OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Musical Word Embedding for Music Tagging and Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Word embedding has become an essential means for text-based information retrieval. Typically, word embeddings are learned from large quantities of general and unstructured text data. However, in the domain of music, the word embedding may have difficulty understanding musical contexts or recognizing music-related entities like artists and tracks. To address this issue, we propose a new approach called Musical Word Embedding (MWE), which involves learning from various types of texts, including both everyday and music-related vocabulary. We integrate MWE into an audio-word joint representation framework for tagging and retrieving music, using words like tag, artist, and track that have different levels of musical specificity. Our experiments show that using a more specific musical word like track results in better retrieval performance, while using a less specific term like tag leads to better tagging performance. To balance this compromise, we suggest multi-prototype training that uses words with different levels of musical specificity jointly. We evaluate both word embedding and audio-word joint embedding on four tasks (tag rank prediction, music tagging, query-by-tag, and query-by-track) across two datasets (Million Song Dataset and MTG-Jamendo). Our findings show that the suggested MWE is more efficient and robust than the conventional word embedding.
Enhancing ASIC Technology Mapping via Parallel Supergate Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

With the development of large-scale integrated circuits, electronic design automation~(EDA) tools are increasingly emphasizing efficiency, with parallel algorithms becoming a trend. The optimization of delay reduction is a crucial factor for ASIC technology mapping, and supergate technology proves to be an effective method for achieving this in EDA tools flow. However, we have observed that increasing the number of generated supergates can reduce delay, but this comes at the cost of an exponential increase in computation time. In this paper, we propose a parallel supergate computing method that addresses the tradeoff between time-consuming and delay optimization. The proposed method utilizes the input-constrained supergate pattern to parallelly generate the supergate candidates, and then filter the valid supergates as the results. Experiment results show the efficiency of the proposed method, for example, it can attain the improvement of 4x speedup in computation time and 10.1 in delay reduction with 32 threads.
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Capacity-Achieving Private Information Retrieval with Non-Colluding and Colluding Servers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is a mechanism for efficiently downloading messages while keeping the index secret. Here, PIRs in which servers do not communicate with each other are called standard PIRs, and PIRs in which some servers communicate with each other are called colluding PIRs. The information-theoretic upper bound on efficiency has been given in previous studies. However, the conditions for PIRs to keep privacy, to decode the desired message, and to achieve that upper bound have not been clarified in matrix form. In this paper, we prove the necessary and sufficient conditions for the properties of standard PIR and colluding PIR. Further, we represent the properties in matrix form.
BANSAI: Towards Bridging the AI Adoption Gap in Industrial Robotics with Neurosymbolic Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Over the past decade, deep learning helped solve manipulation problems across all domains of robotics. At the same time, industrial robots continue to be programmed overwhelmingly using traditional program representations and interfaces. This paper undertakes an analysis of this "AI adoption gap" from an industry practitioner's perspective. In response, we propose the BANSAI approach (Bridging the AI Adoption Gap via Neurosymbolic AI). It systematically leverages principles of neurosymbolic AI to establish data-driven, subsymbolic program synthesis and optimization in modern industrial robot programming workflow. BANSAI conceptually unites several lines of prior research and proposes a path toward practical, real-world validation.
MSTG: A Flexible and Scalable Microservices Infrastructure Generator
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The last few years in the software engineering field has seen a paradigm shift from monolithic application towards architectures in which the application is split in various smaller entities (i.e., microservices) fueled by the improved availability and ease of use of containers technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes. Those microservices communicate between each other using networking technologies in place of function calls in traditional monolithic software. In order to be able to evaluate the potential, the modularity, and the scalability of this new approach, many tools, such as microservices benchmarking, have been developed with that objective in mind. Unfortunately, many of these tend to focus only on the application layer while not taking the underlying networking infrastructure into consideration. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the performance of a new modular and scalable tool, MicroServices Topology Generator (MSTG), that allows to simulate both the application and networking layers of a microservices architecture. Based on a topology described in YAML format, MSTG generates the configuration file(s) for deploying the architecture on either Docker Composer or Kubernetes. Furthermore, MSTG encompasses telemetry tools, such as Application Performance Monitoring (APM) relying on OpenTelemetry. This paper fully describes MSTG, evaluates its performance, and demonstrates its potential through several use cases.
