OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Toward General Instruction-Following Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Following natural instructions is crucial for the effective application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), research on assessing and improving instruction-following (IF) alignment within the RAG domain remains limited. To address this issue, we propose VIF-RAG, the first automated, scalable, and verifiable synthetic pipeline for instruction-following alignment in RAG systems. We start by manually crafting a minimal set of atomic instructions (<100) and developing combination rules to synthesize and verify complex instructions for a seed set. We then use supervised models for instruction rewriting while simultaneously generating code to automate the verification of instruction quality via a Python executor. Finally, we integrate these instructions with extensive RAG and general data samples, scaling up to a high-quality VIF-RAG-QA dataset (>100k) through automated processes. To further bridge the gap in instruction-following auto-evaluation for RAG systems, we introduce FollowRAG Benchmark, which includes approximately 3K test samples, covering 22 categories of general instruction constraints and four knowledge-intensive QA datasets. Due to its robust pipeline design, FollowRAG can seamlessly integrate with different RAG benchmarks. Using FollowRAG and eight widely-used IF and foundational abilities benchmarks for LLMs, we demonstrate that VIF-RAG markedly enhances LLM performance across a broad range of general instruction constraints while effectively leveraging its capabilities in RAG scenarios. Further analysis offers practical insights for achieving IF alignment in RAG systems. Our code and datasets are released at https://FollowRAG.github.io.
ControLRM: Fast and Controllable 3D Generation via Large Reconstruction Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite recent advancements in 3D generation methods, achieving controllability still remains a challenging issue. Current approaches utilizing score-distillation sampling are hindered by laborious procedures that consume a significant amount of time. Furthermore, the process of first generating 2D representations and then mapping them to 3D lacks internal alignment between the two forms of representation. To address these challenges, we introduce ControLRM, an end-to-end feed-forward model designed for rapid and controllable 3D generation using a large reconstruction model (LRM). ControLRM comprises a 2D condition generator, a condition encoding transformer, and a triplane decoder transformer. Instead of training our model from scratch, we advocate for a joint training framework. In the condition training branch, we lock the triplane decoder and reuses the deep and robust encoding layers pretrained with millions of 3D data in LRM. In the image training branch, we unlock the triplane decoder to establish an implicit alignment between the 2D and 3D representations. To ensure unbiased evaluation, we curate evaluation samples from three distinct datasets (G-OBJ, GSO, ABO) rather than relying on cherry-picking manual generation. The comprehensive experiments conducted on quantitative and qualitative comparisons of 3D controllability and generation quality demonstrate the strong generalization capacity of our proposed approach.
I or Not I: Unraveling the Linguistic Echoes of Identity in Samuel Beckett's "Not I" Through Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Exploring the depths of Samuel Beckett's "Not I" through advanced natural language processing techniques, this research uncovers the intricate linguistic structures that underpin the text. By analyzing word frequency, detecting emotional sentiments with a BERT-based model, and examining repetitive motifs, we unveil how Beckett's minimalist yet complex language reflects the protagonist's fragmented psyche. Our results demonstrate that recurring themes of time, memory, and existential angst are artfully woven through recursive linguistic patterns and rhythmic repetition. This innovative approach not only deepens our understanding of Beckett's stylistic contributions but also highlights his unique role in modern literature, where language transcends simple communication to explore profound existential questions.
An Ensemble Scheme for Proactive Dominant Data Migration of Pervasive Tasks at the Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Nowadays, a significant focus within the research community on the intelligent management of data at the confluence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing (EC) is observed. In this manuscript, we propose a scheme to be implemented by autonomous edge nodes concerning their identifications of the appropriate data to be migrated to particular locations within the infrastructure, thereby facilitating the effective processing of requests. Our objective is to equip nodes with the capability to comprehend the access patterns relating to offloaded data-driven tasks and to predict which data ought to be returned to the original nodes associated with those tasks. It is evident that these tasks depend on the processing of data that is absent from the original hosting nodes, thereby underscoring the essential data assets that necessitate access. To infer these data intervals, we utilize an ensemble approach that integrates a statistically oriented model and a machine learning framework. As a result, we are able to identify the dominant data assets in addition to detecting the density of the requests. A detailed analysis of the suggested method is provided by presenting the related formulations, which is also assessed and compared with models found in the relevant literature.
