OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Cooperative Dual Attention for Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement with Facial Cues
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we focus on leveraging facial cues beyond the lip region for robust Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement (AVSE). The facial region, encompassing the lip region, reflects additional speech-related attributes such as gender, skin color, nationality, etc., which contribute to the effectiveness of AVSE. However, static and dynamic speech-unrelated attributes also exist, causing appearance changes during speech. To address these challenges, we propose a Dual Attention Cooperative Framework, DualAVSE, to ignore speech-unrelated information, capture speech-related information with facial cues, and dynamically integrate it with the audio signal for AVSE. Specifically, we introduce a spatial attention-based visual encoder to capture and enhance visual speech information beyond the lip region, incorporating global facial context and automatically ignoring speech-unrelated information for robust visual feature extraction. Additionally, a dynamic visual feature fusion strategy is introduced by integrating a temporal-dimensional self-attention module, enabling the model to robustly handle facial variations. The acoustic noise in the speaking process is variable, impacting audio quality. Therefore, a dynamic fusion strategy for both audio and visual features is introduced to address this issue. By integrating cooperative dual attention in the visual encoder and audio-visual fusion strategy, our model effectively extracts beneficial speech information from both audio and visual cues for AVSE. Thorough analysis and comparison on different datasets, including normal and challenging cases with unreliable or absent visual information, consistently show our model outperforming existing methods across multiple metrics.
Racing With ROS 2 A Navigation System for an Autonomous Formula Student Race Car
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The advent of autonomous vehicle technologies has significantly impacted various sectors, including motorsport, where Formula Student and Formula: Society of Automotive Engineers introduced autonomous racing classes. These offer new challenges to aspiring engineers, including the team at QUT Motorsport, but also raise the entry barrier due to the complexity of high-speed navigation and control. This paper presents an open-source solution using the Robot Operating System 2, specifically its open-source navigation stack, to address these challenges in autonomous Formula Student race cars. We compare off-the-shelf navigation libraries that this stack comprises of against traditional custom-made programs developed by QUT Motorsport to evaluate their applicability in autonomous racing scenarios and integrate them onto an autonomous race car. Our contributions include quantitative and qualitative comparisons of these packages against traditional navigation solutions, aiming to lower the entry barrier for autonomous racing. This paper also serves as a comprehensive tutorial for teams participating in similar racing disciplines and other autonomous mobile robot applications.
Fair Influence Maximization in Social Networks: A Community-Based Evolutionary Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Influence Maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in network science, which attempts to find a subset of users to maximize the influence spread. A new variant of IM, Fair Influence Maximization (FIM), which primarily enhances the fair propagation of information, attracts increasing attention in academic. However, existing algorithms for FIM suffer from a trade-off between fairness and running time. Since it is a tough task to ensure that users are fairly influenced in terms of sensitive attributes, such as race or gender, while maintaining a high influence spread. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose an effective and efficient Community-based Evolutionary Algorithm for FIM (named CEA-FIM). In CEA-FIM, a community-based node selection strategy is proposed to identify potential nodes, which not only considers the size of the community but also the attributes of the nodes in the community. Subsequently, we design an evolutionary algorithm based on the proposed node selection strategy to hasten the search for the optimal solution, including the novel initialization, crossover and mutation strategies. We validate the proposed algorithm CEA-FIM by performing experiments on real-world and synthetic networks. The experimental results show that the proposed CEA-FIM achieves a better balance between effectiveness and efficiency, compared to the state-of-the-art baseline algorithms.
Four-set Hypergraphlets for Characterization of Directed Hypergraphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

A directed hypergraph, which consists of nodes and hyperarcs, is a higher-order data structure that naturally models directional group interactions (e.g., chemical reactions of molecules). Although there have been extensive studies on local structures of (directed) graphs in the real world, those of directed hypergraphs remain unexplored. In this work, we focus on measurements, findings, and applications related to local structures of directed hypergraphs, and they together contribute to a systematic understanding of various real-world systems interconnected by directed group interactions. Our first contribution is to define 91 directed hypergraphlets (DHGs), which disjointly categorize directed connections and overlaps among four node sets that compose two incident hyperarcs. Our second contribution is to develop exact and approximate algorithms for counting the occurrences of each DHG. Our last contribution is to characterize 11 real-world directed hypergraphs and individual hyperarcs in them using the occurrences of DHGs, which reveals clear domain-based local structural patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that our DHG-based characterization gives up to 12% and 33% better performances on hypergraph clustering and hyperarc prediction, respectively, than baseline characterization methods. Moreover, we show that CODA-A, which is our proposed approximate algorithm, is up to 32X faster than its competitors with similar characterization quality.