A Nasal Cytology Dataset for Object Detection and Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Nasal Cytology is a new and efficient clinical technique to diagnose rhinitis and allergies that is not much widespread due to the time-consuming nature of cell counting; that is why AI-aided counting could be a turning point for the diffusion of this technique. In this article we present the first dataset of rhino-cytological field images: the NCD (Nasal Cytology Dataset), aimed to train and deploy Object Detection models to support physicians and biologists during clinical practice. The real distribution of the cytotypes, populating the nasal mucosa has been replicated, sampling images from slides of clinical patients, and manually annotating each cell found on them. The correspondent object detection task presents non'trivial issues associated with the strong class imbalancement, involving the rarest cell types. This work contributes to some of open challenges by presenting a novel machine learning-based approach to aid the automated detection and classification of nasal mucosa cells: the DETR and YOLO models shown good performance in detecting cells and classifying them correctly, revealing great potential to accelerate the work of rhinology experts.
Sublinear Time Low-Rank Approximation of Toeplitz Matrices
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We present a sublinear time algorithm for computing a near optimal low-rank approximation to any positive semidefinite (PSD) Toeplitz matrix $T\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}$, given noisy access to its entries. In particular, given entrywise query access to $T+E$ for an arbitrary noise matrix $E\in \mathbb{R}^{d\times d}$, integer rank $k\leq d$, and error parameter $δ>0$, our algorithm runs in time $\text{poly}(k,\log(d/δ))$ and outputs (in factored form) a Toeplitz matrix $\widetilde{T} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ with rank $\text{poly}(k,\log(d/δ))$ satisfying, for some fixed constant $C$, \begin{equation*} \|T-\widetilde{T}\|_F \leq C \cdot \max\{\|E\|_F,\|T-T_k\|_F\} + δ\cdot \|T\|_F. \end{equation*} Here $\|\cdot \|_F$ is the Frobenius norm and $T_k$ is the best (not necessarily Toeplitz) rank-$k$ approximation to $T$ in the Frobenius norm, given by projecting $T$ onto its top $k$ eigenvectors. Our result has the following applications. When $E = 0$, we obtain the first sublinear time near-relative-error low-rank approximation algorithm for PSD Toeplitz matrices, resolving the main open problem of Kapralov et al. SODA `23, whose algorithm had sublinear query complexity but exponential runtime. Our algorithm can also be applied to approximate the unknown Toeplitz covariance matrix of a multivariate Gaussian distribution, given sample access to this distribution, resolving an open question of Eldar et al. SODA `20. Our algorithm applies sparse Fourier transform techniques to recover a low-rank Toeplitz matrix using its Fourier structure. Our key technical contribution is the first polynomial time algorithm for \emph{discrete time off-grid} sparse Fourier recovery, which may be of independent interest.
Using Adaptive Empathetic Responses for Teaching English
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety. Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning. We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback. This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through a preliminary user study.
AnyPattern: Towards In-context Image Copy Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores in-context learning for image copy detection (ICD), i.e., prompting an ICD model to identify replicated images with new tampering patterns without the need for additional training. The prompts (or the contexts) are from a small set of image-replica pairs that reflect the new patterns and are used at inference time. Such in-context ICD has good realistic value, because it requires no fine-tuning and thus facilitates fast reaction against the emergence of unseen patterns. To accommodate the "seen $\rightarrow$ unseen" generalization scenario, we construct the first large-scale pattern dataset named AnyPattern, which has the largest number of tamper patterns ($90$ for training and $10$ for testing) among all the existing ones. We benchmark AnyPattern with popular ICD methods and reveal that existing methods barely generalize to novel patterns. We further propose a simple in-context ICD method named ImageStacker. ImageStacker learns to select the most representative image-replica pairs and employs them as the pattern prompts in a stacking manner (rather than the popular concatenation manner). Experimental results show (1) training with our large-scale dataset substantially benefits pattern generalization ($+26.66 \%$ $μAP$), (2) the proposed ImageStacker facilitates effective in-context ICD (another round of $+16.75 \%$ $μAP$), and (3) AnyPattern enables in-context ICD, i.e., without such a large-scale dataset, in-context learning does not emerge even with our ImageStacker. Beyond the ICD task, we also demonstrate how AnyPattern can benefit artists, i.e., the pattern retrieval method trained on AnyPattern can be generalized to identify style mimicry by text-to-image models. The project is publicly available at https://anypattern.github.io.
