OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Feature Aggregation in Joint Sound Classification and Localization Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This study addresses the application of deep learning techniques in joint sound signal classification and localization networks. Current state-of-the-art sound source localization deep learning networks lack feature aggregation within their architecture. Feature aggregation enhances model performance by enabling the consolidation of information from different feature scales, thereby improving feature robustness and invariance. This is particularly important in SSL networks, which must differentiate direct and indirect acoustic signals. To address this gap, we adapt feature aggregation techniques from computer vision neural networks to signal detection neural networks. Additionally, we propose the Scale Encoding Network (SEN) for feature aggregation to encode features from various scales, compressing the network for more computationally efficient aggregation. To evaluate the efficacy of feature aggregation in SSL networks, we integrated the following computer vision feature aggregation sub-architectures into a SSL control architecture: Path Aggregation Network (PANet), Weighted Bi-directional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN), and SEN. These sub-architectures were evaluated using two metrics for signal classification and two metrics for direction-of-arrival regression. PANet and BiFPN are established aggregators in computer vision models, while the proposed SEN is a more compact aggregator. The results suggest that models incorporating feature aggregations outperformed the control model, the Sound Event Localization and Detection network (SELDnet), in both sound signal classification and localization. The feature aggregation techniques enhance the performance of sound detection neural networks, particularly in direction-of-arrival regression.
Atom: Low-bit Quantization for Efficient and Accurate LLM Serving
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The growing demand for Large Language Models (LLMs) in applications such as content generation, intelligent chatbots, and sentiment analysis poses considerable challenges for LLM service providers. To efficiently use GPU resources and boost throughput, batching multiple requests has emerged as a popular paradigm; to further speed up batching, LLM quantization techniques reduce memory consumption and increase computing capacity. However, prevalent quantization schemes (e.g., 8-bit weight-activation quantization) cannot fully leverage the capabilities of modern GPUs, such as 4-bit integer operators, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To maximize LLMs' serving throughput, we introduce Atom, a low-bit quantization method that achieves high throughput improvements with negligible accuracy loss. Atom significantly boosts serving throughput by using low-bit operators and considerably reduces memory consumption via low-bit quantization. It attains high accuracy by applying a novel mixed-precision and fine-grained quantization process. We evaluate Atom on 4-bit weight-activation quantization in the serving context. Atom improves end-to-end throughput (token/s) by up to $7.7\times$ compared to the FP16 and by $2.5\times$ compared to INT8 quantization, while maintaining the same latency target.
Causal Fair Metric: Bridging Causality, Individual Fairness, and Adversarial Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the essential need for comprehensive considerations in responsible AI, factors like robustness, fairness, and causality are often studied in isolation. Adversarial perturbation, used to identify vulnerabilities in models, and individual fairness, aiming for equitable treatment of similar individuals, despite initial differences, both depend on metrics to generate comparable input data instances. Previous attempts to define such joint metrics often lack general assumptions about data or structural causal models and were unable to reflect counterfactual proximity. To address this, our paper introduces a causal fair metric formulated based on causal structures encompassing sensitive attributes and protected causal perturbation. To enhance the practicality of our metric, we propose metric learning as a method for metric estimation and deployment in real-world problems in the absence of structural causal models. We also demonstrate the application of our novel metric in classifiers. Empirical evaluation of real-world and synthetic datasets illustrates the effectiveness of our proposed metric in achieving an accurate classifier with fairness, resilience to adversarial perturbations, and a nuanced understanding of causal relationships.
IterInv: Iterative Inversion for Pixel-Level T2I Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have been a ground-breaking development in generating convincing images following an input text prompt. The goal of image editing research is to give users control over the generated images by modifying the text prompt. Current image editing techniques predominantly hinge on DDIM inversion as a prevalent practice rooted in Latent Diffusion Models (LDM). However, the large pretrained T2I models working on the latent space suffer from losing details due to the first compression stage with an autoencoder mechanism. Instead, other mainstream T2I pipeline working on the pixel level, such as Imagen and DeepFloyd-IF, circumvents the above problem. They are commonly composed of multiple stages, typically starting with a text-to-image stage and followed by several super-resolution stages. In this pipeline, the DDIM inversion fails to find the initial noise and generate the original image given that the super-resolution diffusion models are not compatible with the DDIM technique. According to our experimental findings, iteratively concatenating the noisy image as the condition is the root of this problem. Based on this observation, we develop an iterative inversion (IterInv) technique for this category of T2I models and verify IterInv with the open-source DeepFloyd-IF model.Specifically, IterInv employ NTI as the inversion and reconstruction of low-resolution image generation. In stages 2 and 3, we update the latent variance at each timestep to find the deterministic inversion trace and promote the reconstruction process. By combining our method with a popular image editing method, we prove the application prospects of IterInv. The code will be released upon acceptance. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Tchuanm/IterInv.git}.
