OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Privacy-Preserving Detection Method for Transmission Line Based on Edge Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are commonly used for edge collaborative computing in current transmission line object detection, where computationally intensive tasks generated by user nodes are offloaded to more powerful edge servers for processing. However, performing edge collaborative processing on transmission line image data may result in serious privacy breaches. To address this issue, we propose a secure single-stage detection model called SecYOLOv7 that preserves the privacy of object detecting. Based on secure multi-party computation (MPC), a series of secure computing protocols are designed for the collaborative execution of Secure Feature Contraction, Secure Bounding-Box Prediction and Secure Object Classification by two non-edge servers. Performance evaluation shows that both computational and communication overhead in this framework as well as calculation error significantly outperform existing works.
Efficient Commercial Bank Customer Credit Risk Assessment Based on LightGBM and Feature Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Effective control of credit risk is a key link in the steady operation of commercial banks. This paper is mainly based on the customer information dataset of a foreign commercial bank in Kaggle, and we use LightGBM algorithm to build a classifier to classify customers, to help the bank judge the possibility of customer credit default. This paper mainly deals with characteristic engineering, such as missing value processing, coding, imbalanced samples, etc., which greatly improves the machine learning effect. The main innovation of this paper is to construct new feature attributes on the basis of the original dataset so that the accuracy of the classifier reaches 0.734, and the AUC reaches 0.772, which is more than many classifiers based on the same dataset. The model can provide some reference for commercial banks' credit granting, and also provide some feature processing ideas for other similar studies.
Smooth Distance Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2023
Year: 2023

Traditional problems in computational geometry involve aspects that are both discrete and continuous. One such example is nearest-neighbor searching, where the input is discrete, but the result depends on distances, which vary continuously. In many real-world applications of geometric data structures, it is assumed that query results are continuous, free of jump discontinuities. This is at odds with many modern data structures in computational geometry, which employ approximations to achieve efficiency, but these approximations often suffer from discontinuities. In this paper, we present a general method for transforming an approximate but discontinuous data structure into one that produces a smooth approximation, while matching the asymptotic space efficiencies of the original. We achieve this by adapting an approach called the partition-of-unity method, which smoothly blends multiple local approximations into a single smooth global approximation. We illustrate the use of this technique in a specific application of approximating the distance to the boundary of a convex polytope in $\mathbb{R}^d$ from any point in its interior. We begin by developing a novel data structure that efficiently computes an absolute $\varepsilon$-approximation to this query in time $O(\log (1/\varepsilon))$ using $O(1/\varepsilon^{d/2})$ storage space. Then, we proceed to apply the proposed partition-of-unity blending to guarantee the smoothness of the approximate distance field, establishing optimal asymptotic bounds on the norms of its gradient and Hessian.
Task Relation Distillation and Prototypical Pseudo Label for Incremental Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Incremental Named Entity Recognition (INER) involves the sequential learning of new entity types without accessing the training data of previously learned types. However, INER faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting specific for incremental learning, further aggravated by background shift (i.e., old and future entity types are labeled as the non-entity type in the current task). To address these challenges, we propose a method called task Relation Distillation and Prototypical pseudo label (RDP) for INER. Specifically, to tackle catastrophic forgetting, we introduce a task relation distillation scheme that serves two purposes: 1) ensuring inter-task semantic consistency across different incremental learning tasks by minimizing inter-task relation distillation loss, and 2) enhancing the model's prediction confidence by minimizing intra-task self-entropy loss. Simultaneously, to mitigate background shift, we develop a prototypical pseudo label strategy that distinguishes old entity types from the current non-entity type using the old model. This strategy generates high-quality pseudo labels by measuring the distances between token embeddings and type-wise prototypes. We conducted extensive experiments on ten INER settings of three benchmark datasets (i.e., CoNLL2003, I2B2, and OntoNotes5). The results demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art methods, with an average increase of 6.08% in Micro F1 score and 7.71% in Macro F1 score.
