OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reasoning about distributive laws in a concurrent refinement algebra
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Distributive laws are important for algebraic reasoning in arithmetic and logic. They are equally important for algebraic reasoning about concurrent programs. In existing theories such as Concurrent Kleene Algebra, only partial correctness is handled, and many of its distributive laws are weak, in the sense that they are only refinements in one direction, rather than equalities. The focus of this paper is on strengthening our theory to support the proof of strong distributive laws that are equalities, and in doing so come up with laws that are quite general. Our concurrent refinement algebra supports total correctness by allowing both finite and infinite behaviours. It supports the rely/guarantee approach of Jones by encoding rely and guarantee conditions as rely and guarantee commands. The strong distributive laws may then be used to distribute rely and guarantee commands over sequential compositions and into (and out of) iterations. For handling data refinement of concurrent programs, strong distributive laws are essential.
Automatic Navigation Map Generation for Mobile Robots in Urban Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

A fundamental prerequisite for safe and efficient navigation of mobile robots is the availability of reliable navigation maps upon which trajectories can be planned. With the increasing industrial interest in mobile robotics, especially in urban environments, the process of generating navigation maps has become of particular interest, being a labor intensive step of the deployment process. Automating this step is challenging and becomes even more arduous when the perception capabilities are limited by cost considerations. This paper proposes an algorithm to automatically generate navigation maps using a typical navigation-oriented sensor setup: a single top-mounted 3D LiDAR sensor. The proposed method is designed and validated with the urban environment as the main use case: it is shown to be able to produce accurate maps featuring different terrain types, positive obstacles of different heights as well as negative obstacles. The algorithm is applied to data collected in a typical urban environment with a wheeled inverted pendulum robot, showing its robustness against localization, perception and dynamic uncertainties. The generated map is validated against a human-made map.
Advancing 6D Pose Estimation in Augmented Reality -- Overcoming Projection Ambiguity with Uncontrolled Imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study addresses the challenge of accurate 6D pose estimation in Augmented Reality (AR), a critical component for seamlessly integrating virtual objects into real-world environments. Our research primarily addresses the difficulty of estimating 6D poses from uncontrolled RGB images, a common scenario in AR applications, which lacks metadata such as focal length. We propose a novel approach that strategically decomposes the estimation of z-axis translation and focal length, leveraging the neural-render and compare strategy inherent in the FocalPose architecture. This methodology not only streamlines the 6D pose estimation process but also significantly enhances the accuracy of 3D object overlaying in AR settings. Our experimental results demonstrate a marked improvement in 6D pose estimation accuracy, with promising applications in manufacturing and robotics. Here, the precise overlay of AR visualizations and the advancement of robotic vision systems stand to benefit substantially from our findings.
Robustness Verifcation in Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper we investigate formal verification problems for Neural Network computations. Of central importance will be various robustness and minimization problems such as: Given symbolic specifications of allowed inputs and outputs in form of Linear Programming instances, one question is whether there do exist valid inputs such that the network computes a valid output? And does this property hold for all valid inputs? Do two given networks compute the same function? Is there a smaller network computing the same function? The complexity of these questions have been investigated recently from a practical point of view and approximated by heuristic algorithms. We complement these achievements by giving a theoretical framework that enables us to interchange security and efficiency questions in neural networks and analyze their computational complexities. We show that the problems are conquerable in a semi-linear setting, meaning that for piecewise linear activation functions and when the sum- or maximum metric is used, most of them are in P or in NP at most.
MedCycle: Unpaired Medical Report Generation via Cycle-Consistency
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generating medical reports for X-ray images presents a significant challenge, particularly in unpaired scenarios where access to paired image-report data for training is unavailable. Previous works have typically learned a joint embedding space for images and reports, necessitating a specific labeling schema for both. We introduce an innovative approach that eliminates the need for consistent labeling schemas, thereby enhancing data accessibility and enabling the use of incompatible datasets. This approach is based on cycle-consistent mapping functions that transform image embeddings into report embeddings, coupled with report auto-encoding for medical report generation. Our model and objectives consider intricate local details and the overarching semantic context within images and reports. This approach facilitates the learning of effective mapping functions, resulting in the generation of coherent reports. It outperforms state-of-the-art results in unpaired chest X-ray report generation, demonstrating improvements in both language and clinical metrics.