AdaMedGraph: Adaboosting Graph Neural Networks for Personalized Medicine
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Precision medicine tailored to individual patients has gained significant attention in recent times. Machine learning techniques are now employed to process personalized data from various sources, including images, genetics, and assessments. These techniques have demonstrated good outcomes in many clinical prediction tasks. Notably, the approach of constructing graphs by linking similar patients and then applying graph neural networks (GNNs) stands out, because related information from analogous patients are aggregated and considered for prediction. However, selecting the appropriate edge feature to define patient similarity and construct the graph is challenging, given that each patient is depicted by high-dimensional features from diverse sources. Previous studies rely on human expertise to select the edge feature, which is neither scalable nor efficient in pinpointing crucial edge features for complex diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named \ours, which can automatically select important features to construct multiple patient similarity graphs, and train GNNs based on these graphs as weak learners in adaptive boosting. \ours{} is evaluated on two real-world medical scenarios and shows superiors performance.
RelJoin: Relative-cost-based Selection of Distributed Join Methods for Query Plan Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Selecting appropriate distributed join methods for logical join operations in a query plan is crucial for the performance of data-intensive scalable computing (DISC). Different network communication patterns in the data exchange phase generate varying network communication workloads and significantly affect the distributed join performance. However, most cost-based query optimizers focus on the local computing cost and do not precisely model the network communication cost. We propose a cost model for various distributed join methods to optimize join queries in DISC platforms. Our method precisely measures the network and local computing workloads in different execution phases, using information on the size and cardinality statistics of datasets and cluster join parallelism. Our cost model reveals the importance of the relative size of the joining datasets. We implement an efficient distributed join selection strategy, known as RelJoin in SparkSQL, which is an industry-prevalent distributed data processing framework. RelJoin uses runtime adaptive statistics for accurate cost estimation and selects optimal distributed join methods for logical joins to optimize the physical query plan. The evaluation results on the TPC-DS benchmark show that RelJoin performs best in 62 of the 97 queries and can reduce the average query time by 21% compared with other strategies.
C-ITS Environment Modeling and Attack Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

As technology advances, cities are evolving into smart cities, with the ability to process large amounts of data and the increasing complexity and diversification of various elements within urban areas. Among the core systems of a smart city is the Cooperative-Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS). C-ITS is a system where vehicles provide real-time information to drivers about surrounding traffic conditions, sudden stops, falling objects, and other accident risks through roadside base stations. It consists of road infrastructure, C-ITS centers, and vehicle terminals. However, as smart cities integrate many elements through networks and electronic control, they are susceptible to cybersecurity issues. In the case of cybersecurity problems in C-ITS, there is a significant risk of safety issues arising. This technical document aims to model the C-ITS environment and the services it provides, with the purpose of identifying the attack surface where security incidents could occur in a smart city environment. Subsequently, based on the identified attack surface, the document aims to construct attack scenarios and their respective stages. The document provides a description of the concept of C-ITS, followed by the description of the C-ITS environment model, service model, and attack scenario model defined by us.
TVT: Training-Free Vision Transformer Search on Tiny Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Training-free Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture search is presented to search for a better ViT with zero-cost proxies. While ViTs achieve significant distillation gains from CNN teacher models on small datasets, the current zero-cost proxies in ViTs do not generalize well to the distillation training paradigm according to our experimental observations. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate how to search in a training-free manner with the help of teacher models and devise an effective Training-free ViT (TVT) search framework. Firstly, we observe that the similarity of attention maps between ViT and ConvNet teachers affects distill accuracy notably. Thus, we present a teacher-aware metric conditioned on the feature attention relations between teacher and student. Additionally, TVT employs the L2-Norm of the student's weights as the student-capability metric to improve ranking consistency. Finally, TVT searches for the best ViT for distilling with ConvNet teachers via our teacher-aware metric and student-capability metric, resulting in impressive gains in efficiency and effectiveness. Extensive experiments on various tiny datasets and search spaces show that our TVT outperforms state-of-the-art training-free search methods. The code will be released.
