OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BADGE: BADminton report Generation and Evaluation with LLM
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Badminton enjoys widespread popularity, and reports on matches generally include details such as player names, game scores, and ball types, providing audiences with a comprehensive view of the games. However, writing these reports can be a time-consuming task. This challenge led us to explore whether a Large Language Model (LLM) could automate the generation and evaluation of badminton reports. We introduce a novel framework named BADGE, designed for this purpose using LLM. Our method consists of two main phases: Report Generation and Report Evaluation. Initially, badminton-related data is processed by the LLM, which then generates a detailed report of the match. We tested different Input Data Types, In-Context Learning (ICL), and LLM, finding that GPT-4 performs best when using CSV data type and the Chain of Thought prompting. Following report generation, the LLM evaluates and scores the reports to assess their quality. Our comparisons between the scores evaluated by GPT-4 and human judges show a tendency to prefer GPT-4 generated reports. Since the application of LLM in badminton reporting remains largely unexplored, our research serves as a foundational step for future advancements in this area. Moreover, our method can be extended to other sports games, thereby enhancing sports promotion. For more details, please refer to https://github.com/AndyChiangSH/BADGE.
Resilient and Secure Programmable System-on-Chip Accelerator Offload
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Computational offload to hardware accelerators is gaining traction due to increasing computational demands and efficiency challenges. Programmable hardware, like FPGAs, offers a promising platform in rapidly evolving application areas, with the benefits of hardware acceleration and software programmability. Unfortunately, such systems composed of multiple hardware components must consider integrity in the case of malicious components. In this work, we propose Samsara, the first secure and resilient platform that derives, from Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT), protocols to enhance the computing resilience of programmable hardware. Samsara uses a novel lightweight hardware-based BFT protocol for Systems-on-Chip, called H-Quorum, that implements the theoretical-minimum latency between applications and replicated compute nodes. To withstand malicious behaviors, Samsara supports hardware rejuvenation, which is used to replace, relocate, or diversify faulty compute nodes. Samsara's architecture ensures the security of the entire workflow while keeping the latency overhead, of both computation and rejuvenation, close to the non-replicated counterpart.
Robust personnel rostering: how accurate should absenteeism predictions be?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Disruptions to personnel rosters caused by absenteeism often necessitate last-minute adjustments to the employees' working hours. A common strategy to mitigate the impact of such changes is to assign employees to reserve shifts: special on-call duties during which an employee can be called in to cover for an absent employee. To maximize roster robustness, we assume a predict-then-optimize approach that uses absence predictions from a machine learning model to schedule an adequate number of reserve shifts. In this paper we propose a methodology to evaluate the robustness of rosters generated by the predict-then-optimize approach, assuming the machine learning model will make predictions at a predetermined prediction performance level. Instead of training and testing machine learning models, our methodology simulates the predictions based on a characterization of model performance. We show how this methodology can be applied to identify the minimum performance level needed for the model to outperform simple non-data-driven robust rostering policies. In a computational study on a nurse rostering problem, we demonstrate how the predict-then-optimize approach outperforms non-data-driven policies under reasonable performance requirements, particularly when employees possess interchangeable skills.
B-TMS: Bayesian Traversable Terrain Modeling and Segmentation Across 3D LiDAR Scans and Maps for Enhanced Off-Road Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recognizing traversable terrain from 3D point cloud data is critical, as it directly impacts the performance of autonomous navigation in off-road environments. However, existing segmentation algorithms often struggle with challenges related to changes in data distribution, environmental specificity, and sensor variations. Moreover, when encountering sunken areas, their performance is frequently compromised, and they may even fail to recognize them. To address these challenges, we introduce B-TMS, a novel approach that performs map-wise terrain modeling and segmentation by utilizing Bayesian generalized kernel (BGK) within the graph structure known as the tri-grid field (TGF). Our experiments encompass various data distributions, ranging from single scans to partial maps, utilizing both public datasets representing urban scenes and off-road environments, and our own dataset acquired from extremely bumpy terrains. Our results demonstrate notable contributions, particularly in terms of robustness to data distribution variations, adaptability to diverse environmental conditions, and resilience against the challenges associated with parameter changes.
