OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Leveraging LLMs for Hypothetical Deduction in Logical Inference: A Neuro-Symbolic Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable potential across a wide array of reasoning tasks, including logical reasoning. Although massive efforts have been made to empower the logical reasoning ability of LLMs via external logical symbolic solvers, crucial challenges of the poor generalization ability to questions with different features and inevitable question information loss of symbolic solver-driven approaches remain unresolved. To mitigate these issues, we introduce LINA, a LLM-driven neuro-symbolic approach for faithful logical reasoning. By enabling an LLM to autonomously perform the transition from propositional logic extraction to sophisticated logical reasoning, LINA not only bolsters the resilience of the reasoning process but also eliminates the dependency on external solvers. Additionally, through its adoption of a hypothetical-deductive reasoning paradigm, LINA effectively circumvents the expansive search space challenge that plagues traditional forward reasoning methods. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that LINA substantially outperforms both established propositional logic frameworks and conventional prompting techniques across a spectrum of five logical reasoning tasks. Specifically, LINA achieves an improvement of 24.34% over LINC on the FOLIO dataset, while also surpassing prompting strategies like CoT and CoT-SC by up to 24.02%. Our code is available at https://github.com/wufeiwuwoshihua/nshy.
Volumetric Conditioning Module to Control Pretrained Diffusion Models for 3D Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Spatial control methods using additional modules on pretrained diffusion models have gained attention for enabling conditional generation in natural images. These methods guide the generation process with new conditions while leveraging the capabilities of large models. They could be beneficial as training strategies in the context of 3D medical imaging, where training a diffusion model from scratch is challenging due to high computational costs and data scarcity. However, the potential application of spatial control methods with additional modules to 3D medical images has not yet been explored. In this paper, we present a tailored spatial control method for 3D medical images with a novel lightweight module, Volumetric Conditioning Module (VCM). Our VCM employs an asymmetric U-Net architecture to effectively encode complex information from various levels of 3D conditions, providing detailed guidance in image synthesis. To examine the applicability of spatial control methods and the effectiveness of VCM for 3D medical data, we conduct experiments under single- and multimodal conditions scenarios across a wide range of dataset sizes, from extremely small datasets with 10 samples to large datasets with 500 samples. The experimental results show that the VCM is effective for conditional generation and efficient in terms of requiring less training data and computational resources. We further investigate the potential applications for our spatial control method through axial super-resolution for medical images. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/Ahn-Ssu/VCM}
Improving In-Context Learning with Small Language Model Ensembles
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance on domain-specific tasks remains limited. While methods like retrieval augmented generation and fine-tuning can help to address this, they require significant resources. In-context learning (ICL) is a cheap and efficient alternative but cannot match the accuracies of advanced methods. We present Ensemble SuperICL, a novel approach that enhances ICL by leveraging the expertise of multiple fine-tuned small language models (SLMs). Ensemble SuperICL achieves state of the art (SoTA) results on several natural language understanding benchmarks. Additionally, we test it on a medical-domain labelling task and showcase its practicality by using off-the-shelf SLMs fine-tuned on a general language task, achieving superior accuracy in large-scale data labelling compared to all baselines. Finally, we conduct an ablation study and sensitivity analyses to elucidate the underlying mechanism of Ensemble SuperICL. Our research contributes to the growing demand for efficient domain specialisation methods in LLMs, offering a cheap and effective method for practitioners.
Multi-step feature fusion for natural disaster damage assessment on satellite images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Quick and accurate assessment of the damage state of buildings after natural disasters is crucial for undertaking properly targeted rescue and subsequent recovery operations, which can have a major impact on the safety of victims and the cost of disaster recovery. The quality of such a process can be significantly improved by harnessing the potential of machine learning methods in computer vision. This paper presents a novel damage assessment method using an original multi-step feature fusion network for the classification of the damage state of buildings based on pre- and post-disaster large-scale satellite images. We introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) module that performs feature fusion at multiple network levels between pre- and post-disaster images in the horizontal and vertical directions of CNN network. An additional network element - Fuse Module - was proposed to adapt any CNN model to analyze image pairs in the issue of pair classification. We use, open, large-scale datasets (IDA-BD and xView2) to verify, that the proposed method is suitable to improve on existing state-of-the-art architectures. We report over a 3 percentage point increase in the accuracy of the Vision Transformer model.