Prototype of deployment of Federated Learning with IoT devices
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In the age of technology, data is an increasingly important resource. This importance is growing in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where sub fields such as Machine Learning (ML) need more and more data to achieve better results. Internet of Things (IoT) is the connection of sensors and smart objects to collect and exchange data, in addition to achieving many other tasks. A huge amount of the resource desired, data, is stored in mobile devices, sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but remains there due to data protection restrictions. At the same time these devices do not have enough data or computational capacity to train good models. Moreover, transmitting, storing and processing all this data on a centralised server is problematic. Federated Learning (FL) provides an innovative solution that allows devices to learn in a collaborative way. More importantly, it accomplishes this without violating data protection laws. FL is currently growing, and there are several solutions that implement it. This article presents a prototype of a FL solution where the IoT devices used were raspberry pi boards. The results compare the performance of a solution of this type with those obtained in traditional approaches. In addition, the FL solution performance was tested in a hostile environment. A convolutional neural network (CNN) and a image data set were used. The results show the feasibility and usability of these techniques, although in many cases they do not reach the performance of traditional approaches.
BHGNN-RT: Network embedding for directed heterogeneous graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Networks are one of the most valuable data structures for modeling problems in the real world. However, the most recent node embedding strategies have focused on undirected graphs, with limited attention to directed graphs, especially directed heterogeneous graphs. In this study, we first investigated the network properties of directed heterogeneous graphs. Based on network analysis, we proposed an embedding method, a bidirectional heterogeneous graph neural network with random teleport (BHGNN-RT), for directed heterogeneous graphs, that leverages bidirectional message-passing process and network heterogeneity. With the optimization of teleport proportion, BHGNN-RT is beneficial to overcome the over-smoothing problem. Extensive experiments on various datasets were conducted to verify the efficacy and efficiency of BHGNN-RT. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of message components, model layer, and teleport proportion on model performance. The performance comparison with all other baselines illustrates that BHGNN-RT achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming the benchmark methods in both node classification and unsupervised clustering tasks.
IDD-AW: A Benchmark for Safe and Robust Segmentation of Drive Scenes in Unstructured Traffic and Adverse Weather
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Large-scale deployment of fully autonomous vehicles requires a very high degree of robustness to unstructured traffic, and weather conditions, and should prevent unsafe mispredictions. While there are several datasets and benchmarks focusing on segmentation for drive scenes, they are not specifically focused on safety and robustness issues. We introduce the IDD-AW dataset, which provides 5000 pairs of high-quality images with pixel-level annotations, captured under rain, fog, low light, and snow in unstructured driving conditions. As compared to other adverse weather datasets, we provide i.) more annotated images, ii.) paired Near-Infrared (NIR) image for each frame, iii.) larger label set with a 4-level label hierarchy to capture unstructured traffic conditions. We benchmark state-of-the-art models for semantic segmentation in IDD-AW. We also propose a new metric called ''Safe mean Intersection over Union (Safe mIoU)'' for hierarchical datasets which penalizes dangerous mispredictions that are not captured in the traditional definition of mean Intersection over Union (mIoU). The results show that IDD-AW is one of the most challenging datasets to date for these tasks. The dataset and code will be available here: http://iddaw.github.io.
Towards Interpretable Classification of Leukocytes based on Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Label-free approaches are attractive in cytological imaging due to their flexibility and cost efficiency. They are supported by machine learning methods, which, despite the lack of labeling and the associated lower contrast, can classify cells with high accuracy where the human observer has little chance to discriminate cells. In order to better integrate these workflows into the clinical decision making process, this work investigates the calibration of confidence estimation for the automated classification of leukocytes. In addition, different visual explanation approaches are compared, which should bring machine decision making closer to professional healthcare applications. Furthermore, we were able to identify general detection patterns in neural networks and demonstrate the utility of the presented approaches in different scenarios of blood cell analysis.
