OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
NTIRE 2023 Quality Assessment of Video Enhancement Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2023 Quality Assessment of Video Enhancement Challenge, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2023. This challenge is to address a major challenge in the field of video processing, namely, video quality assessment (VQA) for enhanced videos. The challenge uses the VQA Dataset for Perceptual Video Enhancement (VDPVE), which has a total of 1211 enhanced videos, including 600 videos with color, brightness, and contrast enhancements, 310 videos with deblurring, and 301 deshaked videos. The challenge has a total of 167 registered participants. 61 participating teams submitted their prediction results during the development phase, with a total of 3168 submissions. A total of 176 submissions were submitted by 37 participating teams during the final testing phase. Finally, 19 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets, and detailed the methods they used. Some methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods have demonstrated superior prediction performance.
Unmaking AI Imagemaking: A Methodological Toolkit for Critical Investigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

AI image models are rapidly evolving, disrupting aesthetic production in many industries. However, understanding of their underlying archives, their logic of image reproduction, and their persistent biases remains limited. What kind of methods and approaches could open up these black boxes? In this paper, we provide three methodological approaches for investigating AI image models and apply them to Stable Diffusion as a case study. Unmaking the ecosystem analyzes the values, structures, and incentives surrounding the model's production. Unmaking the data analyzes the images and text the model draws upon, with their attendant particularities and biases. Unmaking the output analyzes the model's generative results, revealing its logics through prompting, reflection, and iteration. Each mode of inquiry highlights particular ways in which the image model captures, "understands," and recreates the world. This accessible framework supports the work of critically investigating generative AI image models and paves the way for more socially and politically attuned analyses of their impacts in the world.
A Note on Hardness of Computing Recursive Teaching Dimension
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

In this short note, we show that the problem of computing the recursive teaching dimension (RTD) for a concept class (given explicitly as input) requires $n^{Ω(\log n)}$-time, assuming the exponential time hypothesis (ETH). This matches the running time $n^{O(\log n)}$ of the brute-force algorithm for the problem.
Graph Federated Learning Based on the Decentralized Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph learning has a wide range of applications in many scenarios, which require more need for data privacy. Federated learning is an emerging distributed machine learning approach that leverages data from individual devices or data centers to improve the accuracy and generalization of the model, while also protecting the privacy of user data. Graph-federated learning is mainly based on the classical federated learning framework i.e., the Client-Server framework. However, the Client-Server framework faces problems such as a single point of failure of the central server and poor scalability of network topology. First, we introduce the decentralized framework to graph-federated learning. Second, determine the confidence among nodes based on the similarity of data among nodes, subsequently, the gradient information is then aggregated by linear weighting based on confidence. Finally, the proposed method is compared with FedAvg, Fedprox, GCFL, and GCFL+ to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other methods.
BSDM: Background Suppression Diffusion Model for Hyperspectral Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Hyperspectral anomaly detection (HAD) is widely used in Earth observation and deep space exploration. A major challenge for HAD is the complex background of the input hyperspectral images (HSIs), resulting in anomalies confused in the background. On the other hand, the lack of labeled samples for HSIs leads to poor generalization of existing HAD methods. This paper starts the first attempt to study a new and generalizable background learning problem without labeled samples. We present a novel solution BSDM (background suppression diffusion model) for HAD, which can simultaneously learn latent background distributions and generalize to different datasets for suppressing complex background. It is featured in three aspects: (1) For the complex background of HSIs, we design pseudo background noise and learn the potential background distribution in it with a diffusion model (DM). (2) For the generalizability problem, we apply a statistical offset module so that the BSDM adapts to datasets of different domains without labeling samples. (3) For achieving background suppression, we innovatively improve the inference process of DM by feeding the original HSIs into the denoising network, which removes the background as noise. Our work paves a new background suppression way for HAD that can improve HAD performance without the prerequisite of manually labeled data. Assessments and generalization experiments of four HAD methods on several real HSI datasets demonstrate the above three unique properties of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/majitao-xd/BSDM-HAD.
