OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DAG-Sword: A Simulator of Large-Scale Network Topologies for DAG-Oriented Proof-of-Work Blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The blockchain brought interesting properties for many practical applications. However, some properties, such as the transaction processing throughput remained limited, especially in Proof-of-Work blockchains. Therefore, several promising directions, such as sharding designs and DAG-based protocols emerged. In this paper, we focus on DAG-based consensus protocols and present a discrete-event simulator for them. Our simulator can simulate realistic blockchain networks created from data of a Bitcoin network, while its network configuration and topology can be customized. The simulated network consists of honest and malicious miners. Malicious miners do not make any attack on consensus itself. Instead, they use a different transaction selection strategy than honest miners (who select transactions randomly) with the intention to earn unfairly more profits than honest miners at the cost of downgrading the protocol performance by duplicate transactions. As a consequence, this harms the performance of some DAG-based protocols (e.g., PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG) in terms of transaction processing throughput, which we demonstrate in our experiments and extend the results of the related work that contains a small-scale network of 10 nodes by the results obtained on a large-scale network with 7000 nodes. Next, we empirically compare different algorithms for the mempool structure, and we propose a composite mempool structure that is memory-efficient and thus convenient for simulations of resource-demanding large-scale networks.
Mass Adoption of NATs: Survey and experiments on carrier-grade NATs
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

In recent times, the prevalence of home NATs and the widespread implementation of Carrier-Grade NATs have posed significant challenges to various applications, particularly those relying on Peer-to-Peer communication. This paper addresses these issues by conducting a thorough review of related literature and exploring potential techniques to mitigate the problems. The literature review focuses on the disruptive effects of home NATs and CGNATs on application performance. Additionally, the study examines existing approaches used to alleviate these disruptions. Furthermore, this paper presents a comprehensive guide on how to puncture a NAT and facilitate direct communication between two peers behind any type of NAT. The techniques outlined in the guide are rigorously tested using a simple application running the IPv8 network overlay, along with their built-in NAT penetration procedures. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, 5G communication is established between two phones using four different Dutch telephone carriers. The results indicate successful cross-connectivity with three out of the four carriers tested, showcasing the practical applicability of the suggested methods.
Versatile Airborne Ultrasonic NDT Technologies via Active Omni-Sliding with Over-Actuated Aerial Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents the utilization of advanced methodologies in aerial manipulation to address meaningful industrial applications and develop versatile ultrasonic Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) technologies with aerial robots. The primary objectives of this work are to enable multi-point measurements through sliding without re-approaching the work surface, and facilitate the representation of material thickness with B and C scans via dynamic scanning in arbitrary directions (i.e. omnidirections). To accomplish these objectives, a payload that can slide in omnidirections (here we call the omni-sliding payload) is designed for an over-actuated aerial vehicle, ensuring truly omnidirectional sliding mobility while exerting consistent forces in contact with a flat work surface. The omni-sliding payload is equipped with an omniwheel-based active end-effector and an Electro Magnetic Acoustic Transducer (EMAT). Furthermore, to ensure successful development of the designed payload and integration with the aerial vehicle, a comprehensive studying on contact conditions and system dynamics during active sliding is presented, and the derived system constraints are later used as guidelines for the hardware development and control setting. The proposed methods are validated through experiments, encompassing both the wall-sliding task and dynamic scanning for Ultrasonic Testing (UT), employing the aerial platform - Voliro T.
Weakly supervised cross-modal learning in high-content screening
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With the surge in available data from various modalities, there is a growing need to bridge the gap between different data types. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to learn cross-modal representations between image data and molecular representations for drug discovery. We propose EMM and IMM, two innovative loss functions built on top of CLIP that leverage weak supervision and cross sites replicates in High-Content Screening. Evaluating our model against known baseline on cross-modal retrieval, we show that our proposed approach allows to learn better representations and mitigate batch effect. In addition, we also present a preprocessing method for the JUMP-CP dataset that effectively reduce the required space from 85Tb to a mere usable 7Tb size, still retaining all perturbations and most of the information content.
Exchanging... Watch out!