The Westermo test system performance data set
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

There is a growing body of knowledge in the computer science, software engineering, software testing and software test automation disciplines. However, a challenge for researchers is to evaluate their research findings, ideas and tools due to lack of realistic data. This paper presents the Westermo test system performance data set. More than twenty performance metrics such as CPU and memory usage sampled twice per minute for a month on nineteen test systems driving nightly testing of cyber-physical systems has been anonymized and released. The industrial motivation is to spur work on anomaly detection in seasonal data such that one may increase trust in nightly testing. One could ask: If the test system is in an abnormal state - can we trust the test results? How could one automate the detection of abnormal states? The data set has previously been used by students and in hackathons. By releasing it we hope to simplify experiments on anomaly detection based on rules, thresholds, statistics, machine learning or artificial intelligence, perhaps while incorporating seasonality. We also hope that the data set could lead to findings in sustainable software engineering.
CMed-GPT: Prompt Tuning for Entity-Aware Chinese Medical Dialogue Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Medical dialogue generation relies on natural language generation techniques to enable online medical consultations. Recently, the widespread adoption of large-scale models in the field of natural language processing has facilitated rapid advancements in this technology. Existing medical dialogue models are mostly based on BERT and pre-trained on English corpora, but there is a lack of high-performing models on the task of Chinese medical dialogue generation. To solve the above problem, this paper proposes CMed-GPT, which is the GPT pre-training language model based on Chinese medical domain text. The model is available in two versions, namely, base and large, with corresponding perplexity values of 8.64 and 8.01. Additionally, we incorporate lexical and entity embeddings into the dialogue text in a uniform manner to meet the requirements of downstream dialogue generation tasks. By applying both fine-tuning and p-tuning to CMed-GPT, we lowered the PPL from 8.44 to 7.35. This study not only confirms the exceptional performance of the CMed-GPT model in generating Chinese biomedical text but also highlights the advantages of p-tuning over traditional fine-tuning with prefix prompts. Furthermore, we validate the significance of incorporating external information in medical dialogue generation, which enhances the quality of dialogue generation.
Multi-tap Resistive Sensing and FEM Modeling enables Shape and Force Estimation in Soft Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We address the challenge of reliable and accurate proprioception in soft robots, specifically those with tight packaging constraints and relying only on internally embedded sensors. While various sensing approaches with single sensors have been tried, often with a constant curvature assumption, we look into sensing local deformations at multiple locations of the sensor. In our approach, we multi-tap an off-the-shelf resistive sensor by creating multiple electrical connections onto the resistive layer of the sensor and we insert the sensor into a soft body. This modification allows us to measure changes in resistance at multiple segments throughout the length of the sensor, providing improved resolution of local deformations in the soft body. These measurements inform a model based on a finite element method (FEM) that estimates the shape of the soft body and the magnitude of an external force acting at a known arbitrary location. Our model-based approach estimates soft body deformation with approximately 3% average relative error while taking into account internal fluidic actuation. Our estimate of external force disturbance has an 11% relative error within a range of 0 to 5 N. The combined sensing and modeling approach can be integrated, for instance, into soft manipulation platforms to enable features such as identifying the shape and material properties of an object being grasped. Such manipulators can benefit from the inherent softness and compliance while being fully proprioceptive, relying only on embedded sensing and not on external systems such as motion capture. Such proprioception is essential for the deployment of soft robots in real-world scenarios.
Large Language Models as Automated Aligners for benchmarking Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have reached a new level of sophistication, showing notable competence in executing intricate cognition and reasoning tasks. However, existing evaluation benchmarks, primarily relying on rigid, hand-crafted datasets to measure task-specific performance, face significant limitations in assessing the alignment of these increasingly anthropomorphic models with human intelligence. In this work, we address the limitations via Auto-Bench, which delves into exploring LLMs as proficient aligners, measuring the alignment between VLMs and human intelligence and value through automatic data curation and assessment. Specifically, for data curation, Auto-Bench utilizes LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to automatically generate a vast set of question-answer-reasoning triplets via prompting on visual symbolic representations (e.g., captions, object locations, instance relationships, and etc.). The curated data closely matches human intent, owing to the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs. Through this pipeline, a total of 28.5K human-verified and 3,504K unfiltered question-answer-reasoning triplets have been curated, covering 4 primary abilities and 16 sub-abilities. We subsequently engage LLMs like GPT-3.5 to serve as judges, implementing the quantitative and qualitative automated assessments to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs. Our validation results reveal that LLMs are proficient in both evaluation data curation and model assessment, achieving an average agreement rate of 85%. We envision Auto-Bench as a flexible, scalable, and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the evolving sophisticated VLMs.