Dr.Bokeh: DiffeRentiable Occlusion-aware Bokeh Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

Bokeh is widely used in photography to draw attention to the subject while effectively isolating distractions in the background. Computational methods simulate bokeh effects without relying on a physical camera lens. However, in the realm of digital bokeh synthesis, the two main challenges for bokeh synthesis are color bleeding and partial occlusion at object boundaries. Our primary goal is to overcome these two major challenges using physics principles that define bokeh formation. To achieve this, we propose a novel and accurate filtering-based bokeh rendering equation and a physically-based occlusion-aware bokeh renderer, dubbed Dr.Bokeh, which addresses the aforementioned challenges during the rendering stage without the need of post-processing or data-driven approaches. Our rendering algorithm first preprocesses the input RGBD to obtain a layered scene representation. Dr.Bokeh then takes the layered representation and user-defined lens parameters to render photo-realistic lens blur. By softening non-differentiable operations, we make Dr.Bokeh differentiable such that it can be plugged into a machine-learning framework. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluations on synthetic and real-world images to validate the effectiveness of the rendering quality and the differentiability of our method. We show Dr.Bokeh not only outperforms state-of-the-art bokeh rendering algorithms in terms of photo-realism but also improves the depth quality from depth-from-defocus.
Long-frame-shift Neural Speech Phase Prediction with Spectral Continuity Enhancement and Interpolation Error Compensation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Speech phase prediction, which is a significant research focus in the field of signal processing, aims to recover speech phase spectra from amplitude-related features. However, existing speech phase prediction methods are constrained to recovering phase spectra with short frame shifts, which are considerably smaller than the theoretical upper bound required for exact waveform reconstruction of short-time Fourier transform (STFT). To tackle this issue, we present a novel long-frame-shift neural speech phase prediction (LFS-NSPP) method which enables precise prediction of long-frame-shift phase spectra from long-frame-shift log amplitude spectra. The proposed method consists of three stages: interpolation, prediction and decimation. The short-frame-shift log amplitude spectra are first constructed from long-frame-shift ones through frequency-by-frequency interpolation to enhance the spectral continuity, and then employed to predict short-frame-shift phase spectra using an NSPP model, thereby compensating for interpolation errors. Ultimately, the long-frame-shift phase spectra are obtained from short-frame-shift ones through frame-by-frame decimation. Experimental results show that the proposed LFS-NSPP method can yield superior quality in predicting long-frame-shift phase spectra than the original NSPP model and other signal-processing-based phase estimation algorithms.
Sensitivity and Dynamic Distance Oracles via Generic Matrices and Frobenius Form
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Algebraic techniques have had an important impact on graph algorithms so far. Porting them, e.g., the matrix inverse, into the dynamic regime improved best-known bounds for various dynamic graph problems. In this paper, we develop new algorithms for another cornerstone algebraic primitive, the Frobenius normal form (FNF). We apply our developments to dynamic and fault-tolerant exact distance oracle problems on directed graphs. For generic matrices $A$ over a finite field accompanied by an FNF, we show (1) an efficient data structure for querying submatrices of the first $k\geq 1$ powers of $A$, and (2) a near-optimal algorithm updating the FNF explicitly under rank-1 updates. By representing an unweighted digraph using a generic matrix over a sufficiently large field (obtained by random sampling) and leveraging the developed FNF toolbox, we obtain: (a) a conditionally optimal distance sensitivity oracle (DSO) in the case of single-edge or single-vertex failures, providing a partial answer to the open question of Gu and Ren [ICALP'21], (b) a multiple-failures DSO improving upon the state of the art (vd. Brand and Saranurak [FOCS'19]) wrt. both preprocessing and query time, (c) improved dynamic distance oracles in the case of single-edge updates, and (d) a dynamic distance oracle supporting vertex updates, i.e., changing all edges incident to a single vertex, in $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ worst-case time and distance queries in $\tilde{O}(n)$ time.
Text-Only Training for Visual Storytelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Visual storytelling aims to generate a narrative based on a sequence of images, necessitating both vision-language alignment and coherent story generation. Most existing solutions predominantly depend on paired image-text training data, which can be costly to collect and challenging to scale. To address this, we formulate visual storytelling as a visual-conditioned story generation problem and propose a text-only training method that separates the learning of cross-modality alignment and story generation. Our approach specifically leverages the cross-modality pre-trained CLIP model to integrate visual control into a story generator, trained exclusively on text data. Moreover, we devise a training-free visual condition planner that accounts for the temporal structure of the input image sequence while balancing global and local visual content. The distinctive advantage of requiring only text data for training enables our method to learn from external text story data, enhancing the generalization capability of visual storytelling. We conduct extensive experiments on the VIST benchmark, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach in both in-domain and cross-domain settings. Further evaluations on expression diversity and human assessment underscore the superiority of our method in terms of informativeness and robustness.
