains as high as possible. For the basic case that each device utilizes its knowledge of age gain of only itself, we provide an analytical modeling approach by a multi-layer discrete-time Markov chains (DTMCs), where an external infinite-horizon DTMC manages the jumps between the beginnings of frames and an internal finite-horizon DTMC manages the evolution during an arbitrary frame. Such modelling enables that optimal access parameters can be obtained offline. For the enhanced case that each device utilizes its knowledge of age gains of all the devices, we require each device to adjust its access parameters for maximizing the estimated network \textit{expected AoI reduction} (EAR) per slot, which captures the essential for improving the contribution of the throughput to the AoI performance. To estimate the network EAR, we require each device to use Bayes' rule to keep a posteriori joint probability distribution of local age and age gain of an arbitrary device based on the channel observations. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the advantage of the proposed schemes over the existing schemes in a wide range of network configurations.
Exploring Child-Robot Interaction in Individual and Group settings in India
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This study evaluates the effectiveness of child-robot interactions with the HaKsh-E social robot in India, examining both individual and group interaction settings. The research centers on game-based interactions designed to teach hand hygiene to children aged 7-11. Utilizing video analysis, rubric assessments, and post-study questionnaires, the study gathered data from 36 participants. Findings indicate that children in both settings developed positive perceptions of the robot in terms of the robot's trustworthiness, closeness, and social support. The significant difference in the interaction level scores presented in the study suggests that group settings foster higher levels of interaction, potentially due to peer influence and collaborative dynamics. While both settings showed significant improvements in learning outcomes, the individual setting had more pronounced learning gains. This suggests that personal interactions with the robot might lead to deeper or more effective learning experiences. Consequently, this study concludes that individual interaction settings are more conducive for focused learning gains, while group settings enhance interaction and engagement.
Expected Possession Value of Control and Duel Actions for Soccer Player's Skills Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Estimation of football players' skills is one of the key tasks in sports analytics. This paper introduces multiple extensions to a widely used model, expected possession value (EPV), to address some key challenges such as selection problem. First, we assign greater weights to events occurring immediately prior to the shot rather than those preceding them (decay effect). Second, our model incorporates possession risk more accurately by considering the decay effect and effective playing time. Third, we integrate the assessment of individual player ability to win aerial and ground duels. Using the extended EPV model, we predict this metric for various football players for the upcoming season, particularly taking into account the strength of their opponents.
A Lazy Abstraction Algorithm for Markov Decision Processes: Theory and Initial Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Analysis of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) is often hindered by state space explosion. Abstraction is a well-established technique in model checking to mitigate this issue. This paper presents a novel lazy abstraction method for MDP analysis based on adaptive simulation graphs. Refinement is performed only when new parts of the state space are explored, which makes partial exploration techniques like Bounded Real-Time Dynamic Programming (BRTDP) retain more merged states. Therefore, we propose a combination of lazy abstraction and BRTDP. To evaluate the performance of our algorithm, we conduct initial experiments using the Quantitative Verification Benchmark Set.
End-to-End Hybrid Refractive-Diffractive Lens Design with Differentiable Ray-Wave Model
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Hybrid refractive-diffractive lenses combine the light efficiency of refractive lenses with the information encoding power of diffractive optical elements (DOE), showing great potential as the next generation of imaging systems. However, accurately simulating such hybrid designs is generally difficult, and in particular, there are no existing differentiable image formation models for hybrid lenses with sufficient accuracy. In this work, we propose a new hybrid ray-tracing and wave-propagation (ray-wave) model for accurate simulation of both optical aberrations and diffractive phase modulation, where the DOE is placed between the last refractive surface and the image sensor, i.e. away from the Fourier plane that is often used as a DOE position. The proposed ray-wave model is fully differentiable, enabling gradient back-propagation for end-to-end co-design of refractive-diffractive lens optimization and the image reconstruction network. We validate the accuracy of the proposed model by comparing the simulated point spread functions (PSFs) with theoretical results, as well as simulation experiments that show our model to be more accurate than solutions implemented in commercial software packages like Zemax. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model through real-world experiments and show significant improvements in both aberration correction and extended depth-of-field (EDoF) imaging. We believe the proposed model will motivate further investigation into a wide range of applications in computational imaging, computational photography, and advanced optical design. Code will be released upon publication.
Global High Categorical Resolution Land Cover Mapping via Weak Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Land cover information is indispensable for advancing the United Nations' sustainable development goals, and land cover mapping under a more detailed category system would significantly contribute to economic livelihood tracking and environmental degradation measurement. However, the substantial difficulty in acquiring fine-grained training data makes the implementation of this task particularly challenging. Here, we propose to combine fully labeled source domain and weakly labeled target domain for weakly supervised domain adaptation (WSDA). This is beneficial as the utilization of sparse and coarse weak labels can considerably alleviate the labor required for precise and detailed land cover annotation. Specifically, we introduce the Prototype-based pseudo-label Rectification and Expansion (PRE) approach, which leverages the prototypes (i.e., the class-wise feature centroids) as the bridge to connect sparse labels and global feature distributions. According to the feature distances to the prototypes, the confidence of pseudo-labels predicted in the unlabeled regions of the target domain is assessed. This confidence is then utilized to guide the dynamic expansion and rectification of pseudo-labels. Based on PRE, we carry out high categorical resolution land cover mapping for 10 cities in different regions around the world, severally using PlanetScope, Gaofen-1, and Sentinel-2 satellite images. In the study areas, we achieve cross-sensor, cross-category, and cross-continent WSDA, with the overall accuracy exceeding 80%. The promising results indicate that PRE is capable of reducing the dependency of land cover classification on high-quality annotations, thereby improving label efficiency. We expect our work to enable global fine-grained land cover mapping, which in turn promote Earth observation to provide more precise and thorough information for environmental monitoring.
YODAS: Youtube-Oriented Dataset for Audio and Speech
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we introduce YODAS (YouTube-Oriented Dataset for Audio and Speech), a large-scale, multilingual dataset comprising currently over 500k hours of speech data in more than 100 languages, sourced from both labeled and unlabeled YouTube speech datasets. The labeled subsets, including manual or automatic subtitles, facilitate supervised model training. Conversely, the unlabeled subsets are apt for self-supervised learning applications. YODAS is distinctive as the first publicly available dataset of its scale, and it is distributed under a Creative Commons license. We introduce the collection methodology utilized for YODAS, which contributes to the large-scale speech dataset construction. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive analysis of speech, text contained within the dataset. Finally, we describe the speech recognition baselines over the top-15 languages.