A Survey on Knowledge Editing of Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep neural networks are becoming increasingly pervasive in academia and industry, matching and surpassing human performance on a wide variety of fields and related tasks. However, just as humans, even the largest artificial neural networks make mistakes, and once-correct predictions can become invalid as the world progresses in time. Augmenting datasets with samples that account for mistakes or up-to-date information has become a common workaround in practical applications. However, the well-known phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting poses a challenge in achieving precise changes in the implicitly memorized knowledge of neural network parameters, often requiring a full model re-training to achieve desired behaviors. That is expensive, unreliable, and incompatible with the current trend of large self-supervised pre-training, making it necessary to find more efficient and effective methods for adapting neural network models to changing data. To address this need, knowledge editing is emerging as a novel area of research that aims to enable reliable, data-efficient, and fast changes to a pre-trained target model, without affecting model behaviors on previously learned tasks. In this survey, we provide a brief review of this recent artificial intelligence field of research. We first introduce the problem of editing neural networks, formalize it in a common framework and differentiate it from more notorious branches of research such as continuous learning. Next, we provide a review of the most relevant knowledge editing approaches and datasets proposed so far, grouping works under four different families: regularization techniques, meta-learning, direct model editing, and architectural strategies. Finally, we outline some intersections with other fields of research and potential directions for future works.
Learn to Categorize or Categorize to Learn? Self-Coding for Generalized Category Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the quest for unveiling novel categories at test time, we confront the inherent limitations of traditional supervised recognition models that are restricted by a predefined category set. While strides have been made in the realms of self-supervised and open-world learning towards test-time category discovery, a crucial yet often overlooked question persists: what exactly delineates a category? In this paper, we conceptualize a category through the lens of optimization, viewing it as an optimal solution to a well-defined problem. Harnessing this unique conceptualization, we propose a novel, efficient and self-supervised method capable of discovering previously unknown categories at test time. A salient feature of our approach is the assignment of minimum length category codes to individual data instances, which encapsulates the implicit category hierarchy prevalent in real-world datasets. This mechanism affords us enhanced control over category granularity, thereby equipping our model to handle fine-grained categories adeptly. Experimental evaluations, bolstered by state-of-the-art benchmark comparisons, testify to the efficacy of our solution in managing unknown categories at test time. Furthermore, we fortify our proposition with a theoretical foundation, providing proof of its optimality. Our code is available at https://github.com/SarahRastegar/InfoSieve.
Meta-Learning Strategies through Value Maximization in Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Biological and artificial learning agents face numerous choices about how to learn, ranging from hyperparameter selection to aspects of task distributions like curricula. Understanding how to make these meta-learning choices could offer normative accounts of cognitive control functions in biological learners and improve engineered systems. Yet optimal strategies remain challenging to compute in modern deep networks due to the complexity of optimizing through the entire learning process. Here we theoretically investigate optimal strategies in a tractable setting. We present a learning effort framework capable of efficiently optimizing control signals on a fully normative objective: discounted cumulative performance throughout learning. We obtain computational tractability by using average dynamical equations for gradient descent, available for simple neural network architectures. Our framework accommodates a range of meta-learning and automatic curriculum learning methods in a unified normative setting. We apply this framework to investigate the effect of approximations in common meta-learning algorithms; infer aspects of optimal curricula; and compute optimal neuronal resource allocation in a continual learning setting. Across settings, we find that control effort is most beneficial when applied to easier aspects of a task early in learning; followed by sustained effort on harder aspects. Overall, the learning effort framework provides a tractable theoretical test bed to study normative benefits of interventions in a variety of learning systems, as well as a formal account of optimal cognitive control strategies over learning trajectories posited by established theories in cognitive neuroscience.
