OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Empirical Evaluation of Public HateSpeech Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Despite the extensive communication benefits offered by social media platforms, numerous challenges must be addressed to ensure user safety. One of the most significant risks faced by users on these platforms is targeted hate speech. Social media platforms are widely utilised for generating datasets employed in training and evaluating machine learning algorithms for hate speech detection. However, existing public datasets exhibit numerous limitations, hindering the effective training of these algorithms and leading to inaccurate hate speech classification. This study provides a comprehensive empirical evaluation of several public datasets commonly used in automated hate speech classification. Through rigorous analysis, we present compelling evidence highlighting the limitations of current hate speech datasets. Additionally, we conduct a range of statistical analyses to elucidate the strengths and weaknesses inherent in these datasets. This work aims to advance the development of more accurate and reliable machine learning models for hate speech detection by addressing the dataset limitations identified.
Idle is the New Sleep: Configuration-Aware Alternative to Powering Off FPGA-Based DL Accelerators During Inactivity
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

In the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) domain, we concentrate on enhancing energy efficiency in Deep Learning accelerators on FPGA-based heterogeneous platforms, aligning with the principles of sustainable computing. Instead of focusing on the inference phase, we introduce innovative optimizations to minimize the overhead of the FPGA configuration phase. By fine-tuning configuration parameters correctly, we achieved a 40.13-fold reduction in configuration energy. Moreover, augmented with power-saving methods, our Idle-Waiting strategy outperformed the traditional On-Off strategy in duty-cycle mode for request periods up to 499.06 ms. Specifically, at a 40 ms request period within a 4147 J energy budget, this strategy extends the system lifetime to approximately 12.39x that of the On-Off strategy. Empirically validated through hardware measurements and simulations, these optimizations provide valuable insights and practical methods for achieving energy-efficient and sustainable deployments in IoT.
Reporting Risks in AI-based Assistive Technology Research: A Systematic Review
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly employed to enhance assistive technologies, yet it can fail in various ways. We conducted a systematic literature review of research into AI-based assistive technology for persons with visual impairments. Our study shows that most proposed technologies with a testable prototype have not been evaluated in a human study with members of the sight-loss community. Furthermore, many studies did not consider or report failure cases or possible risks. These findings highlight the importance of inclusive system evaluations and the necessity of standardizing methods for presenting and analyzing failure cases and threats when developing AI-based assistive technologies.
Integrating Query-aware Segmentation and Cross-Attention for Robust VQA
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a method for VizWiz-VQA using LVLM with trainable cross-attention and LoRA finetuning. We train the model with the following conditions: 1) Training with original images. 2) Training with enhanced images using CLIPSeg to highlight or contrast the original image. 3) Training with integrating the output features of Vision Transformer (ViT) and CLIPSeg features of the original images. Then, we ensemble the results based on Levenshtein distance to enhance the prediction of the final answer. In the experiments, we demonstrate and analyze the proposed method's effectiveness.
Co-Designing Binarized Transformer and Hardware Accelerator for Efficient End-to-End Edge Deployment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Transformer models have revolutionized AI tasks, but their large size hinders real-world deployment on resource-constrained and latency-critical edge devices. While binarized Transformers offer a promising solution by significantly reducing model size, existing approaches suffer from algorithm-hardware mismatches with limited co-design exploration, leading to suboptimal performance on edge devices. Hence, we propose a co-design method for efficient end-to-end edge deployment of Transformers from three aspects: algorithm, hardware, and joint optimization. First, we propose BMT, a novel hardware-friendly binarized Transformer with optimized quantization methods and components, and we further enhance its model accuracy by leveraging the weighted ternary weight splitting training technique. Second, we develop a streaming processor mixed binarized Transformer accelerator, namely BAT, which is equipped with specialized units and scheduling pipelines for efficient inference of binarized Transformers. Finally, we co-optimize the algorithm and hardware through a design space exploration approach to achieve a global trade-off between accuracy, latency, and robustness for real-world deployments. Experimental results show our co-design achieves up to 2.14-49.37x throughput gains and 3.72-88.53x better energy efficiency over state-of-the-art Transformer accelerators, enabling efficient end-to-end edge deployment.
