OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CgT-GAN: CLIP-guided Text GAN for Image Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The large-scale visual-language pre-trained model, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), has significantly improved image captioning for scenarios without human-annotated image-caption pairs. Recent advanced CLIP-based image captioning without human annotations follows a text-only training paradigm, i.e., reconstructing text from shared embedding space. Nevertheless, these approaches are limited by the training/inference gap or huge storage requirements for text embeddings. Given that it is trivial to obtain images in the real world, we propose CLIP-guided text GAN (CgT-GAN), which incorporates images into the training process to enable the model to "see" real visual modality. Particularly, we use adversarial training to teach CgT-GAN to mimic the phrases of an external text corpus and CLIP-based reward to provide semantic guidance. The caption generator is jointly rewarded based on the caption naturalness to human language calculated from the GAN's discriminator and the semantic guidance reward computed by the CLIP-based reward module. In addition to the cosine similarity as the semantic guidance reward (i.e., CLIP-cos), we further introduce a novel semantic guidance reward called CLIP-agg, which aligns the generated caption with a weighted text embedding by attentively aggregating the entire corpus. Experimental results on three subtasks (ZS-IC, In-UIC and Cross-UIC) show that CgT-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly across all metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/Lihr747/CgtGAN.
Aligning Language Models with Offline Learning from Human Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Learning from human preferences is crucial for language models (LMs) to effectively cater to human needs and societal values. Previous research has made notable progress by leveraging human feedback to follow instructions. However, these approaches rely primarily on online learning techniques like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which have been proven unstable and challenging to tune for language models. Moreover, PPO requires complex distributed system implementation, hindering the efficiency of large-scale distributed training. In this study, we propose an offline learning from human feedback framework to align LMs without interacting with environments. Specifically, we explore filtering alignment (FA), reward-weighted regression (RWR), and conditional alignment (CA) to align language models to human preferences. By employing a loss function similar to supervised fine-tuning, our methods ensure more stable model training than PPO with a simple machine learning system~(MLSys) and much fewer (around 9\%) computing resources. Experimental results demonstrate that conditional alignment outperforms other offline alignment methods and is comparable to PPO.
Sample Complexity of Robust Learning against Evasion Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

It is becoming increasingly important to understand the vulnerability of machine learning models to adversarial attacks. One of the fundamental problems in adversarial machine learning is to quantify how much training data is needed in the presence of evasion attacks, where data is corrupted at test time. In this thesis, we work with the exact-in-the-ball notion of robustness and study the feasibility of adversarially robust learning from the perspective of learning theory, considering sample complexity. We first explore the setting where the learner has access to random examples only, and show that distributional assumptions are essential. We then focus on learning problems with distributions on the input data that satisfy a Lipschitz condition and show that robustly learning monotone conjunctions has sample complexity at least exponential in the adversary's budget (the maximum number of bits it can perturb on each input). However, if the adversary is restricted to perturbing $O(\log n)$ bits, then one can robustly learn conjunctions and decision lists w.r.t. log-Lipschitz distributions. We then study learning models where the learner is given more power. We first consider local membership queries, where the learner can query the label of points near the training sample. We show that, under the uniform distribution, the exponential dependence on the adversary's budget to robustly learn conjunctions remains inevitable. We then introduce a local equivalence query oracle, which returns whether the hypothesis and target concept agree in a given region around a point in the training sample, and a counterexample if it exists. We show that if the query radius is equal to the adversary's budget, we can develop robust empirical risk minimization algorithms in the distribution-free setting. We give general query complexity upper and lower bounds, as well as for concrete concept classes.
Cached Operator Reordering: A Unified View for Fast GNN Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a powerful tool for handling structured graph data and addressing tasks such as node classification, graph classification, and clustering. However, the sparse nature of GNN computation poses new challenges for performance optimization compared to traditional deep neural networks. We address these challenges by providing a unified view of GNN computation, I/O, and memory. By analyzing the computational graphs of the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and Graph Attention (GAT) layers -- two widely used GNN layers -- we propose alternative computation strategies. We present adaptive operator reordering with caching, which achieves a speedup of up to 2.43x for GCN compared to the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, an exploration of different caching schemes for GAT yields a speedup of up to 1.94x. The proposed optimizations save memory, are easily implemented across various hardware platforms, and have the potential to alleviate performance bottlenecks in training large-scale GNN models.