Conditional Unscented Autoencoders for Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The CVAE is one of the most widely-used models in trajectory prediction for AD. It captures the interplay between a driving context and its ground-truth future into a probabilistic latent space and uses it to produce predictions. In this paper, we challenge key components of the CVAE. We leverage recent advances in the space of the VAE, the foundation of the CVAE, which show that a simple change in the sampling procedure can greatly benefit performance. We find that unscented sampling, which draws samples from any learned distribution in a deterministic manner, can naturally be better suited to trajectory prediction than potentially dangerous random sampling. We go further and offer additional improvements including a more structured Gaussian mixture latent space, as well as a novel, potentially more expressive way to do inference with CVAEs. We show wide applicability of our models by evaluating them on the INTERACTION prediction dataset, outperforming the state of the art, as well as at the task of image modeling on the CelebA dataset, outperforming the baseline vanilla CVAE. Code is available at https://github.com/boschresearch/cuae-prediction.
GOPlan: Goal-conditioned Offline Reinforcement Learning by Planning with Learned Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Offline Goal-Conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a feasible paradigm for learning general-purpose policies from diverse and multi-task offline datasets. Despite notable recent progress, the predominant offline GCRL methods, mainly model-free, face constraints in handling limited data and generalizing to unseen goals. In this work, we propose Goal-conditioned Offline Planning (GOPlan), a novel model-based framework that contains two key phases: (1) pretraining a prior policy capable of capturing multi-modal action distribution within the multi-goal dataset; (2) employing the reanalysis method with planning to generate imagined trajectories for funetuning policies. Specifically, we base the prior policy on an advantage-weighted conditioned generative adversarial network, which facilitates distinct mode separation, mitigating the pitfalls of out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. For further policy optimization, the reanalysis method generates high-quality imaginary data by planning with learned models for both intra-trajectory and inter-trajectory goals. With thorough experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that GOPlan achieves state-of-the-art performance on various offline multi-goal navigation and manipulation tasks. Moreover, our results highlight the superior ability of GOPlan to handle small data budgets and generalize to OOD goals.
LinFlo-Net: A two-stage deep learning method to generate simulation ready meshes of the heart
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We present a deep learning model to automatically generate computer models of the human heart from patient imaging data with an emphasis on its capability to generate thin-walled cardiac structures. Our method works by deforming a template mesh to fit the cardiac structures to the given image. Compared with prior deep learning methods that adopted this approach, our framework is designed to minimize mesh self-penetration, which typically arises when deforming surface meshes separated by small distances. We achieve this by using a two-stage diffeomorphic deformation process along with a novel loss function derived from the kinematics of motion that penalizes surface contact and interpenetration. Our model demonstrates comparable accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while additionally producing meshes free of self-intersections. The resultant meshes are readily usable in physics based simulation, minimizing the need for post-processing and cleanup.
The Missing U for Efficient Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Diffusion Probabilistic Models stand as a critical tool in generative modelling, enabling the generation of complex data distributions. This family of generative models yields record-breaking performance in tasks such as image synthesis, video generation, and molecule design. Despite their capabilities, their efficiency, especially in the reverse process, remains a challenge due to slow convergence rates and high computational costs. In this paper, we introduce an approach that leverages continuous dynamical systems to design a novel denoising network for diffusion models that is more parameter-efficient, exhibits faster convergence, and demonstrates increased noise robustness. Experimenting with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs), our framework operates with approximately a quarter of the parameters, and $\sim$ 30\% of the Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) compared to standard U-Nets in DDPMs. Furthermore, our model is notably faster in inference than the baseline when measured in fair and equal conditions. We also provide a mathematical intuition as to why our proposed reverse process is faster as well as a mathematical discussion of the empirical tradeoffs in the denoising downstream task. Finally, we argue that our method is compatible with existing performance enhancement techniques, enabling further improvements in efficiency, quality, and speed.
Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Precipitation Post-Processor
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Obtaining a sufficient forecast lead time for local precipitation is essential in preventing hazardous weather events. Global warming-induced climate change increases the challenge of accurately predicting severe precipitation events, such as heavy rainfall. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based precipitation post-processor for numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. The precipitation post-processor consists of (i) employing self-supervised pre-training, where the parameters of the encoder are pre-trained on the reconstruction of the masked variables of the atmospheric physics domain; and (ii) conducting transfer learning on precipitation segmentation tasks (the target domain) from the pre-trained encoder. In addition, we introduced a heuristic labeling approach to effectively train class-imbalanced datasets. Our experiments on precipitation correction for regional NWP show that the proposed method outperforms other approaches.