ReMix: Training Generalized Person Re-identification on a Mixture of Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Modern person re-identification (Re-ID) methods have a weak generalization ability and experience a major accuracy drop when capturing environments change. This is because existing multi-camera Re-ID datasets are limited in size and diversity, since such data is difficult to obtain. At the same time, enormous volumes of unlabeled single-camera records are available. Such data can be easily collected, and therefore, it is more diverse. Currently, single-camera data is used only for self-supervised pre-training of Re-ID methods. However, the diversity of single-camera data is suppressed by fine-tuning on limited multi-camera data after pre-training. In this paper, we propose ReMix, a generalized Re-ID method jointly trained on a mixture of limited labeled multi-camera and large unlabeled single-camera data. Effective training of our method is achieved through a novel data sampling strategy and new loss functions that are adapted for joint use with both types of data. Experiments show that ReMix has a high generalization ability and outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generalizable person Re-ID. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that explores joint training on a mixture of multi-camera and single-camera data in person Re-ID.
Multi-layer network analysis of deliberation in an online discussion platform: the case of Reddit
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper uses a multi-layer network model to study deliberation in online discussion platforms, focusing on the Reddit platform. The model comprises two layers: a discussion layer, which represents the comment-to-comment replies as a hierarchical tree, and an actor layer, which represent the actor-to-actor reply interactions. The interlayer links represent user-comment ownership. We further propose several different network metrics to characterise the level of deliberation in discussion threads, and apply the model and metrics to a large Reddit dataset containing posts from 72 subreddits focused on different topics. We compare the level of deliberation that occurs on different subreddits, finding that subreddits that are based on geographical regions or focus on sports have the highest levels of deliberation. Analysis of the actor layer reveals several features consistent across all subreddits, such as small-world characteristics and similar numbers of highly active users.
Neurofeedback-Driven 6-DOF Robotic Arm: Integration of Brain-Computer Interface with Arduino for Advanced Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Brain computer interface (BCI) applications in robotics are becoming more famous and famous. People with disabilities are facing a real-time problem of doing simple activities such as grasping, handshaking etc. in order to aid with this problem, the use of brain signals to control actuators is showing a great importance. The Emotive Insight, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) device, is utilized in this project to collect brain signals and transform them into commands for controlling a robotic arm using an Arduino controller. The Emotive Insight captures brain signals, which are subsequently analyzed using Emotive software and connected with Arduino code. The HITI Brain software integrates these devices, allowing for smooth communication between brain activity and the robotic arm. This system demonstrates how brain impulses may be utilized to control external devices directly. The results showed that the system is applicable efficiently to robotic arms and also for prosthetic arms with Multi Degree of Freedom. In addition to that, the system can be used for other actuators such as bikes, mobile robots, wheelchairs etc.
Enhance Hyperbolic Representation Learning via Second-order Pooling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Hyperbolic representation learning is well known for its ability to capture hierarchical information. However, the distance between samples from different levels of hierarchical classes can be required large. We reveal that the hyperbolic discriminant objective forces the backbone to capture this hierarchical information, which may inevitably increase the Lipschitz constant of the backbone. This can hinder the full utilization of the backbone's generalization ability. To address this issue, we introduce second-order pooling into hyperbolic representation learning, as it naturally increases the distance between samples without compromising the generalization ability of the input features. In this way, the Lipschitz constant of the backbone does not necessarily need to be large. However, current off-the-shelf low-dimensional bilinear pooling methods cannot be directly employed in hyperbolic representation learning because they inevitably reduce the distance expansion capability. To solve this problem, we propose a kernel approximation regularization, which enables the low-dimensional bilinear features to approximate the kernel function well in low-dimensional space. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on graph-structured datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Algorithmic methods of finite discrete structures. Graph clique problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2024
Year: 2024

The monography presents a new algorithm for finding the clique of maximal length in a nonseparable graph. The algorithm is based on the properties of the representation of a clique as a subset of the set of cycles with a length of three, the ring sum of which is an empty set. As a result of selecting the cycles of the length of three, two vectors are formed: the vector of cycles passing through the edges and the vector of cycles passing through the vertices. The numerical values of the components of these vectors determine the weights of the vertices and edges. The iterative process of constructing the set of vectors of cycles passing through the edges allows identifying the main vector of cycles passing through the edges. In turn, the construction of the main vector allows finding the clicks of the graph. The computational complexity of the presented algorithm is analyzed.