Private prediction for large-scale synthetic text generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We present an approach for generating differentially private synthetic text using large language models (LLMs), via private prediction. In the private prediction framework, we only require the output synthetic data to satisfy differential privacy guarantees. This is in contrast to approaches that train a generative model on potentially sensitive user-supplied source data and seek to ensure the model itself is safe to release. We prompt a pretrained LLM with source data, but ensure that next-token predictions are made with differential privacy guarantees. Previous work in this paradigm reported generating a small number of examples (<10) at reasonable privacy levels, an amount of data that is useful only for downstream in-context learning or prompting. In contrast, we make changes that allow us to generate thousands of high-quality synthetic data points, greatly expanding the set of potential applications. Our improvements come from an improved privacy analysis and a better private selection mechanism, which makes use of the equivalence between the softmax layer for sampling tokens in LLMs and the exponential mechanism. Furthermore, we introduce a novel use of public predictions via the sparse vector technique, in which we do not pay privacy costs for tokens that are predictable without sensitive data; we find this to be particularly effective for structured data.
Pseudorandomness, symmetry, smoothing: II
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2024
Year: 2024

We prove several new results on the Hamming weight of bounded uniform and small-bias distributions. We exhibit bounded-uniform distributions whose weight is anti-concentrated, matching existing concentration inequalities. This construction relies on a recent result in approximation theory due to Erdéyi (Acta Arithmetica 2016). In particular, we match the classical tail bounds, generalizing a result by Bun and Steinke (RANDOM 2015). Also, we improve on a construction by Benjamini, Gurel-Gurevich, and Peled (2012). We give a generic transformation that converts any bounded uniform distribution to a small-bias distribution that almost preserves its weight distribution. Applying this transformation in conjunction with the above results and others, we construct small-bias distributions with various weight restrictions. In particular, we match the concentration that follows from that of bounded uniformity and the generic closeness of small-bias and bounded-uniform distributions, answering a question by Bun and Steinke (RANDOM 2015). Moreover, these distributions are supported on only a constant number of Hamming weights. We further extend the anti-concentration constructions to small-bias distributions perturbed with noise, a class that has received much attention recently in derandomization. Our results imply (but are not implied by) a recent result of the authors (CCC 2024), and are based on different techniques. In particular, we prove that the standard Gaussian distribution is far from any mixture of Gaussians with bounded variance.
Trustworthy AI in practice: an analysis of practitioners' needs and challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, there has been growing attention on behalf of both academic and practice communities towards the ability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to operate responsibly and ethically. As a result, a plethora of frameworks and guidelines have appeared to support practitioners in implementing Trustworthy AI applications (TAI). However, little research has been done to investigate whether such frameworks are being used and how. In this work, we study the vision AI practitioners have on TAI principles, how they address them, and what they would like to have - in terms of tools, knowledge, or guidelines - when they attempt to incorporate such principles into the systems they develop. Through a survey and semi-structured interviews, we systematically investigated practitioners' challenges and needs in developing TAI systems. Based on these practical findings, we highlight recommendations to help AI practitioners develop Trustworthy AI applications.
Propensity towards Ownership and Use of Automated Vehicles: Who Are the Adopters? Who Are the Non-adopters? Who Is Hesitant?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The objective of this study is to investigate automated vehicle (AV) adoption perceptions, including ownership intentions and the willingness to use self-driving mobility services. In this paper, we use data from the 2018 California Transportation Survey, and use K-means, a clustering technique in data mining, to reveal patterns of potential AV owners (and non-owners) as well as AV users (and non-users) of self-driving services. The results reveal seven clusters, namely Multitaskers/ environmentalists/ impaired drivers, Tech mavens/ travelers, Life in transition, Captive car-users, Public/ active transport users, Sub-urban Dwellers, and Car enthusiasts. The first two clusters include adopters who are largely familiar with AVs, are tech savvy, and who make good use of time during their commute. The last cluster comprise of non-adopters who are car enthusiasts. On the other hand, people who are Life in transition, Captive car-users, Public/ active transport users, and Sub-urban dwellers show uncertain perceptions towards being AV adopters. They are either pursuing higher education, having a busy schedule, supporting for sustainable society via government policies, or have a stable life, respectively. Insights from this study help practitioners to build business models and strategic planning, addressing potential market segments of individuals that are willing to own an AV vs. those that are more inclined to use self-driving mobility services. The "gray" segments identify a latent untapped demand and a potential target for marketing, campaigns, and sales.