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

During a conversation, individuals take turns speaking and engage in exchanges, which can occur smoothly or involve interruptions. Listeners have various ways of participating, such as displaying backchannels, signalling the aim to take a turn, waiting for the speaker to yield the floor, or even interrupting and taking over the conversation. These exchanges are commonplace in natural interactions. To create realistic and engaging interactions between human participants and embodied conversational agents (ECAs), it is crucial to equip virtual agents with the ability to manage these exchanges. This includes being able to initiate or respond to signals from the human user. In order to achieve this, we annotate, analyze and characterize these exchanges in human-human conversations. In this paper, we present an analysis of multimodal features, with a focus on prosodic features such as pitch (F0) and loudness, as well as facial expressions, to describe different types of exchanges.
FAIR Knowledge Graphs with Semantic Units: a Prototype
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge graphs and ontologies are becoming increasingly important in the context of making data and metadata findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). We introduce the concept of Semantic Units for organizing Knowledge Graphs into identifiable and semantically meaningful subgraphs. Each Semantic Unit is represented in the graph by its own resource that instantiates a Semantic Unit class. Different types of Semantic Units are distinguished, and together they can organize a Knowledge Graph into different levels of representational granularity with partially overlapping, partially enclosed subgraphs that users of Knowledge Graphs can refer to for making statements about statements. The use of Semantic Units in Knowledge Graphs supports making them FAIR and increases the human-reader-actionability of their data and metadata by increasing the graph's cognitive interoperability by increasing its explorability for a human reader. We introduce a minimal prototype web application for a user-driven FAIR Knowledge Graph that is based on Semantic Units.
The voraus-AD Dataset for Anomaly Detection in Robot Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

During the operation of industrial robots, unusual events may endanger the safety of humans and the quality of production. When collecting data to detect such cases, it is not ensured that data from all potentially occurring errors is included as unforeseeable events may happen over time. Therefore, anomaly detection (AD) delivers a practical solution, using only normal data to learn to detect unusual events. We introduce a dataset that allows training and benchmarking of anomaly detection methods for robotic applications based on machine data which will be made publicly available to the research community. As a typical robot task the dataset includes a pick-and-place application which involves movement, actions of the end effector and interactions with the objects of the environment. Since several of the contained anomalies are not task-specific but general, evaluations on our dataset are transferable to other robotics applications as well. Additionally, we present MVT-Flow (multivariate time-series flow) as a new baseline method for anomaly detection: It relies on deep-learning-based density estimation with normalizing flows, tailored to the data domain by taking its structure into account for the architecture. Our evaluation shows that MVT-Flow outperforms baselines from previous work by a large margin of 6.2% in area under ROC.
On the Multiple Roles of Ontologies in Explainable AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper discusses the different roles that explicit knowledge, in particular ontologies, can play in Explainable AI and in the development of human-centric explainable systems and intelligible explanations. We consider three main perspectives in which ontologies can contribute significantly, namely reference modelling, common-sense reasoning, and knowledge refinement and complexity management. We overview some of the existing approaches in the literature, and we position them according to these three proposed perspectives. The paper concludes by discussing what challenges still need to be addressed to enable ontology-based approaches to explanation and to evaluate their human-understandability and effectiveness.
Why Do Probabilistic Clinical Models Fail To Transport Between Sites?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The rising popularity of artificial intelligence in healthcare is highlighting the problem that a computational model achieving super-human clinical performance at its training sites may perform substantially worse at new sites. In this perspective, we present common sources for this failure to transport, which we divide into sources under the control of the experimenter and sources inherent to the clinical data-generating process. Of the inherent sources we look a little deeper into site-specific clinical practices that can affect the data distribution, and propose a potential solution intended to isolate the imprint of those practices on the data from the patterns of disease cause and effect that are the usual target of probabilistic clinical models.