Automatic Signboard Recognition in Low Quality Night Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

An essential requirement for driver assistance systems and autonomous driving technology is implementing a robust system for detecting and recognizing traffic signs. This system enables the vehicle to autonomously analyze the environment and make appropriate decisions regarding its movement, even when operating at higher frame rates. However, traffic sign images captured in inadequate lighting and adverse weather conditions are poorly visible, blurred, faded, and damaged. Consequently, the recognition of traffic signs in such circumstances becomes inherently difficult. This paper addressed the challenges of recognizing traffic signs from images captured in low light, noise, and blurriness. To achieve this goal, a two-step methodology has been employed. The first step involves enhancing traffic sign images by applying a modified MIRNet model and producing enhanced images. In the second step, the Yolov4 model recognizes the traffic signs in an unconstrained environment. The proposed method has achieved 5.40% increment in mAP@0.5 for low quality images on Yolov4. The overall mAP@0.5 of 96.75% has been achieved on the GTSRB dataset. It has also attained mAP@0.5 of 100% on the GTSDB dataset for the broad categories, comparable with the state-of-the-art work.
Watch Your Steps: Local Image and Scene Editing by Text Instructions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Denoising diffusion models have enabled high-quality image generation and editing. We present a method to localize the desired edit region implicit in a text instruction. We leverage InstructPix2Pix (IP2P) and identify the discrepancy between IP2P predictions with and without the instruction. This discrepancy is referred to as the relevance map. The relevance map conveys the importance of changing each pixel to achieve the edits, and is used to to guide the modifications. This guidance ensures that the irrelevant pixels remain unchanged. Relevance maps are further used to enhance the quality of text-guided editing of 3D scenes in the form of neural radiance fields. A field is trained on relevance maps of training views, denoted as the relevance field, defining the 3D region within which modifications should be made. We perform iterative updates on the training views guided by rendered relevance maps from the relevance field. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both image and NeRF editing tasks. Project page: https://ashmrz.github.io/WatchYourSteps/
Physical Implementation of a Tunable Memristor-based Chua's Circuit
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2023
Year: 2023

Nonlinearity is a central feature in demanding computing applications that aim to deal with tasks such as optimization or classification. Furthermore, the consensus is that nonlinearity should not be only exploited at the algorithm level, but also at the physical level by finding devices that incorporate desired nonlinear features to physically implement energy, area and/or time efficient computing applications. Chaotic oscillators are one type of system powered by nonlinearity, which can be used for computing purposes. In this work we present a physical implementation of a tunable Chua's circuit in which the nonlinear part is based on a nonvolatile memristive device. Device characterization and circuit analysis serve as guidelines to design the circuit and results prove the possibility to tune the circuit oscillatory response by electrically programming the device.
Modeling Digital Penetration of the Industrialized Society and its Ensuing Transfiguration
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, ushered by the deeper integration of digital technologies into professional and social spaces, provides an opportunity to meaningfully serve society. Humans have tremendous capability to innovatively improve social well-being when the situation is clear. Which was not the case during the first three revolutions. Thus, society has been accepting lifestyle changes willingly and several negative consequences unwillingly. Since the fourth one is still in its infancy, we can control it better. This paper presents a unified model of the industrialized ecosystem covering value creation, value consumption, enabling infrastructure, required skills, and additional governance. This design thinking viewpoint, which includes the consumer side of digital transformation, sets the stage for the next major lifestyle change, termed Digital Transfiguration. For validation and ease of comprehension, the model draws upon the well-understood automobile industry. This model unifies the digital penetration of both industrial creation and social consumption, in a manner that aligns several stakeholders on their transformation journey.
Evaluation of really good grammatical error correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Although rarely stated, in practice, Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) encompasses various models with distinct objectives, ranging from grammatical error detection to improving fluency. Traditional evaluation methods fail to fully capture the full range of system capabilities and objectives. Reference-based evaluations suffer from limitations in capturing the wide variety of possible correction and the biases introduced during reference creation and is prone to favor fixing local errors over overall text improvement. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further highlighted the shortcomings of these evaluation strategies, emphasizing the need for a paradigm shift in evaluation methodology. In the current study, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of various GEC systems using a recently published dataset of Swedish learner texts. The evaluation is performed using established evaluation metrics as well as human judges. We find that GPT-3 in a few-shot setting by far outperforms previous grammatical error correction systems for Swedish, a language comprising only 0.11% of its training data. We also found that current evaluation methods contain undesirable biases that a human evaluation is able to reveal. We suggest using human post-editing of GEC system outputs to analyze the amount of change required to reach native-level human performance on the task, and provide a dataset annotated with human post-edits and assessments of grammaticality, fluency and meaning preservation of GEC system outputs.