Quebec Automobile Insurance Question-Answering With Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform outstandingly in various downstream tasks, and the use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture has been shown to improve performance for legal question answering (Nuruzzaman and Hussain, 2020; Louis et al., 2024). However, there are limited applications in insurance questions-answering, a specific type of legal document. This paper introduces two corpora: the Quebec Automobile Insurance Expertise Reference Corpus and a set of 82 Expert Answers to Layperson Automobile Insurance Questions. Our study leverages both corpora to automatically and manually assess a GPT4-o, a state-of-the-art LLM, to answer Quebec automobile insurance questions. Our results demonstrate that, on average, using our expertise reference corpus generates better responses on both automatic and manual evaluation metrics. However, they also highlight that LLM QA is unreliable enough for mass utilization in critical areas. Indeed, our results show that between 5% to 13% of answered questions include a false statement that could lead to customer misunderstanding.
Multimodal Physical Activity Forecasting in Free-Living Clinical Settings: Hunting Opportunities for Just-in-Time Interventions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: This research aims to develop a lifestyle intervention system, called MoveSense, that forecasts a patient's activity behavior to allow for early and personalized interventions in real-world clinical environments. Methods: We conducted two clinical studies involving 58 prediabetic veterans and 60 patients with obstructive sleep apnea to gather multimodal behavioral data using wearable devices. We develop multimodal long short-term memory (LSTM) network models, which are capable of forecasting the number of step counts of a patient up to 24 hours in advance by examining data from activity and engagement modalities. Furthermore, we design goal-based forecasting models to predict whether a person's next-day steps will be over a certain threshold. Results: Multimodal LSTM with early fusion achieves 33% and 37% lower mean absolute errors than linear regression and ARIMA respectively on the prediabetes dataset. LSTM also outperforms linear regression and ARIMA with a margin of 13% and 32% on the sleep dataset. Multimodal forecasting models also perform with 72% and 79% accuracy on the prediabetes dataset and sleep dataset respectively on goal-based forecasting. Conclusion: Our experiments conclude that multimodal LSTM models with early fusion are better than multimodal LSTM with late fusion and unimodal LSTM models and also than ARIMA and linear regression models. Significance: We address an important and challenging task of time-series forecasting in uncontrolled environments. Effective forecasting of a person's physical activity can aid in designing adaptive behavioral interventions to keep the user engaged and adherent to a prescribed routine.
LSTM-Based Proactive Congestion Management for Internet of Vehicle Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks support a variety of safety, entertainment, and commercial applications. This is realized by applying the principles of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to facilitate connectivity among vehicles and between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Network congestion management is essential for IoVs and it represents a significant concern due to its impact on improving the efficiency of transportation systems and providing reliable communication among vehicles for the timely delivery of safety-critical packets. This paper introduces a framework for proactive congestion management for IoV networks. We generate congestion scenarios and a data set to predict the congestion using LSTM. We present the framework and the packet congestion dataset. Simulation results using SUMO with NS3 demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework for forecasting IoV network congestion and clustering/prioritizing packets employing recurrent neural networks.
Making Beshbarmak: Games for Central Asian Cultural Heritage
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces "Making Beshbarmak", an interactive cooking game that celebrates the nomadic ancestry and cultural heritage of Central Asian communities worldwide. Designed to promote cultural appreciation and identity formation, the game invites players to learn and recreate the traditional dish Beshbarmak through an engaging step-by-step process, incorporating storytelling elements that explain the cultural significance of the meal. Our project contributes to digital cultural heritage and games research by offering an accessible, open-source prototype on p5.js, enabling users to connect with and explore Central Asian traditions. "Making Beshbarmak" serves as both an educational tool and a platform for cultural preservation, fostering a sense of belonging among Central Asian immigrant populations.
Uncovering Attacks and Defenses in Secure Aggregation for Federated Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Federated learning enables the collaborative learning of a global model on diverse data, preserving data locality and eliminating the need to transfer user data to a central server. However, data privacy remains vulnerable, as attacks can target user training data by exploiting the updates sent by users during each learning iteration. Secure aggregation protocols are designed to mask/encrypt user updates and enable a central server to aggregate the masked information. MicroSecAgg (PoPETS 2024) proposes a single server secure aggregation protocol that aims to mitigate the high communication complexity of the existing approaches by enabling a one-time setup of the secret to be re-used in multiple training iterations. In this paper, we identify a security flaw in the MicroSecAgg that undermines its privacy guarantees. We detail the security flaw and our attack, demonstrating how an adversary can exploit predictable masking values to compromise user privacy. Our findings highlight the critical need for enhanced security measures in secure aggregation protocols, particularly the implementation of dynamic and unpredictable masking strategies. We propose potential countermeasures to mitigate these vulnerabilities and ensure robust privacy protection in the secure aggregation frameworks.