Optimal Linear Precoder Design for MIMO-OFDM Integrated Sensing and Communications Based on Bayesian Cramér-Rao Bound
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we investigate the fundamental limits of MIMO-OFDM integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems based on a Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB) analysis. We derive the BCRB for joint channel parameter estimation and data symbol detection, in which a performance trade-off between both functionalities is observed. We formulate the optimization problem for a linear precoder design and propose the stochastic Riemannian gradient descent (SRGD) approach to solve the non-convex problem. We analyze the optimality conditions and show that SRGD ensures convergence with high probability. The simulation results verify our analyses and also demonstrate a fast convergence speed. Finally, the performance trade-off is illustrated and investigated.
The TYC Dataset for Understanding Instance-Level Semantics and Motions of Cells in Microstructures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Segmenting cells and tracking their motion over time is a common task in biomedical applications. However, predicting accurate instance-wise segmentation and cell motions from microscopy imagery remains a challenging task. Using microstructured environments for analyzing single cells in a constant flow of media adds additional complexity. While large-scale labeled microscopy datasets are available, we are not aware of any large-scale dataset, including both cells and microstructures. In this paper, we introduce the trapped yeast cell (TYC) dataset, a novel dataset for understanding instance-level semantics and motions of cells in microstructures. We release $105$ dense annotated high-resolution brightfield microscopy images, including about $19$k instance masks. We also release $261$ curated video clips composed of $1293$ high-resolution microscopy images to facilitate unsupervised understanding of cell motions and morphology. TYC offers ten times more instance annotations than the previously largest dataset, including cells and microstructures. Our effort also exceeds previous attempts in terms of microstructure variability, resolution, complexity, and capturing device (microscopy) variability. We facilitate a unified comparison on our novel dataset by introducing a standardized evaluation strategy. TYC and evaluation code are publicly available under CC BY 4.0 license.
Resiliency Analysis of LLM generated models for Industrial Automation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a study of the resilience and efficiency of automatically generated industrial automation and control systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). The approach involves modeling the system using percolation theory to estimate its resilience and formulating the design problem as an optimization problem subject to constraints. Techniques from stochastic optimization and regret analysis are used to find a near-optimal solution with provable regret bounds. The study aims to provide insights into the effectiveness and reliability of automatically generated systems in industrial automation and control, and to identify potential areas for improvement in their design and implementation.
Aparecium: Revealing Secrets from Physical Photographs
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Watermarking is a crucial tool for safeguarding copyrights and can serve as a more aesthetically pleasing alternative to QR codes. In recent years, watermarking methods based on deep learning have proved superior robustness against complex physical distortions than traditional watermarking methods. However, they have certain limitations that render them less effective in practice. For instance, current solutions necessitate physical photographs to be rectangular for accurate localization, cannot handle physical bending or folding, and require the hidden area to be completely captured at a close distance and small angle. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel deep watermarking framework dubbed \textit{Aparecium}. Specifically, we preprocess secrets (i.e., watermarks) into a pattern and then embed it into the cover image, which is symmetrical to the final decoding-then-extracting process. To capture the watermarked region from complex physical scenarios, a locator is also introduced. Besides, we adopt a three-stage training strategy for training convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textit{Aparecium} is not only robust against different digital distortions, but also can resist various physical distortions, such as screen-shooting and printing-shooting, even in severe cases including different shapes, curvature, folding, incompleteness, long distances, and big angles while maintaining high visual quality. Furthermore, some ablation studies are also conducted to verify our design.
Geo-Sketcher: Rapid 3D Geological Modeling using Geological and Topographic Map Sketches
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

The construction of 3D geological models is an essential task in oil/gas exploration, development and production. However, it is a cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone task mainly because of the model's geometric and topological complexity. The models construction is usually separated into interpretation and 3D modeling, performed by different highly specialized individuals, which leads to inconsistencies and intensifies the challenges. In addition, the creation of models following geological rules is paramount for properly depicting static and dynamic properties of oil/gas reservoirs. In this work, we propose a sketch-based approach to expedite the creation of valid 3D geological models by mimicking how domain experts interpret geological structures, allowing creating models directly from interpretation sketches. Our sketch-based modeler (Geo-Sketcher) is based on sketches of standard 2D topographic and geological maps, comprised of lines, symbols and annotations. We developed a graph-based representation to enable (1) the automatic computation of the relative ages of rock series and layers, and (2) the embedding of specific geological rules directly in the sketching. We introduce the use of Hermite-Birkhoff Radial Basis Functions to interpolate the geological map constraints, and demonstrate the capabilities of our approach with a variety of results with different levels of complexity.