Enforcing Conditional Independence for Fair Representation Learning and Causal Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Conditional independence (CI) constraints are critical for defining and evaluating fairness in machine learning, as well as for learning unconfounded or causal representations. Traditional methods for ensuring fairness either blindly learn invariant features with respect to a protected variable (e.g., race when classifying sex from face images) or enforce CI relative to the protected attribute only on the model output (e.g., the sex label). Neither of these methods are effective in enforcing CI in high-dimensional feature spaces. In this paper, we focus on a nascent approach characterizing the CI constraint in terms of two Jensen-Shannon divergence terms, and we extend it to high-dimensional feature spaces using a novel dynamic sampling strategy. In doing so, we introduce a new training paradigm that can be applied to any encoder architecture. We are able to enforce conditional independence of the diffusion autoencoder latent representation with respect to any protected attribute under the equalized odds constraint and show that this approach enables causal image generation with controllable latent spaces. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high accuracy on downstream tasks while upholding equality of odds.
Adaptive Heterogeneous Client Sampling for Federated Learning over Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) algorithms usually sample a fraction of clients in each round (partial participation) when the number of participants is large and the server's communication bandwidth is limited. Recent works on the convergence analysis of FL have focused on unbiased client sampling, e.g., sampling uniformly at random, which suffers from slow wall-clock time for convergence due to high degrees of system heterogeneity and statistical heterogeneity. This paper aims to design an adaptive client sampling algorithm for FL over wireless networks that tackles both system and statistical heterogeneity to minimize the wall-clock convergence time. We obtain a new tractable convergence bound for FL algorithms with arbitrary client sampling probability. Based on the bound, we analytically establish the relationship between the total learning time and sampling probability with an adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme, which results in a non-convex optimization problem. We design an efficient algorithm for learning the unknown parameters in the convergence bound and develop a low-complexity algorithm to approximately solve the non-convex problem. Our solution reveals the impact of system and statistical heterogeneity parameters on the optimal client sampling design. Moreover, our solution shows that as the number of sampled clients increases, the total convergence time first decreases and then increases because a larger sampling number reduces the number of rounds for convergence but results in a longer expected time per-round due to limited wireless bandwidth. Experimental results from both hardware prototype and simulation demonstrate that our proposed sampling scheme significantly reduces the convergence time compared to several baseline sampling schemes.
A Comparative Study on Enhancing Prediction in Social Network Advertisement through Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

In the ever-evolving landscape of social network advertising, the volume and accuracy of data play a critical role in the performance of predictive models. However, the development of robust predictive algorithms is often hampered by the limited size and potential bias present in real-world datasets. This study presents and explores a generative augmentation framework of social network advertising data. Our framework explores three generative models for data augmentation - Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) - to enrich data availability and diversity in the context of social network advertising analytics effectiveness. By performing synthetic extensions of the feature space, we find that through data augmentation, the performance of various classifiers has been quantitatively improved. Furthermore, we compare the relative performance gains brought by each data augmentation technique, providing insights for practitioners to select appropriate techniques to enhance model performance. This paper contributes to the literature by showing that synthetic data augmentation alleviates the limitations imposed by small or imbalanced datasets in the field of social network advertising. At the same time, this article also provides a comparative perspective on the practicality of different data augmentation methods, thereby guiding practitioners to choose appropriate techniques to enhance model performance.