Stability and Transparency in Mixed Reality Bilateral Human Teleoperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent work introduced the concept of human teleoperation (HT), where the remote robot typically considered in conventional bilateral teleoperation is replaced by a novice person wearing a mixed reality head mounted display and tracking the motion of a virtual tool controlled by an expert. HT has advantages in cost, complexity, and patient acceptance for telemedicine in low-resource communities or remote locations. However, the stability, transparency, and performance of bilateral HT are unexplored. In this paper, we therefore develop a mathematical model and simulation of the HT system using test data. We then analyze various control architectures with this model and implement them with the HT system to find the achievable performance, investigate stability, and determine the most promising teleoperation scheme in the presence of time delays. We show that instability in HT, while not destructive or dangerous, makes the system impossible to use. However, stable and transparent teleoperation are possible with small time delays (<200 ms) through 3-channel teleoperation, or with large time delays through model-mediated teleoperation with local pose and force feedback for the novice.
AM-SAM: Automated Prompting and Mask Calibration for Segment Anything Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained significant recognition in the field of semantic segmentation due to its versatile capabilities and impressive performance. Despite its success, SAM faces two primary limitations: (1) it relies heavily on meticulous human-provided prompts like key points, bounding boxes or text messages, which is labor-intensive; (2) the mask decoder's feature representation is sometimes inaccurate, as it solely employs dot product operations at the end of mask decoder, which inadequately captures the necessary correlations for precise segmentation. Current solutions to these problems such as fine-tuning SAM often require retraining a large number of parameters, which needs huge amount of time and computing resources. To address these limitations, we propose an automated prompting and mask calibration method called AM-SAM based on a bi-level optimization framework. Our approach automatically generates prompts for an input image, eliminating the need for human involvement with a good performance in early training epochs, achieving faster convergence. Additionally, we freeze the main part of SAM, and modify the mask decoder with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), enhancing the mask decoder's feature representation by incorporating advanced techniques that go beyond simple dot product operations to more accurately capture and utilize feature correlations. Our experimental results demonstrate that AM-SAM achieves significantly accurate segmentation, matching or exceeding the effectiveness of human-generated and default prompts. Notably, on the body segmentation dataset, our method yields a 5% higher dice score with a 4-example few-shot training set compared to the SOTA method, underscoring its superiority in semantic segmentation tasks.
Expanding Search Space with Diverse Prompting Agents: An Efficient Sampling Approach for LLM Mathematical Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in many complex tasks including mathematical reasoning. However, traditional approaches heavily rely on ensuring self-consistency within single prompting method, which limits the exploration of diverse problem-solving strategies. This study addresses these limitations by performing an experimental analysis of distinct prompting methods within the domain of mathematical reasoning. Our findings demonstrate that each method explores a distinct search space, and this differentiation becomes more evident with increasing problem complexity. To leverage this phenomenon, we applied efficient sampling process that uniformly combines samples from these diverse methods, which not only expands the maximum search space but achieves higher performance with fewer runs compared to single methods. Especially, within the subset of difficult questions of MATH dataset named MATH-hard, The maximum search space was achieved while utilizing approximately 43% fewer runs than single methods on average. These findings highlight the importance of integrating diverse problem-solving strategies to enhance the reasoning abilities of LLMs.
BlackDAN: A Black-Box Multi-Objective Approach for Effective and Contextual Jailbreaking of Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across various tasks, they encounter potential security risks such as jailbreak attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities to bypass security measures and generate harmful outputs. Existing jailbreak strategies mainly focus on maximizing attack success rate (ASR), frequently neglecting other critical factors, including the relevance of the jailbreak response to the query and the level of stealthiness. This narrow focus on single objectives can result in ineffective attacks that either lack contextual relevance or are easily recognizable. In this work, we introduce BlackDAN, an innovative black-box attack framework with multi-objective optimization, aiming to generate high-quality prompts that effectively facilitate jailbreaking while maintaining contextual relevance and minimizing detectability. BlackDAN leverages Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs), specifically the NSGA-II algorithm, to optimize jailbreaks across multiple objectives including ASR, stealthiness, and semantic relevance. By integrating mechanisms like mutation, crossover, and Pareto-dominance, BlackDAN provides a transparent and interpretable process for generating jailbreaks. Furthermore, the framework allows customization based on user preferences, enabling the selection of prompts that balance harmfulness, relevance, and other factors. Experimental results demonstrate that BlackDAN outperforms traditional single-objective methods, yielding higher success rates and improved robustness across various LLMs and multimodal LLMs, while ensuring jailbreak responses are both relevant and less detectable.