LOOK-M: Look-Once Optimization in KV Cache for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demand substantial computational resources for inference as the growth of their multimodal Key-Value (KV) cache, in response to increasing input lengths, challenges memory and time efficiency. Unlike single-modality LLMs that manage only textual contexts, the KV cache of long-context MLLMs includes representations from multiple images with temporal and spatial relationships and related textual contexts. The predominance of image tokens means traditional optimizations for LLMs' KV caches are unsuitable for multimodal long-context settings, and no prior works have addressed this challenge. In this work, we introduce LOOK-M, a pioneering, fine-tuning-free approach that efficiently reduces the multimodal KV cache size while maintaining performance comparable to a full cache. We observe that during prompt prefill, the model prioritizes more textual attention over image features, and based on the multimodal interaction observation, a new proposed text-prior method is explored to compress the KV cache. Furthermore, to mitigate the degradation of image contextual information, we propose several compensatory strategies using KV pairs merging. LOOK-M demonstrates that with a significant reduction in KV Cache memory usage, such as reducing it by 80% in some cases, it not only achieves up to 1.5x faster decoding but also maintains or even enhances performance across a variety of long context multimodal tasks.
Human-Free Automated Prompting for Vision-Language Anomaly Detection: Prompt Optimization with Meta-guiding Prompt Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) are highly adaptable to various downstream tasks through few-shot learning, making prompt-based anomaly detection a promising approach. Traditional methods depend on human-crafted prompts that require prior knowledge of specific anomaly types. Our goal is to develop a human-free prompt-based anomaly detection framework that optimally learns prompts through data-driven methods, eliminating the need for human intervention. The primary challenge in this approach is the lack of anomalous samples during the training phase. Additionally, the Vision Transformer (ViT)-based image encoder in VLMs is not ideal for pixel-wise anomaly segmentation due to a locality feature mismatch between the original image and the output feature map. To tackle the first challenge, we have developed the Object-Attention Anomaly Generation Module (OAGM) to synthesize anomaly samples for training. Furthermore, our Meta-Guiding Prompt-Tuning Scheme (MPTS) iteratively adjusts the gradient-based optimization direction of learnable prompts to avoid overfitting to the synthesized anomalies. For the second challenge, we propose Locality-Aware Attention, which ensures that each local patch feature attends only to nearby patch features, preserving the locality features corresponding to their original locations. This framework allows for the optimal prompt embeddings by searching in the continuous latent space via backpropagation, free from human semantic constraints. Additionally, the modified locality-aware attention improves the precision of pixel-wise anomaly segmentation.
#CFG and #DNNF admit FPRAS
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We provide the first fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for the following two counting problems: 1. Given a Context Free Grammar $G$ over alphabet $Σ$, count the number of words of length exactly $n$ generated by $G$. 2. Given a circuit $φ$ in Decomposable Negation Normal Form (DNNF) over the set of Boolean variables $X$, compute the number of assignments to $X$ such that $φ$ evaluates to 1. Finding polynomial time algorithms for the aforementioned problems has been a longstanding open problem. Prior work could either only obtain a quasi-polynomial runtime (SODA 1995) or a polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme for restricted fragments, such as non-deterministic finite automata (JACM 2021) or non-deterministic tree automata (STOC 2021).
Advancing Robotic Surgery: Affordable Kinesthetic and Tactile Feedback Solutions for Endotrainers
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery highlights the need for advanced training tools such as cost-effective robotic endotrainers. Current surgical robots often lack haptic feedback, which is crucial for providing surgeons with a real-time sense of touch. This absence can impact the surgeon's ability to perform delicate operations effectively. To enhance surgical training and address this deficiency, we have integrated a cost-effective haptic feedback system into a robotic endotrainer. This system incorporates both kinesthetic (force) and tactile feedback, improving the fidelity of surgical simulations and enabling more precise control during operations. Our system incorporates an innovative, cost-effective Force/Torque sensor utilizing optoelectronic technology, specifically designed to accurately detect forces and moments exerted on surgical tools with a 95% accuracy, providing essential kinesthetic feedback. Additionally, we implemented a tactile feedback mechanism that informs the surgeon of the gripping forces between the tool's tip and the tissue. This dual feedback system enhances the fidelity of training simulations and the execution of robotic surgeries, promoting broader adoption and safer practices.