On Support Relations Inference and Scene Hierarchy Graph Construction from Point Cloud in Clustered Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Over the years, scene understanding has attracted a growing interest in computer vision, providing the semantic and physical scene information necessary for robots to complete some particular tasks autonomously. In 3D scenes, rich spatial geometric and topological information are often ignored by RGB-based approaches for scene understanding. In this study, we develop a bottom-up approach for scene understanding that infers support relations between objects from a point cloud. Our approach utilizes the spatial topology information of the plane pairs in the scene, consisting of three major steps. 1) Detection of pairwise spatial configuration: dividing primitive pairs into local support connection and local inner connection; 2) primitive classification: a combinatorial optimization method applied to classify primitives; and 3) support relations inference and hierarchy graph construction: bottom-up support relations inference and scene hierarchy graph construction containing primitive level and object level. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the algorithm achieves excellent performance in primitive classification and support relations inference. Additionally, we show that the scene hierarchy graph contains rich geometric and topological information of objects, and it possesses great scalability for scene understanding.
ICST-DNET: An Interpretable Causal Spatio-Temporal Diffusion Network for Traffic Speed Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Traffic speed prediction is significant for intelligent navigation and congestion alleviation. However, making accurate predictions is challenging due to three factors: 1) traffic diffusion, i.e., the spatial and temporal causality existing between the traffic conditions of multiple neighboring roads, 2) the poor interpretability of traffic data with complicated spatio-temporal correlations, and 3) the latent pattern of traffic speed fluctuations over time, such as morning and evening rush. Jointly considering these factors, in this paper, we present a novel architecture for traffic speed prediction, called Interpretable Causal Spatio-Temporal Diffusion Network (ICST-DNET). Specifically, ICST-DENT consists of three parts, namely the Spatio-Temporal Causality Learning (STCL), Causal Graph Generation (CGG), and Speed Fluctuation Pattern Recognition (SFPR) modules. First, to model the traffic diffusion within road networks, an STCL module is proposed to capture both the temporal causality on each individual road and the spatial causality in each road pair. The CGG module is then developed based on STCL to enhance the interpretability of the traffic diffusion procedure from the temporal and spatial perspectives. Specifically, a time causality matrix is generated to explain the temporal causality between each road's historical and future traffic conditions. For spatial causality, we utilize causal graphs to visualize the diffusion process in road pairs. Finally, to adapt to traffic speed fluctuations in different scenarios, we design a personalized SFPR module to select the historical timesteps with strong influences for learning the pattern of traffic speed fluctuations. Extensive experimental results prove that ICST-DNET can outperform all existing baselines, as evidenced by the higher prediction accuracy, ability to explain causality, and adaptability to different scenarios.
Distributional Black-Box Model Inversion Attack with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A Model Inversion (MI) attack based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) aims to recover the private training data from complex deep learning models by searching codes in the latent space. However, they merely search a deterministic latent space such that the found latent code is usually suboptimal. In addition, the existing distributional MI schemes assume that an attacker can access the structures and parameters of the target model, which is not always viable in practice. To overcome the above shortcomings, this paper proposes a novel Distributional Black-Box Model Inversion (DBB-MI) attack by constructing the probabilistic latent space for searching the target privacy data. Specifically, DBB-MI does not need the target model parameters or specialized GAN training. Instead, it finds the latent probability distribution by combining the output of the target model with multi-agent reinforcement learning techniques. Then, it randomly chooses latent codes from the latent probability distribution for recovering the private data. As the latent probability distribution closely aligns with the target privacy data in latent space, the recovered data will leak the privacy of training samples of the target model significantly. Abundant experiments conducted on diverse datasets and networks show that the present DBB-MI has better performance than state-of-the-art in attack accuracy, K-nearest neighbor feature distance, and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio.
TeamTrack: A Dataset for Multi-Sport Multi-Object Tracking in Full-pitch Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a critical and challenging task in computer vision, particularly in situations involving objects with similar appearances but diverse movements, as seen in team sports. Current methods, largely reliant on object detection and appearance, often fail to track targets in such complex scenarios accurately. This limitation is further exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive and diverse datasets covering the full view of sports pitches. Addressing these issues, we introduce TeamTrack, a pioneering benchmark dataset specifically designed for MOT in sports. TeamTrack is an extensive collection of full-pitch video data from various sports, including soccer, basketball, and handball. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis and benchmarking effort to underscore TeamTrack's utility and potential impact. Our work signifies a crucial step forward, promising to elevate the precision and effectiveness of MOT in complex, dynamic settings such as team sports. The dataset, project code and competition is released at: https://atomscott.github.io/TeamTrack/.