Benchmarking Human and Automated Prompting in the Segment Anything Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The remarkable capabilities of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for tackling image segmentation tasks in an intuitive and interactive manner has sparked interest in the design of effective visual prompts. Such interest has led to the creation of automated point prompt selection strategies, typically motivated from a feature extraction perspective. However, there is still very little understanding of how appropriate these automated visual prompting strategies are, particularly when compared to humans, across diverse image domains. Additionally, the performance benefits of including such automated visual prompting strategies within the finetuning process of SAM also remains unexplored, as does the effect of interpretable factors like distance between the prompt points on segmentation performance. To bridge these gaps, we leverage a recently released visual prompting dataset, PointPrompt, and introduce a number of benchmarking tasks that provide an array of opportunities to improve the understanding of the way human prompts differ from automated ones and what underlying factors make for effective visual prompts. We demonstrate that the resulting segmentation scores obtained by humans are approximately 29% higher than those given by automated strategies and identify potential features that are indicative of prompting performance with $R^2$ scores over 0.5. Additionally, we demonstrate that performance when using automated methods can be improved by up to 68% via a finetuning approach. Overall, our experiments not only showcase the existing gap between human prompts and automated methods, but also highlight potential avenues through which this gap can be leveraged to improve effective visual prompt design. Further details along with the dataset links and codes are available at https://github.com/olivesgatech/PointPrompt
An Actor-Critic Approach to Boosting Text-to-SQL Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Text-To-SQL (T2S) conversion based on large language models (LLMs) has found a wide range of applications, by leveraging the capabilities of LLMs in interpreting the query intent expressed in natural language. Existing research focuses on suitable representations for data schema and/or questions, task-specific instructions and representative examples, and complicated inference pipelines. All these methods are empirical and task specific, without a theoretical bound on performance. In this paper, we propose a simple, general, and performance guaranteed T2S enhancement approach called Actor-Critic (AC). Specifically, we design two roles using the same LLM: an Actor to produce SQL queries and a Critic to evaluate the produced SQL. If the Critic believes the produced SQL is wrong, it notifies the Actor to reproduce the SQL and perform evaluation again. By this simple iterative process, expected performance can be derived in theory. We conducted extensive experiments on the Spider and related datasets with eleven LLMs, and demonstrated that the Actor-Critic method consistently improves the performance of T2S, thus serving as a general enhancement approach for T2S conversion.
Joint Extraction and Classification of Danish Competences for Job Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The matching of competences, such as skills, occupations or knowledges, is a key desiderata for candidates to be fit for jobs. Automatic extraction of competences from CVs and Jobs can greatly promote recruiters' productivity in locating relevant candidates for job vacancies. This work presents the first model that jointly extracts and classifies competence from Danish job postings. Different from existing works on skill extraction and skill classification, our model is trained on a large volume of annotated Danish corpora and is capable of extracting a wide range of Danish competences, including skills, occupations and knowledges of different categories. More importantly, as a single BERT-like architecture for joint extraction and classification, our model is lightweight and efficient at inference. On a real-scenario job matching dataset, our model beats the state-of-the-art models in the overall performance of Danish competence extraction and classification, and saves over 50% time at inference.
Testing Identity of Distributions under Kolmogorov Distance in Polylogarithmic Space
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Suppose we have a sample from a distribution $D$ and we want to test whether $D = D^*$ for a fixed distribution $D^*$. Specifically, we want to reject with constant probability, if the distance of $D$ from $D^*$ is $\geq \varepsilon$ in a given metric. In the case of continuous distributions, this has been studied thoroughly in the statistics literature. Namely, for the well-studied Kolmogorov metric a test is known that uses the optimal $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples. However, this test naively uses also space $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$, and previous work improved this to $O(1/\varepsilon)$. In this paper, we show that much less space suffices -- we give an algorithm that uses space $O(\log^4 \varepsilon^{-1})$ in the streaming setting while also using an asymptotically optimal number of samples. This is in contrast with the standard total variation distance on discrete distributions for which such space reduction is known to be impossible. Finally, we state 9 related open problems that we hope will spark interest in this and related problems.