Semantic Information for Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we demonstrate that the concept of Semantic Consistency and the ensuing method of Knowledge-Aware Re-Optimization can be adapted for the problem of object detection in intricate traffic scenes. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method for extracting a knowledge graph from a dataset of images provided with instance-level annotations, and integrate this new knowledge graph with the existing semantic consistency model. Combining both this novel hybrid knowledge graph and the preexisting methods of frequency analysis and external knowledge graph as sources for semantic information, we investigate the effectiveness of knowledge-aware re-optimization on the Faster-RCNN and DETR object detection models. We find that limited but consistent improvements in precision and or recall can be achieved using this method for all combinations of model and method studied.
Who is the Real Hero? Measuring Developer Contribution via Multi-dimensional Data Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Proper incentives are important for motivating developers in open-source communities, which is crucial for maintaining the development of open-source software healthy. To provide such incentives, an accurate and objective developer contribution measurement method is needed. However, existing methods rely heavily on manual peer review, lacking objectivity and transparency. The metrics of some automated works about effort estimation use only syntax-level or even text-level information, such as changed lines of code, which lack robustness. Furthermore, some works about identifying core developers provide only a qualitative understanding without a quantitative score or have some project-specific parameters, which makes them not practical in real-world projects. To this end, we propose CValue, a multidimensional information fusion-based approach to measure developer contributions. CValue extracts both syntax and semantic information from the source code changes in four dimensions: modification amount, understandability, inter-function and intra-function impact of modification. It fuses the information to produce the contribution score for each of the commits in the projects. Experimental results show that CValue outperforms other approaches by 19.59% on 10 real-world projects with manually labeled ground truth. We validated and proved that the performance of CValue, which takes 83.39 seconds per commit, is acceptable to be applied in real-world projects. Furthermore, we performed a large-scale experiment on 174 projects and detected 2,282 developers having inflated commits. Of these, 2,050 developers did not make any syntax contribution; and 103 were identified as bots.
Digital Twin Based User-Centric Resource Management for Multicast Short Video Streaming
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Multicast short video streaming (MSVS) can effectively reduce network traffic load by delivering identical video sequences to multiple users simultaneously. The existing MSVS schemes mainly rely on the aggregated video requests to reserve bandwidth and computing resources, which cannot satisfy users' diverse and dynamic service requirements, particularly when users' swipe behaviors exhibit spatiotemporal fluctuation. In this paper, we propose a user-centric resource management scheme based on the digital twin (DT) technique, which aims to enhance user satisfaction as well as reduce resource consumption. Firstly, we design a user DT (UDT)-assisted resource reservation framework. Specifically, UDTs are constructed for individual users, which store users' historical data for updating multicast groups and abstracting useful information. The swipe probability distributions and recommended video lists are abstracted from UDTs to predict bandwidth and computing resource demands. Parameterized sigmoid functions are leveraged to characterize multicast groups' user satisfaction. Secondly, we formulate a joint non-convex bandwidth and computing resource reservation problem which is transformed into a convex piecewise problem by utilizing a tangent function to approximately substitute the concave part. A low-complexity scheduling algorithm is then developed to find the optimal resource reservation decisions. Simulation results based on the real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms benchmark schemes in terms of user satisfaction and resource consumption.
Enhancing API Documentation through BERTopic Modeling and Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

As the amount of textual data in various fields, including software development, continues to grow, there is a pressing demand for efficient and effective extraction and presentation of meaningful insights. This paper presents a unique approach to address this need, focusing on the complexities of interpreting Application Programming Interface (API) documentation. While official API documentation serves as a primary source of information for developers, it can often be extensive and lacks user-friendliness. In light of this, developers frequently resort to unofficial sources like Stack Overflow and GitHub. Our novel approach employs the strengths of BERTopic for topic modeling and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically generate summaries of API documentation, thereby creating a more efficient method for developers to extract the information they need. The produced summaries and topics are evaluated based on their performance, coherence, and interoperability. The findings of this research contribute to the field of API documentation analysis by providing insights into recurring topics, identifying common issues, and generating potential solutions. By improving the accessibility and efficiency of API documentation comprehension, our work aims to enhance the software development process and empower developers with practical tools for navigating complex APIs.