A foolish consistency? Aligning interface objects hinders location recall and may induce collinear errors
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

During our nearly constant use of digital devices, perhaps our most frequent need is to visually identify icons representing our content and invoke the actions to manipulate them. Almost since the inception of user interface design in the 1970s, with rare exception it has become the tendency for programmers to prescribe the arrangement these things in uniform rectilinear rows and columns. This was imported from theories for print design and ultimately brought into widespread practice for graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Whether consistent rectilinearity actually does better than less rectilinear arrangements to maximize selection efficiency has not been challenged on considerations of speed or any other measure. In a series of four experiments, we explore how alignment may in fact discourage easy recallability of screen object locations and hence increase search intensity. A second objective is to present a methodological model where we deliberately attempt to begin with psychophysical cognitive evidence at the environmental schematic low end (beginning with contextual cueing paradigm), then move progressively upwards in naturalism in the experiments to something that approximates actual human work at the higher end, all along attempting to keep one important environmental property constant. Two experiments using contextual cueing paradigm confirm that collinearly aligned arrays do not encourage recallability of location, while noncollinear arrays appear to create traces that can be recalled automatically. Two other experiments give further demonstration of explicit recollection and location recall, showing that collinear arrangements may in fact induce location recall errors to neighboring collinear objects. We discuss surrounding theoretical, historical, and practical questions.
A Generative Approach for Image Registration of Visible-Thermal (VT) Cancer Faces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Since thermal imagery offers a unique modality to investigate pain, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has collected a large and diverse set of cancer patient facial thermograms for AI-based pain research. However, differing angles from camera capture between thermal and visible sensors has led to misalignment between Visible-Thermal (VT) images. We modernize the classic computer vision task of image registration by applying and modifying a generative alignment algorithm to register VT cancer faces, without the need for a reference or alignment parameters. By registering VT faces, we demonstrate that the quality of thermal images produced in the generative AI downstream task of Visible-to-Thermal (V2T) image translation significantly improves up to 52.5\%, than without registration. Images in this paper have been approved by the NIH NCI for public dissemination.
Compression Performance Analysis of Different File Formats
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2023
Year: 2023

In data storage and transmission, file compression is a common technique for reducing the volume of data, reducing data storage space and transmission time and bandwidth. However, there are significant differences in the compression performance of different types of file formats, and the benefits vary. In this paper, 22 file formats with approximately 178GB of data were collected and the Zlib algorithm was used for compression experiments to compare performance in order to investigate the compression gains of different file types. The experimental results show that some file types are poorly compressed, with almost constant file size and long compression time, resulting in lower gains; some other file types are significantly reduced in file size and compression time after compression, which can effectively reduce the data volume. Based on the above experimental results, this paper will then selectively reduce the data volume by compression in data storage and transmission for the file types in order to obtain the maximum compression yield.