Detecting Vulnerable Nodes in Urban Infrastructure Interdependent Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding and characterizing the vulnerability of urban infrastructures, which refers to the engineering facilities essential for the regular running of cities and that exist naturally in the form of networks, is of great value to us. Potential applications include protecting fragile facilities and designing robust topologies, etc. Due to the strong correlation between different topological characteristics and infrastructure vulnerability and their complicated evolution mechanisms, some heuristic and machine-assisted analysis fall short in addressing such a scenario. In this paper, we model the interdependent network as a heterogeneous graph and propose a system based on graph neural network with reinforcement learning, which can be trained on real-world data, to characterize the vulnerability of the city system accurately. The presented system leverages deep learning techniques to understand and analyze the heterogeneous graph, which enables us to capture the risk of cascade failure and discover vulnerable infrastructures of cities. Extensive experiments with various requests demonstrate not only the expressive power of our system but also transferring ability and necessity of the specific components.
Large Language Models can accomplish Business Process Management Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to improve organizational activities and their outcomes by managing the underlying processes. To achieve this, it is often necessary to consider information from various sources, including unstructured textual documents. Therefore, researchers have developed several BPM-specific solutions that extract information from textual documents using Natural Language Processing techniques. These solutions are specific to their respective tasks and cannot accomplish multiple process-related problems as a general-purpose instrument. However, in light of the recent emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with remarkable reasoning capabilities, such a general-purpose instrument with multiple applications now appears attainable. In this paper, we illustrate how LLMs can accomplish text-related BPM tasks by applying a specific LLM to three exemplary tasks: mining imperative process models from textual descriptions, mining declarative process models from textual descriptions, and assessing the suitability of process tasks from textual descriptions for robotic process automation. We show that, without extensive configuration or prompt engineering, LLMs perform comparably to or better than existing solutions and discuss implications for future BPM research as well as practical usage.
Symbolic Semantics for Probabilistic Programs (extended version)
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

We present a new symbolic execution semantics of probabilistic programs that include observe statements and sampling from continuous distributions. Building on Kozen's seminal work, this symbolic semantics consists of a countable collection of measurable functions, along with a partition of the state space. We use the new semantics to provide a full correctness proof of symbolic execution for probabilistic programs. We also implement this semantics in the tool symProb, and illustrate its use on examples.
Fine-grained Text-Video Retrieval with Frozen Image Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

State-of-the-art text-video retrieval (TVR) methods typically utilize CLIP and cosine similarity for efficient retrieval. Meanwhile, cross attention methods, which employ a transformer decoder to compute attention between each text query and all frames in a video, offer a more comprehensive interaction between text and videos. However, these methods lack important fine-grained spatial information as they directly compute attention between text and video-level tokens. To address this issue, we propose CrossTVR, a two-stage text-video retrieval architecture. In the first stage, we leverage existing TVR methods with cosine similarity network for efficient text/video candidate selection. In the second stage, we propose a novel decoupled video text cross attention module to capture fine-grained multimodal information in spatial and temporal dimensions. Additionally, we employ the frozen CLIP model strategy in fine-grained retrieval, enabling scalability to larger pre-trained vision models like ViT-G, resulting in improved retrieval performance. Experiments on text video retrieval datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed CrossTVR compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Segmentation with Class-Balanced Mean Teacher
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper studies source-free domain adaptive fundus image segmentation which aims to adapt a pretrained fundus segmentation model to a target domain using unlabeled images. This is a challenging task because it is highly risky to adapt a model only using unlabeled data. Most existing methods tackle this task mainly by designing techniques to carefully generate pseudo labels from the model's predictions and use the pseudo labels to train the model. While often obtaining positive adaption effects, these methods suffer from two major issues. First, they tend to be fairly unstable - incorrect pseudo labels abruptly emerged may cause a catastrophic impact on the model. Second, they fail to consider the severe class imbalance of fundus images where the foreground (e.g., cup) region is usually very small. This paper aims to address these two issues by proposing the Class-Balanced Mean Teacher (CBMT) model. CBMT addresses the unstable issue by proposing a weak-strong augmented mean teacher learning scheme where only the teacher model generates pseudo labels from weakly augmented images to train a student model that takes strongly augmented images as input. The teacher is updated as the moving average of the instantly trained student, which could be noisy. This prevents the teacher model from being abruptly impacted by incorrect pseudo-labels. For the class imbalance issue, CBMT proposes a novel loss calibration approach to highlight foreground classes according to global statistics. Experiments show that CBMT well addresses these two issues and outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks.