Determination of toxic comments and unintended model bias minimization using Deep learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Online conversations can be toxic and subjected to threats, abuse, or harassment. To identify toxic text comments, several deep learning and machine learning models have been proposed throughout the years. However, recent studies demonstrate that because of the imbalances in the training data, some models are more likely to show unintended biases including gender bias and identity bias. In this research, our aim is to detect toxic comment and reduce the unintended bias concerning identity features such as race, gender, sex, religion by fine-tuning an attention based model called BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers). We apply weighted loss to address the issue of unbalanced data and compare the performance of a fine-tuned BERT model with a traditional Logistic Regression model in terms of classification and bias minimization. The Logistic Regression model with the TFIDF vectorizer achieve 57.1% accuracy, and fine-tuned BERT model's accuracy is 89%. Code is available at https://github.com/zim10/Determine_Toxic_comment_and_identity_bias.git
SODAWideNet -- Salient Object Detection with an Attention augmented Wide Encoder Decoder network without ImageNet pre-training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Developing a new Salient Object Detection (SOD) model involves selecting an ImageNet pre-trained backbone and creating novel feature refinement modules to use backbone features. However, adding new components to a pre-trained backbone needs retraining the whole network on the ImageNet dataset, which requires significant time. Hence, we explore developing a neural network from scratch directly trained on SOD without ImageNet pre-training. Such a formulation offers full autonomy to design task-specific components. To that end, we propose SODAWideNet, an encoder-decoder-style network for Salient Object Detection. We deviate from the commonly practiced paradigm of narrow and deep convolutional models to a wide and shallow architecture, resulting in a parameter-efficient deep neural network. To achieve a shallower network, we increase the receptive field from the beginning of the network using a combination of dilated convolutions and self-attention. Therefore, we propose Multi Receptive Field Feature Aggregation Module (MRFFAM) that efficiently obtains discriminative features from farther regions at higher resolutions using dilated convolutions. Next, we propose Multi-Scale Attention (MSA), which creates a feature pyramid and efficiently computes attention across multiple resolutions to extract global features from larger feature maps. Finally, we propose two variants, SODAWideNet-S (3.03M) and SODAWideNet (9.03M), that achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art models on five datasets.
Computing with Residue Numbers in High-Dimensional Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce Residue Hyperdimensional Computing, a computing framework that unifies residue number systems with an algebra defined over random, high-dimensional vectors. We show how residue numbers can be represented as high-dimensional vectors in a manner that allows algebraic operations to be performed with component-wise, parallelizable operations on the vector elements. The resulting framework, when combined with an efficient method for factorizing high-dimensional vectors, can represent and operate on numerical values over a large dynamic range using vastly fewer resources than previous methods, and it exhibits impressive robustness to noise. We demonstrate the potential for this framework to solve computationally difficult problems in visual perception and combinatorial optimization, showing improvement over baseline methods. More broadly, the framework provides a possible account for the computational operations of grid cells in the brain, and it suggests new machine learning architectures for representing and manipulating numerical data.
GENOME: GenerativE Neuro-symbOlic visual reasoning by growing and reusing ModulEs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent works have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) could empower traditional neuro-symbolic models via programming capabilities to translate language into module descriptions, thus achieving strong visual reasoning results while maintaining the model's transparency and efficiency. However, these models usually exhaustively generate the entire code snippet given each new instance of a task, which is extremely ineffective. We propose generative neuro-symbolic visual reasoning by growing and reusing modules. Specifically, our model consists of three unique stages, module initialization, module generation, and module execution. First, given a vision-language task, we adopt LLMs to examine whether we could reuse and grow over established modules to handle this new task. If not, we initialize a new module needed by the task and specify the inputs and outputs of this new module. After that, the new module is created by querying LLMs to generate corresponding code snippets that match the requirements. In order to get a better sense of the new module's ability, we treat few-shot training examples as test cases to see if our new module could pass these cases. If yes, the new module is added to the module library for future reuse. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our model on the testing set by executing the parsed programs with the newly made visual modules to get the results. We find the proposed model possesses several advantages. First, it performs competitively on standard tasks like visual question answering and referring expression comprehension; Second, the modules learned from one task can be seamlessly transferred to new tasks; Last but not least, it is able to adapt to new visual reasoning tasks by observing a few training examples and reusing modules.
Are cascade dialogue state tracking models speaking out of turn in spoken dialogues?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems, correctly updating the system's understanding of the user's needs is key to a smooth interaction. Traditionally TOD systems are composed of several modules that interact with one another. While each of these components is the focus of active research communities, their behavior in interaction can be overlooked. This paper proposes a comprehensive analysis of the errors of state of the art systems in complex settings such as Dialogue State Tracking which highly depends on the dialogue context. Based on spoken MultiWoz, we identify that errors on non-categorical slots' values are essential to address in order to bridge the gap between spoken and chat-based dialogue systems. We explore potential solutions to improve transcriptions and help dialogue state tracking generative models correct such errors.