Trustworthy Representation Learning Across Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

As AI systems have obtained significant performance to be deployed widely in our daily live and human society, people both enjoy the benefits brought by these technologies and suffer many social issues induced by these systems. To make AI systems good enough and trustworthy, plenty of researches have been done to build guidelines for trustworthy AI systems. Machine learning is one of the most important parts for AI systems and representation learning is the fundamental technology in machine learning. How to make the representation learning trustworthy in real-world application, e.g., cross domain scenarios, is very valuable and necessary for both machine learning and AI system fields. Inspired by the concepts in trustworthy AI, we proposed the first trustworthy representation learning across domains framework which includes four concepts, i.e, robustness, privacy, fairness, and explainability, to give a comprehensive literature review on this research direction. Specifically, we first introduce the details of the proposed trustworthy framework for representation learning across domains. Second, we provide basic notions and comprehensively summarize existing methods for the trustworthy framework from four concepts. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
Understanding Dark Scenes by Contrasting Multi-Modal Observations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding dark scenes based on multi-modal image data is challenging, as both the visible and auxiliary modalities provide limited semantic information for the task. Previous methods focus on fusing the two modalities but neglect the correlations among semantic classes when minimizing losses to align pixels with labels, resulting in inaccurate class predictions. To address these issues, we introduce a supervised multi-modal contrastive learning approach to increase the semantic discriminability of the learned multi-modal feature spaces by jointly performing cross-modal and intra-modal contrast under the supervision of the class correlations. The cross-modal contrast encourages same-class embeddings from across the two modalities to be closer and pushes different-class ones apart. The intra-modal contrast forces same-class or different-class embeddings within each modality to be together or apart. We validate our approach on a variety of tasks that cover diverse light conditions and image modalities. Experiments show that our approach can effectively enhance dark scene understanding based on multi-modal images with limited semantics by shaping semantic-discriminative feature spaces. Comparisons with previous methods demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/palmdong/SMMCL.
Benchmarking Causal Study to Interpret Large Language Models for Source Code
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

One of the most common solutions adopted by software researchers to address code generation is by training Large Language Models (LLMs) on massive amounts of source code. Although a number of studies have shown that LLMs have been effectively evaluated on popular accuracy metrics (e.g., BLEU, CodeBleu), previous research has largely overlooked the role of Causal Inference as a fundamental component of the interpretability of LLMs' performance. Existing benchmarks and datasets are meant to highlight the difference between the expected and the generated outcome, but do not take into account confounding variables (e.g., lines of code, prompt size) that equally influence the accuracy metrics. The fact remains that, when dealing with generative software tasks by LLMs, no benchmark is available to tell researchers how to quantify neither the causal effect of SE-based treatments nor the correlation of confounders to the model's performance. In an effort to bring statistical rigor to the evaluation of LLMs, this paper introduces a benchmarking strategy named Galeras comprised of curated testbeds for three SE tasks (i.e., code completion, code summarization, and commit generation) to help aid the interpretation of LLMs' performance. We illustrate the insights of our benchmarking strategy by conducting a case study on the performance of ChatGPT under distinct prompt engineering methods. The results of the case study demonstrate the positive causal influence of prompt semantics on ChatGPT's generative performance by an average treatment effect of $\approx 3\%$. Moreover, it was found that confounders such as prompt size are highly correlated with accuracy metrics ($\approx 0.412\%$). The end result of our case study is to showcase causal inference evaluations, in practice, to reduce confounding bias. By reducing the bias, we offer an interpretable solution for the accuracy metric under analysis.
Toward American Sign Language Processing in the Real World: Data, Tasks, and Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Sign language, which conveys meaning through gestures, is the chief means of communication among deaf people. Recognizing sign language in natural settings presents significant challenges due to factors such as lighting, background clutter, and variations in signer characteristics. In this thesis, I study automatic sign language processing in the wild, using signing videos collected from the Internet. This thesis contributes new datasets, tasks, and methods. Most chapters of this thesis address tasks related to fingerspelling, an important component of sign language and yet has not been studied widely by prior work. I present three new large-scale ASL datasets in the wild: ChicagoFSWild, ChicagoFSWild+, and OpenASL. Using ChicagoFSWild and ChicagoFSWild+, I address fingerspelling recognition, which consists of transcribing fingerspelling sequences into text. I propose an end-to-end approach based on iterative attention that allows recognition from a raw video without explicit hand detection. I further show that using a Conformer-based network jointly modeling handshape and mouthing can bring performance close to that of humans. Next, I propose two tasks for building real-world fingerspelling-based applications: fingerspelling detection and search. For fingerspelling detection, I introduce a suite of evaluation metrics and a new detection model via multi-task training. To address the problem of searching for fingerspelled keywords in raw sign language videos, we propose a novel method that jointly localizes and matches fingerspelling segments to text. Finally, I will describe a benchmark for large-vocabulary open-domain sign language translation based on OpenASL. To address the challenges of sign language translation in realistic settings, we propose a set of techniques including sign search as a pretext task for pre-training and fusion of mouthing and handshape features.