ZoomNeXt: A Unified Collaborative Pyramid Network for Camouflaged Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent camouflaged object detection (COD) attempts to segment objects visually blended into their surroundings, which is extremely complex and difficult in real-world scenarios. Apart from the high intrinsic similarity between camouflaged objects and their background, objects are usually diverse in scale, fuzzy in appearance, and even severely occluded. To this end, we propose an effective unified collaborative pyramid network that mimics human behavior when observing vague images and videos, \ie zooming in and out. Specifically, our approach employs the zooming strategy to learn discriminative mixed-scale semantics by the multi-head scale integration and rich granularity perception units, which are designed to fully explore imperceptible clues between candidate objects and background surroundings. The former's intrinsic multi-head aggregation provides more diverse visual patterns. The latter's routing mechanism can effectively propagate inter-frame differences in spatiotemporal scenarios and be adaptively deactivated and output all-zero results for static representations. They provide a solid foundation for realizing a unified architecture for static and dynamic COD. Moreover, considering the uncertainty and ambiguity derived from indistinguishable textures, we construct a simple yet effective regularization, uncertainty awareness loss, to encourage predictions with higher confidence in candidate regions. Our highly task-friendly framework consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in image and video COD benchmarks. Our code can be found at {https://github.com/lartpang/ZoomNeXt}.
UWFormer: Underwater Image Enhancement via a Semi-Supervised Multi-Scale Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Underwater images often exhibit poor quality, distorted color balance and low contrast due to the complex and intricate interplay of light, water, and objects. Despite the significant contributions of previous underwater enhancement techniques, there exist several problems that demand further improvement: (i) The current deep learning methods rely on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that lack the multi-scale enhancement, and global perception field is also limited. (ii) The scarcity of paired real-world underwater datasets poses a significant challenge, and the utilization of synthetic image pairs could lead to overfitting. To address the aforementioned problems, this paper introduces a Multi-scale Transformer-based Network called UWFormer for enhancing images at multiple frequencies via semi-supervised learning, in which we propose a Nonlinear Frequency-aware Attention mechanism and a Multi-Scale Fusion Feed-forward Network for low-frequency enhancement. Besides, we introduce a special underwater semi-supervised training strategy, where we propose a Subaqueous Perceptual Loss function to generate reliable pseudo labels. Experiments using full-reference and non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantity and visual quality.
A Survey on Federated Unlearning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, the notion of ``the right to be forgotten" (RTBF) has become a crucial aspect of data privacy for digital trust and AI safety, requiring the provision of mechanisms that support the removal of personal data of individuals upon their requests. Consequently, machine unlearning (MU) has gained considerable attention which allows an ML model to selectively eliminate identifiable information. Evolving from MU, federated unlearning (FU) has emerged to confront the challenge of data erasure within federated learning (FL) settings, which empowers the FL model to unlearn an FL client or identifiable information pertaining to the client. Nevertheless, the distinctive attributes of federated learning introduce specific challenges for FU techniques. These challenges necessitate a tailored design when developing FU algorithms. While various concepts and numerous federated unlearning schemes exist in this field, the unified workflow and tailored design of FU are not yet well understood. Therefore, this comprehensive survey delves into the techniques and methodologies in FU providing an overview of fundamental concepts and principles, evaluating existing federated unlearning algorithms, and reviewing optimizations tailored to federated learning. Additionally, it discusses practical applications and assesses their limitations. Finally, it outlines promising directions for future research.
On the matrix code of quadratic relationships for a Goppa code
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this article, we continue the analysis started in \cite{CMT23} for the matrix code of quadratic relationships associated with a Goppa code. We provide new sparse and low-rank elements in the matrix code and categorize them according to their shape. Thanks to this description, we prove that the set of rank 2 matrices in the matrix codes associated with square-free binary Goppa codes, i.e. those used in Classic McEiece, is much larger than what is expected, at least in the case where the Goppa polynomial degree is 2. We build upon the algebraic determinantal modeling introduced in \cite{CMT23} to derive a structural attack on these instances. Our method can break in just a few seconds some recent challenges about key-recovery attacks on the McEliece cryptosystem, consistently reducing their estimated security level. We also provide a general method, valid for any Goppa polynomial degree, to transform a generic pair of support and multiplier into a pair of support and Goppa polynomial.