Dependency Tuples for Almost-Sure Innermost Termination of Probabilistic Term Rewriting (Short WST Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

Dependency pairs are one of the most powerful techniques to analyze termination of term rewrite systems (TRSs) automatically. We adapt the dependency pair framework to the probabilistic setting in order to prove almost-sure innermost termination of probabilistic TRSs. To evaluate its power, we implemented the new framework in our tool AProVE.
An Empirical Study on Fertility Proposals Using Multi-Grained Topic Analysis Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Fertility issues are closely related to population security, in 60 years China's population for the first time in a negative growth trend, the change of fertility policy is of great concern to the community. 2023 "two sessions" proposal "suggests that the country in the form of legislation, the birth of the registration of the cancellation of the marriage restriction" This topic was once a hot topic on the Internet, and "unbundling" the relationship between birth registration and marriage has become the focus of social debate. In this paper, we adopt co-occurrence semantic analysis, topic analysis and sentiment analysis to conduct multi-granularity semantic analysis of microblog comments. It is found that the discussion on the proposal of "removing marriage restrictions from birth registration" involves the individual, society and the state at three dimensions, and is detailed into social issues such as personal behaviour, social ethics and law, and national policy, with people's sentiment inclined to be negative in most of the topics. Based on this, eight proposals were made to provide a reference for governmental decision making and to form a reference method for researching public opinion on political issues.
Divert More Attention to Vision-Language Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multimodal vision-language (VL) learning has noticeably pushed the tendency toward generic intelligence owing to emerging large foundation models. However, tracking, as a fundamental vision problem, surprisingly enjoys less bonus from recent flourishing VL learning. We argue that the reasons are two-fold: the lack of large-scale vision-language annotated videos and ineffective vision-language interaction learning of current works. These nuisances motivate us to design more effective vision-language representation for tracking, meanwhile constructing a large database with language annotation for model learning. Particularly, in this paper, we first propose a general attribute annotation strategy to decorate videos in six popular tracking benchmarks, which contributes a large-scale vision-language tracking database with more than 23,000 videos. We then introduce a novel framework to improve tracking by learning a unified-adaptive VL representation, where the cores are the proposed asymmetric architecture search and modality mixer (ModaMixer). To further improve VL representation, we introduce a contrastive loss to align different modalities. To thoroughly evidence the effectiveness of our method, we integrate the proposed framework on three tracking methods with different designs, i.e., the CNN-based SiamCAR, the Transformer-based OSTrack, and the hybrid structure TransT. The experiments demonstrate that our framework can significantly improve all baselines on six benchmarks. Besides empirical results, we theoretically analyze our approach to show its rationality. By revealing the potential of VL representation, we expect the community to divert more attention to VL tracking and hope to open more possibilities for future tracking with diversified multimodal messages.
Object-centric Representations for Interactive Online Learning with Non-Parametric Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Large offline learning-based models have enabled robots to successfully interact with objects for a wide variety of tasks. However, these models rely on fairly consistent structured environments. For more unstructured environments, an online learning component is necessary to gather and estimate information about objects in the environment in order to successfully interact with them. Unfortunately, online learning methods like Bayesian non-parametric models struggle with changes in the environment, which is often the desired outcome of interaction-based tasks. We propose using an object-centric representation for interactive online learning. This representation is generated by transforming the robot's actions into the object's coordinate frame. We demonstrate how switching to this task-relevant space improves our ability to reason with the training data collected online, enabling scalable online learning of robot-object interactions. We showcase our method by successfully navigating a manipulator arm through an environment with multiple unknown objects without violating interaction-based constraints.