CoDA: Interactive Segmentation and Morphological Analysis of Dendroid Structures Exemplified on Stony Cold-Water Corals
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Herein, we present CoDA, the Coral Dendroid structure Analyzer, a visual analytics suite that allows for the first time to investigate the ontogenetic morphological development of complex dendroid coral colonies, exemplified on three important framework-forming dendroid cold-water corals: Lophelia pertusa (Linnaeus, 1758), Madrepora oculata (Linnaeus, 1758), and Goniocorella dumosa (Alcock, 1902). Input to CoDA is an initial instance segmentation of the coral polyp cavities (calices), from which it estimates the skeleton tree of the colony and extracts classical morphological measurements and advanced shape features of the individual corallites. CoDA also works as a proofreading and error correction tool by helping to identify wrong parts in the skeleton tree and providing tools to quickly correct these errors. The final skeleton tree enables the derivation of additional information about the calices/corallite instances that otherwise could not be obtained, including their ontogenetic generation and branching patterns - the basis of a fully quantitative statistical analysis of the coral colony morphology. Part of CoDA is CoDAGraph, a feature-rich link-and-brush user interface for visualizing the extracted features and 2D graph layouts of the skeleton tree, enabling the real-time exploration of complex coral colonies and their building blocks, the individual corallites and branches. In the future, we expect CoDA to greatly facilitate the analysis of large stony corals of different species and morphotypes, as well as other dendroid structures, enabling new insights into the influence of genetic and environmental factors on their ontogenetic morphological development.
PlaMo: Plan and Move in Rich 3D Physical Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Controlling humanoids in complex physically simulated worlds is a long-standing challenge with numerous applications in gaming, simulation, and visual content creation. In our setup, given a rich and complex 3D scene, the user provides a list of instructions composed of target locations and locomotion types. To solve this task we present PlaMo, a scene-aware path planner and a robust physics-based controller. The path planner produces a sequence of motion paths, considering the various limitations the scene imposes on the motion, such as location, height, and speed. Complementing the planner, our control policy generates rich and realistic physical motion adhering to the plan. We demonstrate how the combination of both modules enables traversing complex landscapes in diverse forms while responding to real-time changes in the environment. Video: https://youtu.be/wWlqSQlRZ9M .
ConStyle v2: A Strong Prompter for All-in-One Image Restoration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces ConStyle v2, a strong plug-and-play prompter designed to output clean visual prompts and assist U-Net Image Restoration models in handling multiple degradations. The joint training process of IRConStyle, an Image Restoration framework consisting of ConStyle and a general restoration network, is divided into two stages: first, pre-training ConStyle alone, and then freezing its weights to guide the training of the general restoration network. Three improvements are proposed in the pre-training stage to train ConStyle: unsupervised pre-training, adding a pretext task (i.e. classification), and adopting knowledge distillation. Without bells and whistles, we can get ConStyle v2, a strong prompter for all-in-one Image Restoration, in less than two GPU days and doesn't require any fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on Restormer (transformer-based), NAFNet (CNN-based), MAXIM-1S (MLP-based), and a vanilla CNN network demonstrate that ConStyle v2 can enhance any U-Net style Image Restoration models to all-in-one Image Restoration models. Furthermore, models guided by the well-trained ConStyle v2 exhibit superior performance in some specific degradation compared to ConStyle.
Llamipa: An Incremental Discourse Parser
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper provides the first discourse parsing experiments with a large language model(LLM) finetuned on corpora annotated in the style of SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory Asher, 1993; Asher and Lascarides, 2003). The result is a discourse parser, Llamipa (Llama Incremental Parser), that leverages discourse context, leading to substantial performance gains over approaches that use encoder-only models to provide local, context-sensitive representations of discourse units. Furthermore, it can process discourse data incrementally, which is essential for the eventual use of discourse information in downstream tasks.
Sanskrit Knowledge-based Systems: Annotation and Computational Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We address the challenges and opportunities in the development of knowledge systems for Sanskrit, with a focus on question answering. By proposing a framework for the automated construction of knowledge graphs, introducing annotation tools for ontology-driven and general-purpose tasks, and offering a diverse collection of web-interfaces, tools, and software libraries, we have made significant contributions to the field of computational Sanskrit. These contributions not only enhance the accessibility and accuracy of Sanskrit text analysis but also pave the way for further advancements in knowledge representation and language processing. Ultimately, this research contributes to the preservation, understanding, and utilization of the rich linguistic information embodied in Sanskrit texts.
RealTalk: Real-time and Realistic Audio-driven Face Generation with 3D Facial Prior-guided Identity Alignment Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Person-generic audio-driven face generation is a challenging task in computer vision. Previous methods have achieved remarkable progress in audio-visual synchronization, but there is still a significant gap between current results and practical applications. The challenges are two-fold: 1) Preserving unique individual traits for achieving high-precision lip synchronization. 2) Generating high-quality facial renderings in real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized audio-driven framework RealTalk, which consists of an audio-to-expression transformer and a high-fidelity expression-to-face renderer. In the first component, we consider both identity and intra-personal variation features related to speaking lip movements. By incorporating cross-modal attention on the enriched facial priors, we can effectively align lip movements with audio, thus attaining greater precision in expression prediction. In the second component, we design a lightweight facial identity alignment (FIA) module which includes a lip-shape control structure and a face texture reference structure. This novel design allows us to generate fine details in real-time, without depending on sophisticated and inefficient feature alignment modules. Our experimental results, both quantitative and qualitative, on public datasets demonstrate the clear advantages of our method in terms of lip-speech synchronization and generation quality. Furthermore, our method is efficient and requires fewer computational resources, making it well-suited to meet the needs of practical applications.
