OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dual-Hybrid Attention Network for Specular Highlight Removal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Specular highlight removal plays a pivotal role in multimedia applications, as it enhances the quality and interpretability of images and videos, ultimately improving the performance of downstream tasks such as content-based retrieval, object recognition, and scene understanding. Despite significant advances in deep learning-based methods, current state-of-the-art approaches often rely on additional priors or supervision, limiting their practicality and generalization capability. In this paper, we propose the Dual-Hybrid Attention Network for Specular Highlight Removal (DHAN-SHR), an end-to-end network that introduces novel hybrid attention mechanisms to effectively capture and process information across different scales and domains without relying on additional priors or supervision. DHAN-SHR consists of two key components: the Adaptive Local Hybrid-Domain Dual Attention Transformer (L-HD-DAT) and the Adaptive Global Dual Attention Transformer (G-DAT). The L-HD-DAT captures local inter-channel and inter-pixel dependencies while incorporating spectral domain features, enabling the network to effectively model the complex interactions between specular highlights and the underlying surface properties. The G-DAT models global inter-channel relationships and long-distance pixel dependencies, allowing the network to propagate contextual information across the entire image and generate more coherent and consistent highlight-free results. To evaluate the performance of DHAN-SHR and facilitate future research in this area, we compile a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising a diverse range of images with varying levels of specular highlights. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DHAN-SHR outperforms 18 state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, setting a new standard for specular highlight removal in multimedia applications.
Assessing the Feasibility, and Efficacy of Virtual Reality Navigational Training for Older Adults
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Objective. Evaluate the feasibility of Virtual Reality (VR) wayfinding training with aging adults, and examine the impact of the training on wayfinding performance. Design. Design involved wayfinding tasks in a study with three groups: active VR training, passive video training, and no training, assigned randomly. The training featured 5 tasks in a digital version of a real building. Post-training assessments had 10 tasks in this building, half familiar from training and half new. The study was double-blinded, with each intervention lasting 10 minutes. Participants. A convenience sample of 49 participants; inclusion criteria: age >58, unfamiliar with the building; exclusion criteria: mobility or vision impairments, history of motion sickness, or medical implants. Outcomes. Time spent and Distance traveled on each wayfinding task with a fixed 10-min limit. Results. Participants in VR group reported moderate usability (63.82, SD=14.55) with respect to the training intervention and high Self Location (3.71, SD=0.94). There were no differences in task performance among the groups in the similar tasks. In the new tasks, compared to the control condition, Time spent on tasks was marginally significantly reduced in the VR group; Distance traveled to finish tasks was also reduced in the VR group, and marginally significantly reduced in the Video training group. No differences were found between VR and Video conditions. No adverse effects were reported during or post intervention. Conclusions. This study provides preliminary evidence that VR training can effectively improve wayfinding performance in older adults with no reported adverse effect.
When can transformers compositionally generalize in-context?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Many tasks can be composed from a few independent components. This gives rise to a combinatorial explosion of possible tasks, only some of which might be encountered during training. Under what circumstances can transformers compositionally generalize from a subset of tasks to all possible combinations of tasks that share similar components? Here we study a modular multitask setting that allows us to precisely control compositional structure in the data generation process. We present evidence that transformers learning in-context struggle to generalize compositionally on this task despite being in principle expressive enough to do so. Compositional generalization becomes possible only when introducing a bottleneck that enforces an explicit separation between task inference and task execution.
Turning Generative Models Degenerate: The Power of Data Poisoning Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing use of large language models (LLMs) trained by third parties raises significant security concerns. In particular, malicious actors can introduce backdoors through poisoning attacks to generate undesirable outputs. While such attacks have been extensively studied in image domains and classification tasks, they remain underexplored for natural language generation (NLG) tasks. To address this gap, we conduct an investigation of various poisoning techniques targeting the LLM's fine-tuning phase via prefix-tuning, a Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method. We assess their effectiveness across two generative tasks: text summarization and text completion; and we also introduce new metrics to quantify the success and stealthiness of such NLG poisoning attacks. Through our experiments, we find that the prefix-tuning hyperparameters and trigger designs are the most crucial factors to influence attack success and stealthiness. Moreover, we demonstrate that existing popular defenses are ineffective against our poisoning attacks. Our study presents the first systematic approach to understanding poisoning attacks targeting NLG tasks during fine-tuning via PEFT across a wide range of triggers and attack settings. We hope our findings will aid the AI security community in developing effective defenses against such threats.