Accelerating Mixed-Precision Out-of-Core Cholesky Factorization with Static Task Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the performance optimization of out-of-core (OOC) Cholesky factorization on shared-memory systems equipped with multiple GPUs. We employ fine-grained computational tasks to expose concurrency while creating opportunities to overlap data movement asynchronously with computations, especially when dealing with matrices that cannot fit on the GPU memory. We leverage the directed acyclic graph of the task-based Cholesky factorization and map it onto a static scheduler that promotes data reuse while supporting strategies for reducing data movement with the CPU host when the GPU memory is exhausted. The CPU-GPU interconnect may become the main performance bottleneck as the gap between the GPU execution rate and the traditional PCIe bandwidth continues to widen. While the surface-to-volume effect of compute-bound kernels partially mitigates the overhead of data motion, deploying mixed-precision (MxP) computations exacerbates the throughput discrepancy. Using static task scheduling, we evaluate the performance capabilities of the new ultra-fast NVIDIA chip interconnect technology, codenamed NVLink-C2C, that constitutes the backbone of the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip (GH200), against a new four-precision (FP64/FP32/FP16/FP8) left-looking Cholesky factorization. We report the performance results of a benchmarking campaign on various NVIDIA GPU generations and interconnects. We highlight 20% performance superiority against cuSOLVER on a single GH200 with FP64 while hiding the cost of OOC task-based Cholesky factorization, and we scale almost linearly on four GH200 superships. With MxP enabled, our statically scheduled four-precision tile-based Cholesky factorization scores a 3X performance speedup against its FP64-only counterpart, delivering application-worthy FP64 accuracy when modeling a large-scale geospatial statistical application.
A Model Is Not Built By A Single Prompt: LLM-Based Domain Modeling With Question Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Domain modeling, a crucial part of model-driven engineering, demands extensive domain knowledge and experience from engineers. When the system description is highly complicated, the modeling task can become particularly challenging and time-consuming. Large language Models(LLMs) can assist by automatically generating an initial object model from the system description. Although LLMs have demonstrated remarkable code-generation ability, they still struggle with model-generation using a single prompt. In real-world domain modeling, engineers usually decompose complex tasks into easily solvable sub-tasks, significantly controlling complexity and enhancing model quality. Inspired by this, we propose an LLM-based domain modeling approach via question decomposition, similar to developer's modeling process. Following conventional modeling guidelines, we divide the model generation task into several sub-tasks, i.e., class generation, association and aggregation generation, and inheritance generation. For each sub-task, we carefully design the prompt by choosing more efficient query words and providing essential modeling knowledge to unlock the modeling potential of LLMs. To sum up all the sub-tasks solutions, we implemente a proof-of-object tool integrated into the standard Ecore editor that asks LLMs to generate an object model from the system description. We evaluate our approach with 20 systems from different application domains. The preliminary results show that our approach outperforms the single-prompt-based prompt by improving recall values and F1 scores in most systems for modeling the classes, attributes, and relationships.
Two-Stage Human Verification using HandCAPTCHA and Anti-Spoofed Finger Biometrics with Feature Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a human verification scheme in two independent stages to overcome the vulnerabilities of attacks and to enhance security. At the first stage, a hand image-based CAPTCHA (HandCAPTCHA) is tested to avert automated bot-attacks on the subsequent biometric stage. In the next stage, finger biometric verification of a legitimate user is performed with presentation attack detection (PAD) using the real hand images of the person who has passed a random HandCAPTCHA challenge. The electronic screen-based PAD is tested using image quality metrics. After this spoofing detection, geometric features are extracted from the four fingers (excluding the thumb) of real users. A modified forward-backward (M-FoBa) algorithm is devised to select relevant features for biometric authentication. The experiments are performed on the Bogazici University (BU) and the IIT-Delhi (IITD) hand databases using the k-nearest neighbor and random forest classifiers. The average accuracy of the correct HandCAPTCHA solution is 98.5%, and the false accept rate of a bot is 1.23%. The PAD is tested on 255 subjects of BU, and the best average error is 0%. The finger biometric identification accuracy of 98% and an equal error rate (EER) of 6.5% have been achieved for 500 subjects of the BU. For 200 subjects of the IITD, 99.5% identification accuracy, and 5.18% EER are obtained.