LLCoach: Generating Robot Soccer Plans using Multi-Role Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The deployment of robots into human scenarios necessitates advanced planning strategies, particularly when we ask robots to operate in dynamic, unstructured environments. RoboCup offers the chance to deploy robots in one of those scenarios, a human-shaped game represented by a soccer match. In such scenarios, robots must operate using predefined behaviors that can fail in unpredictable conditions. This paper introduces a novel application of Large Language Models (LLMs) to address the challenge of generating actionable plans in such settings, specifically within the context of the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL) competitions where robots are required to autonomously execute soccer strategies that emerge from the interactions of individual agents. In particular, we propose a multi-role approach leveraging the capabilities of LLMs to generate and refine plans for a robotic soccer team. The potential of the proposed method is demonstrated through an experimental evaluation,carried out simulating multiple matches where robots with AI-generated plans play against robots running human-built code.
Online Learning of Multiple Tasks and Their Relationships : Testing on Spam Email Data and EEG Signals Recorded in Construction Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper examines an online multi-task learning (OMTL) method, which processes data sequentially to predict labels across related tasks. The framework learns task weights and their relatedness concurrently. Unlike previous models that assumed static task relatedness, our approach treats tasks as initially independent, updating their relatedness iteratively using newly calculated weight vectors. We introduced three rules to update the task relatedness matrix: OMTLCOV, OMTLLOG, and OMTLVON, and compared them against a conventional method (CMTL) that uses a fixed relatedness value. Performance evaluations on three datasets a spam dataset and two EEG datasets from construction workers under varying conditions demonstrated that our OMTL methods outperform CMTL, improving accuracy by 1% to 3% on EEG data, and maintaining low error rates around 12% on the spam dataset.
AI-native Memory: A Pathway from LLMs Towards AGI
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the world with the sparks of artificial general intelligence (AGI). One opinion, especially from some startups working on LLMs, argues that an LLM with nearly unlimited context length can realize AGI. However, they might be too optimistic about the long-context capability of (existing) LLMs -- (1) Recent literature has shown that their effective context length is significantly smaller than their claimed context length; and (2) Our reasoning-in-a-haystack experiments further demonstrate that simultaneously finding the relevant information from a long context and conducting (simple) reasoning is nearly impossible. In this paper, we envision a pathway from LLMs to AGI through the integration of \emph{memory}. We believe that AGI should be a system where LLMs serve as core processors. In addition to raw data, the memory in this system would store a large number of important conclusions derived from reasoning processes. Compared with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that merely processing raw data, this approach not only connects semantically related information closer, but also simplifies complex inferences at the time of querying. As an intermediate stage, the memory will likely be in the form of natural language descriptions, which can be directly consumed by users too. Ultimately, every agent/person should have its own large personal model, a deep neural network model (thus \emph{AI-native}) that parameterizes and compresses all types of memory, even the ones cannot be described by natural languages. Finally, we discuss the significant potential of AI-native memory as the transformative infrastructure for (proactive) engagement, personalization, distribution, and social in the AGI era, as well as the incurred privacy and security challenges with preliminary solutions.
Advancing Airport Tower Command Recognition: Integrating Squeeze-and-Excitation and Broadcasted Residual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate recognition of aviation commands is vital for flight safety and efficiency, as pilots must follow air traffic control instructions precisely. This paper addresses challenges in speech command recognition, such as noisy environments and limited computational resources, by advancing keyword spotting technology. We create a dataset of standardized airport tower commands, including routine and emergency instructions. We enhance broadcasted residual learning with squeeze-and-excitation and time-frame frequency-wise squeeze-and-excitation techniques, resulting in our BC-SENet model. This model focuses on crucial information with fewer parameters. Our tests on five keyword spotting models, including BC-SENet, demonstrate superior accuracy and efficiency. These findings highlight the effectiveness of our model advancements in improving speech command recognition for aviation safety and efficiency in noisy, high-stakes environments. Additionally, BC-SENet shows comparable performance on the common Google Speech Command dataset.