A Unified Model of Congestion Games with Priorities: Two-Sided Markets with Ties, Finite and Non-Affine Delay Functions, and Pure Nash Equilibria
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

The study of equilibrium concepts in congestion games and two-sided markets with ties has been a primary topic in game theory, economics, and computer science. Ackermann, Goldberg, Mirrokni, Röglin, Vöcking (2008) gave a common generalization of these two models, in which a player more prioritized by a resource produces an infinite delay on less prioritized players. While presenting several theorems on pure Nash equilibria in this model, Ackermann et al.\ posed an open problem of how to design a model in which more prioritized players produce a large but finite delay on less prioritized players. In this paper, we present a positive solution to this open problem by combining the model of Ackermann et al.\ with a generalized model of congestion games due to Bilò and Vinci (2023). In the model of Bilò and Vinci, the more prioritized players produce a finite delay on the less prioritized players, while the delay functions are of a specific kind of affine function, and all resources have the same priorities. By unifying these two models, we achieve a model in which the delay functions may be finite and non-affine, and the priorities of the resources may be distinct. We prove some positive results on the existence and computability of pure Nash equilibria in our model, which extend those for the previous models and support the validity of our model.
Frequency Guidance Matters: Skeletal Action Recognition by Frequency-Aware Mixed Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, transformers have demonstrated great potential for modeling long-term dependencies from skeleton sequences and thereby gained ever-increasing attention in skeleton action recognition. However, the existing transformer-based approaches heavily rely on the naive attention mechanism for capturing the spatiotemporal features, which falls short in learning discriminative representations that exhibit similar motion patterns. To address this challenge, we introduce the Frequency-aware Mixed Transformer (FreqMixFormer), specifically designed for recognizing similar skeletal actions with subtle discriminative motions. First, we introduce a frequency-aware attention module to unweave skeleton frequency representations by embedding joint features into frequency attention maps, aiming to distinguish the discriminative movements based on their frequency coefficients. Subsequently, we develop a mixed transformer architecture to incorporate spatial features with frequency features to model the comprehensive frequency-spatial patterns. Additionally, a temporal transformer is proposed to extract the global correlations across frames. Extensive experiments show that FreqMiXFormer outperforms SOTA on 3 popular skeleton action recognition datasets, including NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA datasets.
Spectra: Surprising Effectiveness of Pretraining Ternary Language Models at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Rapid advancements in GPU computational power has outpaced memory capacity and bandwidth growth, creating bottlenecks in Large Language Model (LLM) inference. Post-training quantization is the leading method for addressing memory-related bottlenecks in LLM inference, but it suffers from significant performance degradation below 4-bit precision. This paper addresses these challenges by investigating the pretraining of low-bitwidth models specifically Ternary Language Models (TriLMs) as an alternative to traditional floating-point models (FloatLMs) and their post-training quantized versions (QuantLMs). We present Spectra LLM suite, the first open suite of LLMs spanning multiple bit-widths, including FloatLMs, QuantLMs, and TriLMs, ranging from 99M to 3.9B parameters trained on 300B tokens. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that TriLMs offer superior scaling behavior in terms of model size (in bits). Surprisingly, at scales exceeding one billion parameters, TriLMs consistently outperform their QuantLM and FloatLM counterparts for a given bit size across various benchmarks. Notably, the 3.9B parameter TriLM matches the performance of the FloatLM 3.9B across all benchmarks, despite having fewer bits than FloatLM 830M. Overall, this research provides valuable insights into the feasibility and scalability of low-bitwidth language models, paving the way for the development of more efficient LLMs. To enhance understanding of low-bitwidth models, we are releasing 500+ intermediate checkpoints of the Spectra suite at https://github.com/NolanoOrg/SpectraSuite.