A Comparative Analysis of Student Performance Predictions in Online Courses using Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

As online courses become the norm in the higher-education landscape, investigations into student performance between students who take online vs on-campus versions of classes become necessary. While attention has been given to looking at differences in learning outcomes through comparisons of students' end performance, less attention has been given in comparing students' engagement patterns between different modalities. In this study, we analyze a heterogeneous knowledge graph consisting of students, course videos, formative assessments and their interactions to predict student performance via a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Using students' performance on the assessments, we attempt to determine a useful model for identifying at-risk students. We then compare the models generated between 5 on-campus and 2 fully-online MOOC-style instances of the same course. The model developed achieved a 70-90\% accuracy of predicting whether a student would pass a particular problem set based on content consumed, course instance, and modality.
MASIVE: Open-Ended Affective State Identification in English and Spanish
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of emotion analysis, much NLP research focuses on identifying a limited number of discrete emotion categories, often applied across languages. These basic sets, however, are rarely designed with textual data in mind, and culture, language, and dialect can influence how particular emotions are interpreted. In this work, we broaden our scope to a practically unbounded set of \textit{affective states}, which includes any terms that humans use to describe their experiences of feeling. We collect and publish MASIVE, a dataset of Reddit posts in English and Spanish containing over 1,000 unique affective states each. We then define the new problem of \textit{affective state identification} for language generation models framed as a masked span prediction task. On this task, we find that smaller finetuned multilingual models outperform much larger LLMs, even on region-specific Spanish affective states. Additionally, we show that pretraining on MASIVE improves model performance on existing emotion benchmarks. Finally, through machine translation experiments, we find that native speaker-written data is vital to good performance on this task.
Towards Interpretable Visuo-Tactile Predictive Models for Soft Robot Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous systems face the intricate challenge of navigating unpredictable environments and interacting with external objects. The successful integration of robotic agents into real-world situations hinges on their perception capabilities, which involve amalgamating world models and predictive skills. Effective perception models build upon the fusion of various sensory modalities to probe the surroundings. Deep learning applied to raw sensory modalities offers a viable option. However, learning-based perceptive representations become difficult to interpret. This challenge is particularly pronounced in soft robots, where the compliance of structures and materials makes prediction even harder. Our work addresses this complexity by harnessing a generative model to construct a multi-modal perception model for soft robots and to leverage proprioceptive and visual information to anticipate and interpret contact interactions with external objects. A suite of tools to interpret the perception model is furnished, shedding light on the fusion and prediction processes across multiple sensory inputs after the learning phase. We will delve into the outlooks of the perception model and its implications for control purposes.
HuBar: A Visual Analytics Tool to Explore Human Behaviour based on fNIRS in AR guidance systems
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The concept of an intelligent augmented reality (AR) assistant has significant, wide-ranging applications, with potential uses in medicine, military, and mechanics domains. Such an assistant must be able to perceive the environment and actions, reason about the environment state in relation to a given task, and seamlessly interact with the task performer. These interactions typically involve an AR headset equipped with sensors which capture video, audio, and haptic feedback. Previous works have sought to facilitate the development of intelligent AR assistants by visualizing these sensor data streams in conjunction with the assistant's perception and reasoning model outputs. However, existing visual analytics systems do not focus on user modeling or include biometric data, and are only capable of visualizing a single task session for a single performer at a time. Moreover, they typically assume a task involves linear progression from one step to the next. We propose a visual analytics system that allows users to compare performance during multiple task sessions, focusing on non-linear tasks where different step sequences can lead to success. In particular, we design visualizations for understanding user behavior through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data as a proxy for perception, attention, and memory as well as corresponding motion data (acceleration, angular velocity, and gaze). We distill these insights into embedding representations that allow users to easily select groups of sessions with similar behaviors. We provide two case studies that demonstrate how to use these visualizations to gain insights about task performance using data collected during helicopter copilot training tasks. Finally, we evaluate our approach by conducting an in-depth examination of a think-aloud experiment with five domain experts.