$r$Age-$k$: Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Using Age Factor
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning (FL) is a collaborative approach where multiple clients, coordinated by a parameter server (PS), train a unified machine-learning model. The approach, however, suffers from two key challenges: data heterogeneity and communication overhead. Data heterogeneity refers to inconsistencies in model training arising from heterogeneous data at different clients. Communication overhead arises from the large volumes of parameter updates exchanged between the PS and clients. Existing solutions typically address these challenges separately. This paper introduces a new communication-efficient algorithm that uses the age of information metric to simultaneously tackle both limitations of FL. We introduce age vectors at the PS, which keep track of how often the different model parameters are updated from the clients. The PS uses this to selectively request updates for specific gradient indices from each client. Further, the PS employs age vectors to identify clients with statistically similar data and group them into clusters. The PS combines the age vectors of the clustered clients to efficiently coordinate gradient index updates among clients within a cluster. We evaluate our approach using the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets in highly non-i.i.d. settings. The experimental results show that our proposed method can expedite training, surpassing other communication-efficient strategies in efficiency.
Democratizing Reward Design for Personal and Representative Value-Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Aligning AI agents with human values is challenging due to diverse and subjective notions of values. Standard alignment methods often aggregate crowd feedback, which can result in the suppression of unique or minority preferences. We introduce Interactive-Reflective Dialogue Alignment, a method that iteratively engages users in reflecting on and specifying their subjective value definitions. This system learns individual value definitions through language-model-based preference elicitation and constructs personalized reward models that can be used to align AI behaviour. We evaluated our system through two studies with 30 participants, one focusing on "respect" and the other on ethical decision-making in autonomous vehicles. Our findings demonstrate diverse definitions of value-aligned behaviour and show that our system can accurately capture each person's unique understanding. This approach enables personalized alignment and can inform more representative and interpretable collective alignment strategies.
From melodic note sequences to pitches using word2vec
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Applying the word2vec technique, commonly used in language modeling, to melodies, where notes are treated as words in sentences, enables the capture of pitch information. This study examines two datasets: 20 children's songs and an excerpt from a Bach sonata. The semantic space for defining the embeddings is of very small dimension, specifically 2. Notes are predicted based on the 2, 3 or 4 preceding notes that establish the context. A multivariate analysis of the results shows that the semantic vectors representing the notes have a multiple correlation coefficient of approximately 0.80 with their pitches.
An Efficient Approach to Generate Safe Drivable Space by LiDAR-Camera-HDmap Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose an accurate and robust perception module for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) for drivable space extraction. Perception is crucial in autonomous driving, where many deep learning-based methods, while accurate on benchmark datasets, fail to generalize effectively, especially in diverse and unpredictable environments. Our work introduces a robust easy-to-generalize perception module that leverages LiDAR, camera, and HD map data fusion to deliver a safe and reliable drivable space in all weather conditions. We present an adaptive ground removal and curb detection method integrated with HD map data for enhanced obstacle detection reliability. Additionally, we propose an adaptive DBSCAN clustering algorithm optimized for precipitation noise, and a cost-effective LiDAR-camera frustum association that is resilient to calibration discrepancies. Our comprehensive drivable space representation incorporates all perception data, ensuring compatibility with vehicle dimensions and road regulations. This approach not only improves generalization and efficiency, but also significantly enhances safety in autonomous vehicle operations. Our approach is tested on a real dataset and its reliability is verified during the daily (including harsh snowy weather) operation of our autonomous shuttle, WATonoBus
Robots Pre-train Robots: Manipulation-Centric Robotic Representation from Large-Scale Robot Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The pre-training of visual representations has enhanced the efficiency of robot learning. Due to the lack of large-scale in-domain robotic datasets, prior works utilize in-the-wild human videos to pre-train robotic visual representation. Despite their promising results, representations from human videos are inevitably subject to distribution shifts and lack the dynamics information crucial for task completion. We first evaluate various pre-trained representations in terms of their correlation to the downstream robotic manipulation tasks (i.e., manipulation centricity). Interestingly, we find that the "manipulation centricity" is a strong indicator of success rates when applied to downstream tasks. Drawing from these findings, we propose Manipulation Centric Representation (MCR), a foundation representation learning framework capturing both visual features and the dynamics information such as actions and proprioceptions of manipulation tasks to improve manipulation centricity. Specifically, we pre-train a visual encoder on the DROID robotic dataset and leverage motion-relevant data such as robot proprioceptive states and actions. We introduce a novel contrastive loss that aligns visual observations with the robot's proprioceptive state-action dynamics, combined with a behavior cloning (BC)-like actor loss to predict actions during pre-training, along with a time contrastive loss. Empirical results across 4 simulation domains with 20 tasks verify that MCR outperforms the strongest baseline method by 14.8%. Moreover, MCR boosts the performance of data-efficient learning with a UR5e arm on 3 real-world tasks by 76.9%. Project website: https://robots-pretrain-robots.github.io/.