Fundamental Limits of Reference-Based Sequence Reordering
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The problem of reconstructing a sequence of independent and identically distributed symbols from a set of equal size, consecutive, fragments, as well as a dependent reference sequence, is considered. First, in the regime in which the fragments are relatively long, and typically no fragment appears more than once, the scaling of the failure probability of maximum likelihood reconstruction algorithm is exactly determined for perfect reconstruction and bounded for partial reconstruction. Second, the regime in which the fragments are relatively short and repeating fragments abound is characterized. A trade-off is stated between the fraction of fragments that cannot be adequately reconstructed vs. the distortion level allowed for the reconstruction of each fragment, while still allowing vanishing failure probability
Android in the Wild: A Large-Scale Dataset for Android Device Control
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.
Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs) went from non-existent to ubiquitous in the machine learning discourse within a few years. Due to the fast pace of the field, it is difficult to identify the remaining challenges and already fruitful application areas. In this paper, we aim to establish a systematic set of open problems and application successes so that ML researchers can comprehend the field's current state more quickly and become productive.
Towards fully integrated photonic backpropagation training and inference using on-chip nonlinear activation and gradient functions
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

Gradient descent-based backpropagation training is widely used in many neural network systems. However, photonic implementation of such method is not straightforward mainly since having both the nonlinear activation function and its gradient using standard integrated photonic components is challenging. Here, we demonstrate the realization of two commonly used neural nonlinear activation functions and their gradients on a silicon photonic platform. Our method leverages the nonlinear electro-optic response of a micro-disk modulator. As a proof of concept, the experimental results are incorporated into a neural network simulation platform to classify MNIST handwritten digits dataset where we classification accuracies of more than 97\% are achieved that are on par with those of ideal nonlinearities and gradients.
Contextual Beamforming: Exploiting Location and AI for Enhanced Wireless Telecommunication Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The pervasive nature of wireless telecommunication has made it the foundation for mainstream technologies like automation, smart vehicles, virtual reality, and unmanned aerial vehicles. As these technologies experience widespread adoption in our daily lives, ensuring the reliable performance of cellular networks in mobile scenarios has become a paramount challenge. Beamforming, an integral component of modern mobile networks, enables spatial selectivity and improves network quality. However, many beamforming techniques are iterative, introducing unwanted latency to the system. In recent times, there has been a growing interest in leveraging mobile users' location information to expedite beamforming processes. This paper explores the concept of contextual beamforming, discussing its advantages, disadvantages and implications. Notably, the study presents an impressive 53% improvement in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by implementing the adaptive beamforming (MRT) algorithm compared to scenarios without beamforming. It further elucidates how MRT contributes to contextual beamforming. The importance of localization in implementing contextual beamforming is also examined. Additionally, the paper delves into the use of artificial intelligence schemes, including machine learning and deep learning, in implementing contextual beamforming techniques that leverage user location information. Based on the comprehensive review, the results suggest that the combination of MRT and Zero forcing (ZF) techniques, alongside deep neural networks (DNN) employing Bayesian Optimization (BO), represents the most promising approach for contextual beamforming. Furthermore, the study discusses the future potential of programmable switches, such as Tofino, in enabling location-aware beamforming.
A Lightweight Approach for Network Intrusion Detection based on Self-Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Network Intrusion Detection (NID) works as a kernel technology for the security network environment, obtaining extensive research and application. Despite enormous efforts by researchers, NID still faces challenges in deploying on resource-constrained devices. To improve detection accuracy while reducing computational costs and model storage simultaneously, we propose a lightweight intrusion detection approach based on self-knowledge distillation, namely LNet-SKD, which achieves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, we carefully design the DeepMax block to extract compact representation efficiently and construct the LNet by stacking DeepMax blocks. Furthermore, considering compensating for performance degradation caused by the lightweight network, we adopt batch-wise self-knowledge distillation to provide the regularization of training consistency. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed LNet-SKD, which outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques with fewer parameters and lower computation loads.