SENTAUR: Security EnhaNced Trojan Assessment Using LLMs Against Undesirable Revisions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

A globally distributed IC supply chain brings risks due to untrusted third parties. The risks span inadvertent use of hardware Trojan (HT), inserted Intellectual Property (3P-IP) or Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flows. HT can introduce stealthy HT behavior, prevent an IC work as intended, or leak sensitive data via side channels. To counter HTs, rapidly examining HT scenarios is a key requirement. While Trust-Hub benchmarks are a good starting point to assess defenses, they encompass a small subset of manually created HTs within the expanse of HT designs. Further, the HTs may disappear during synthesis. We propose a large language model (LLM) framework SENTAUR to generate a suite of legitimate HTs for a Register Transfer Level (RTL) design by learning its specifications, descriptions, and natural language descriptions of HT effects. Existing tools and benchmarks are limited; they need a learning period to construct an ML model to mimic the threat model and are difficult to reproduce. SENTAUR can swiftly produce HT instances by leveraging LLMs without any learning period and sanitizing the HTs facilitating their rapid assessment. Evaluation of SENTAUR involved generating effective, synthesizable, and practical HTs from TrustHub and elsewhere, investigating impacts of payloads/triggers at the RTL. While our evaluation focused on HT insertion, SENTAUR can generalize to automatically transform an RTL code to have defined functional modifications.
FETCH: A Memory-Efficient Replay Approach for Continual Learning in Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Class-incremental continual learning is an important area of research, as static deep learning methods fail to adapt to changing tasks and data distributions. In previous works, promising results were achieved using replay and compressed replay techniques. In the field of regular replay, GDumb achieved outstanding results but requires a large amount of memory. This problem can be addressed by compressed replay techniques. The goal of this work is to evaluate compressed replay in the pipeline of GDumb. We propose FETCH, a two-stage compression approach. First, the samples from the continual datastream are encoded by the early layers of a pre-trained neural network. Second, the samples are compressed before being stored in the episodic memory. Following GDumb, the remaining classification head is trained from scratch using only the decompressed samples from the reply memory. We evaluate FETCH in different scenarios and show that this approach can increase accuracy on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100. In our experiments, simple compression methods (e.g., quantization of tensors) outperform deep autoencoders. In the future, FETCH could serve as a baseline for benchmarking compressed replay learning in constrained memory scenarios.
Deep Learning-based Sentiment Analysis of Olympics Tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Sentiment analysis (SA), is an approach of natural language processing (NLP) for determining a text's emotional tone by analyzing subjective information such as views, feelings, and attitudes toward specific topics, products, services, events, or experiences. This study attempts to develop an advanced deep learning (DL) model for SA to understand global audience emotions through tweets in the context of the Olympic Games. The findings represent global attitudes around the Olympics and contribute to advancing the SA models. We have used NLP for tweet pre-processing and sophisticated DL models for arguing with SA, this research enhances the reliability and accuracy of sentiment classification. The study focuses on data selection, preprocessing, visualization, feature extraction, and model building, featuring a baseline Naïve Bayes (NB) model and three advanced DL models: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The results of the experiments show that the BERT model can efficiently classify sentiments related to the Olympics, achieving the highest accuracy of 99.23%.
Mamba-PTQ: Outlier Channels in Recurrent Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Modern recurrent layers are emerging as a promising path toward edge deployment of foundation models, especially in the context of large language models (LLMs). Compressing the whole input sequence in a finite-dimensional representation enables recurrent layers to model long-range dependencies while maintaining a constant inference cost for each token and a fixed memory requirement. However, the practical deployment of LLMs in resource-limited environments often requires further model compression, such as quantization and pruning. While these techniques are well-established for attention-based models, their effects on recurrent layers remain underexplored. In this preliminary work, we focus on post-training quantization for recurrent LLMs and show that Mamba models exhibit the same pattern of outlier channels observed in attention-based LLMs. We show that the reason for the difficulty of quantizing SSMs is caused by activation outliers, similar to those observed in transformer-based LLMs. We report baseline results for post-training quantization of Mamba that do not take into account the activation outliers and suggest first steps for outlier-aware quantization.
Sphere Window: Challenges and Opportunities of 360° Video in Collaborative Design Workshops
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The increased ubiquity of 360° video presents a unique opportunity for designers to deeply engage with the world of users by capturing the complete visual context. However, the opportunities and challenges 360° video introduces for video design ethnography is unclear. This study investigates this gap through 16 workshops in which experienced designers engaged with 360° video. Our analysis shows that while 360° video enhances designers' ability to explore and understand user contexts, it also complicates the process of sharing insights. To address this challenge, we present two opportunities to support the use of 360° video by designers - the creation of designerly 360° video annotation tools, and 360° ``screenshots'' - in order to enable designers to leverage the complete context of 360° video for user research.