GC-VTON: Predicting Globally Consistent and Occlusion Aware Local Flows with Neighborhood Integrity Preservation for Virtual Try-on
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Flow based garment warping is an integral part of image-based virtual try-on networks. However, optimizing a single flow predicting network for simultaneous global boundary alignment and local texture preservation results in sub-optimal flow fields. Moreover, dense flows are inherently not suited to handle intricate conditions like garment occlusion by body parts or by other garments. Forcing flows to handle the above issues results in various distortions like texture squeezing, and stretching. In this work, we propose a novel approach where we disentangle the global boundary alignment and local texture preserving tasks via our GlobalNet and LocalNet modules. A consistency loss is then employed between the two modules which harmonizes the local flows with the global boundary alignment. Additionally, we explicitly handle occlusions by predicting body-parts visibility mask, which is used to mask out the occluded regions in the warped garment. The masking prevents the LocalNet from predicting flows that distort texture to compensate for occlusions. We also introduce a novel regularization loss (NIPR), that defines a criteria to identify the regions in the warped garment where texture integrity is violated (squeezed or stretched). NIPR subsequently penalizes the flow in those regions to ensure regular and coherent warps that preserve the texture in local neighborhoods. Evaluation on a widely used virtual try-on dataset demonstrates strong performance of our network compared to the current SOTA methods.
Edge-assisted U-Shaped Split Federated Learning with Privacy-preserving for Internet of Things
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT), deploying deep learning models to process data generated or collected by IoT devices is a critical challenge. However, direct data transmission can cause network congestion and inefficient execution, given that IoT devices typically lack computation and communication capabilities. Centralized data processing in data centers is also no longer feasible due to concerns over data privacy and security. To address these challenges, we present an innovative Edge-assisted U-Shaped Split Federated Learning (EUSFL) framework, which harnesses the high-performance capabilities of edge servers to assist IoT devices in model training and optimization process. In this framework, we leverage Federated Learning (FL) to enable data holders to collaboratively train models without sharing their data, thereby enhancing data privacy protection by transmitting only model parameters. Additionally, inspired by Split Learning (SL), we split the neural network into three parts using U-shaped splitting for local training on IoT devices. By exploiting the greater computation capability of edge servers, our framework effectively reduces overall training time and allows IoT devices with varying capabilities to perform training tasks efficiently. Furthermore, we proposed a novel noise mechanism called LabelDP to ensure that data features and labels can securely resist reconstruction attacks, eliminating the risk of privacy leakage. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that EUSFL can be integrated with various aggregation algorithms, maintaining good performance across different computing capabilities of IoT devices, and significantly reducing training time and local computation overhead.
Exploiting Inductive Biases in Video Modeling through Neural CDEs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We introduce a novel approach to video modeling that leverages controlled differential equations (CDEs) to address key challenges in video tasks, notably video interpolation and mask propagation. We apply CDEs at varying resolutions leading to a continuous-time U-Net architecture. Unlike traditional methods, our approach does not require explicit optical flow learning, and instead makes use of the inherent continuous-time features of CDEs to produce a highly expressive video model. We demonstrate competitive performance against state-of-the-art models for video interpolation and mask propagation tasks.
Effective Restoration of Source Knowledge in Continual Test Time Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Traditional test-time adaptation (TTA) methods face significant challenges in adapting to dynamic environments characterized by continuously changing long-term target distributions. These challenges primarily stem from two factors: catastrophic forgetting of previously learned valuable source knowledge and gradual error accumulation caused by miscalibrated pseudo labels. To address these issues, this paper introduces an unsupervised domain change detection method that is capable of identifying domain shifts in dynamic environments and subsequently resets the model parameters to the original source pre-trained values. By restoring the knowledge from the source, it effectively corrects the negative consequences arising from the gradual deterioration of model parameters caused by ongoing shifts in the domain. Our method involves progressive estimation of global batch-norm statistics specific to each domain, while keeping track of changes in the statistics triggered by domain shifts. Importantly, our method is agnostic to the specific adaptation technique employed and thus, can be incorporated to existing TTA methods to enhance their performance in dynamic environments. We perform extensive experiments on benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art adaptation methods.