ER-FSL: Experience Replay with Feature Subspace Learning for Online Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Online continual learning (OCL) involves deep neural networks retaining knowledge from old data while adapting to new data, which is accessible only once. A critical challenge in OCL is catastrophic forgetting, reflected in reduced model performance on old data. Existing replay-based methods mitigate forgetting by replaying buffered samples from old data and learning current samples of new data. In this work, we dissect existing methods and empirically discover that learning and replaying in the same feature space is not conducive to addressing the forgetting issue. Since the learned features associated with old data are readily changed by the features related to new data due to data imbalance, leading to the forgetting problem. Based on this observation, we intuitively explore learning and replaying in different feature spaces. Learning in a feature subspace is sufficient to capture novel knowledge from new data while replaying in a larger feature space provides more feature space to maintain historical knowledge from old data. To this end, we propose a novel OCL approach called experience replay with feature subspace learning (ER-FSL). Firstly, ER-FSL divides the entire feature space into multiple subspaces, with each subspace used to learn current samples. Moreover, it introduces a subspace reuse mechanism to address situations where no blank subspaces exist. Secondly, ER-FSL replays previous samples using an accumulated space comprising all learned subspaces. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of ER-FSL over various state-of-the-art methods.
Bayesian Optimization for Fast Radio Mapping and Localization with an Autonomous Aerial Drone
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores how a flying drone can autonomously navigate while constructing a narrowband radio map for signal localization. As flying drones become more ubiquitous, their wireless signals will necessitate new wireless technologies and algorithms to provide robust radio infrastructure while preserving radio spectrum usage. A potential solution for this spectrum-sharing localization challenge is to limit the bandwidth of any transmitter beacon. However, location signaling with a narrow bandwidth necessitates improving a wireless aerial system's ability to filter a noisy signal, estimate the transmitter's location, and self-pilot to improve the location estimate. By showing results through simulation, emulation, and a final drone flight experiment, this work provides an algorithm using a Gaussian process for radio signal estimation and Bayesian optimization for drone automatic guidance. This research supports advanced radio and aerial robotics applications in critical areas such as search-and-rescue, last-mile delivery, and large-scale platform digital twin development.
Exploiting Inter-Image Similarity Prior for Low-Bitrate Remote Sensing Image Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning-based methods have garnered significant attention in remote sensing (RS) image compression due to their superior performance. Most of these methods focus on enhancing the coding capability of the compression network and improving entropy model prediction accuracy. However, they typically compress and decompress each image independently, ignoring the significant inter-image similarity prior. In this paper, we propose a codebook-based RS image compression (Code-RSIC) method with a generated discrete codebook, which is deployed at the decoding end of a compression algorithm to provide inter-image similarity prior. Specifically, we first pretrain a high-quality discrete codebook using the competitive generation model VQGAN. We then introduce a Transformer-based prediction model to align the latent features of the decoded images from an existing compression algorithm with the frozen high-quality codebook. Finally, we develop a hierarchical prior integration network (HPIN), which mainly consists of Transformer blocks and multi-head cross-attention modules (MCMs) that can query hierarchical prior from the codebook, thus enhancing the ability of the proposed method to decode texture-rich RS images. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Code-RSIC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art traditional and learning-based image compression algorithms in terms of perception quality. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/mlkk518/Code-RSIC/
Splatfacto-W: A Nerfstudio Implementation of Gaussian Splatting for Unconstrained Photo Collections
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Novel view synthesis from unconstrained in-the-wild image collections remains a significant yet challenging task due to photometric variations and transient occluders that complicate accurate scene reconstruction. Previous methods have approached these issues by integrating per-image appearance features embeddings in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers faster training and real-time rendering, adapting it for unconstrained image collections is non-trivial due to the substantially different architecture. In this paper, we introduce Splatfacto-W, an approach that integrates per-Gaussian neural color features and per-image appearance embeddings into the rasterization process, along with a spherical harmonics-based background model to represent varying photometric appearances and better depict backgrounds. Our key contributions include latent appearance modeling, efficient transient object handling, and precise background modeling. Splatfacto-W delivers high-quality, real-time novel view synthesis with improved scene consistency in in-the-wild scenarios. Our method improves the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) by an average of 5.3 dB compared to 3DGS, enhances training speed by 150 times compared to NeRF-based methods, and achieves a similar rendering speed to 3DGS. Additional video results and code integrated into Nerfstudio are available at https://kevinxu02.github.io/splatfactow/.