StuGPTViz: A Visual Analytics Approach to Understand Student-ChatGPT Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially ChatGPT, into education is poised to revolutionize students' learning experiences by introducing innovative conversational learning methodologies. To empower students to fully leverage the capabilities of ChatGPT in educational scenarios, understanding students' interaction patterns with ChatGPT is crucial for instructors. However, this endeavor is challenging due to the absence of datasets focused on student-ChatGPT conversations and the complexities in identifying and analyzing the evolutional interaction patterns within conversations. To address these challenges, we collected conversational data from 48 students interacting with ChatGPT in a master's level data visualization course over one semester. We then developed a coding scheme, grounded in the literature on cognitive levels and thematic analysis, to categorize students' interaction patterns with ChatGPT. Furthermore, we present a visual analytics system, StuGPTViz, that tracks and compares temporal patterns in student prompts and the quality of ChatGPT's responses at multiple scales, revealing significant pedagogical insights for instructors. We validated the system's effectiveness through expert interviews with six data visualization instructors and three case studies. The results confirmed StuGPTViz's capacity to enhance educators' insights into the pedagogical value of ChatGPT. We also discussed the potential research opportunities of applying visual analytics in education and developing AI-driven personalized learning solutions.
Sharif-STR at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Transformer as a Regression Model for Fine-Grained Scoring of Textual Semantic Relations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic Textual Relatedness holds significant relevance in Natural Language Processing, finding applications across various domains. Traditionally, approaches to STR have relied on knowledge-based and statistical methods. However, with the emergence of Large Language Models, there has been a paradigm shift, ushering in new methodologies. In this paper, we delve into the investigation of sentence-level STR within Track A (Supervised) by leveraging fine-tuning techniques on the RoBERTa transformer. Our study focuses on assessing the efficacy of this approach across different languages. Notably, our findings indicate promising advancements in STR performance, particularly in Latin languages. Specifically, our results demonstrate notable improvements in English, achieving a correlation of 0.82 and securing a commendable 19th rank. Similarly, in Spanish, we achieved a correlation of 0.67, securing the 15th position. However, our approach encounters challenges in languages like Arabic, where we observed a correlation of only 0.38, resulting in a 20th rank.
Context-Aware Fuzzing for Robustness Enhancement of Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In the testing-retraining pipeline for enhancing the robustness property of deep learning (DL) models, many state-of-the-art robustness-oriented fuzzing techniques are metric-oriented. The pipeline generates adversarial examples as test cases via such a DL testing technique and retrains the DL model under test with test suites that contain these test cases. On the one hand, the strategies of these fuzzing techniques tightly integrate the key characteristics of their testing metrics. On the other hand, they are often unaware of whether their generated test cases are different from the samples surrounding these test cases and whether there are relevant test cases of other seeds when generating the current one. We propose a novel testing metric called Contextual Confidence (CC). CC measures a test case through the surrounding samples of a test case in terms of their mean probability predicted to the prediction label of the test case. Based on this metric, we further propose a novel fuzzing technique Clover as a DL testing technique for the pipeline. In each fuzzing round, Clover first finds a set of seeds whose labels are the same as the label of the seed under fuzzing. At the same time, it locates the corresponding test case that achieves the highest CC values among the existing test cases of each seed in this set of seeds and shares the same prediction label as the existing test case of the seed under fuzzing that achieves the highest CC value. Clover computes the piece of difference between each such pair of a seed and a test case. It incrementally applies these pieces of differences to perturb the current test case of the seed under fuzzing that achieves the highest CC value and to perturb the resulting samples along the gradient to generate new test cases for the seed under fuzzing.
Estimating Reaction Barriers with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Stable states in complex systems correspond to local minima on the associated potential energy surface. Transitions between these local minima govern the dynamics of such systems. Precisely determining the transition pathways in complex and high-dimensional systems is challenging because these transitions are rare events, and isolating the relevant species in experiments is difficult. Most of the time, the system remains near a local minimum, with rare, large fluctuations leading to transitions between minima. The probability of such transitions decreases exponentially with the height of the energy barrier, making the system's dynamics highly sensitive to the calculated energy barriers. This work aims to formulate the problem of finding the minimum energy barrier between two stable states in the system's state space as a cost-minimization problem. We propose solving this problem using reinforcement learning algorithms. The exploratory nature of reinforcement learning agents enables efficient sampling and determination of the minimum energy barrier for transitions.