Deepfake Detection without Deepfakes: Generalization via Synthetic Frequency Patterns Injection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deepfake detectors are typically trained on large sets of pristine and generated images, resulting in limited generalization capacity; they excel at identifying deepfakes created through methods encountered during training but struggle with those generated by unknown techniques. This paper introduces a learning approach aimed at significantly enhancing the generalization capabilities of deepfake detectors. Our method takes inspiration from the unique "fingerprints" that image generation processes consistently introduce into the frequency domain. These fingerprints manifest as structured and distinctly recognizable frequency patterns. We propose to train detectors using only pristine images injecting in part of them crafted frequency patterns, simulating the effects of various deepfake generation techniques without being specific to any. These synthetic patterns are based on generic shapes, grids, or auras. We evaluated our approach using diverse architectures across 25 different generation methods. The models trained with our approach were able to perform state-of-the-art deepfake detection, demonstrating also superior generalization capabilities in comparison with previous methods. Indeed, they are untied to any specific generation technique and can effectively identify deepfakes regardless of how they were made.
Starlink on the Road: A First Look at Mobile Starlink Performance in Central Europe
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Low Earth Orbit Satellite Networks such as Starlink promise to provide world-wide Internet access. While traditionally designed for stationary use, a new dish, released in April 2023 in Europe, provides mobile Internet access including in-motion usage, e.g., while mounted on a car. In this paper, we design and build a mobile measurement setup. Our goal is to fully autonomously conduct continuous Starlink measurements while the car is in motion. We share our practical experiences, including challenges regarding the permanent power supply. We measure the Starlink performance over the span of two months from mid-January to mid-March 2024 when the car is in motion. The measurements consist of all relevant network parameters, such as the download and upload throughput, the RTT, and packet loss, as well as detailed power consumption data. We analyze our dataset to assess Starlink's mobile performance in Central Europe, Germany, and compare it to stationary measurements in proximity. We find that the mobile performance is significantly worse than stationary performance. The power consumption of the new dish is higher, but seems to be more correlated to the heating function of the dish than to the speed of the vehicle.
The Mediterraneus Protocol: building an SSI native decentralised ecosystem of digital services
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents, for the first time, the Mediterraneous protocol. It is designed to support the development of an Internet of digital services, owned by their creators, and consumed by users by presenting their decentralised digital identity and a proof of service purchase. Mediterraneous is Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) native, integrating the SSI model at the core of its working principles to overcome the limitations resulting from using pseudonyms and centralised access control of existing Web3 solutions.
IDAdapter: Learning Mixed Features for Tuning-Free Personalization of Text-to-Image Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Leveraging Stable Diffusion for the generation of personalized portraits has emerged as a powerful and noteworthy tool, enabling users to create high-fidelity, custom character avatars based on their specific prompts. However, existing personalization methods face challenges, including test-time fine-tuning, the requirement of multiple input images, low preservation of identity, and limited diversity in generated outcomes. To overcome these challenges, we introduce IDAdapter, a tuning-free approach that enhances the diversity and identity preservation in personalized image generation from a single face image. IDAdapter integrates a personalized concept into the generation process through a combination of textual and visual injections and a face identity loss. During the training phase, we incorporate mixed features from multiple reference images of a specific identity to enrich identity-related content details, guiding the model to generate images with more diverse styles, expressions, and angles compared to previous works. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving both diversity and identity fidelity in generated images.
What explains the success of cross-modal fine-tuning with ORCA?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

ORCA (Shen et al., 2023) is a recent technique for cross-modal fine-tuning, i.e., applying pre-trained transformer models to modalities beyond their training data. The technique consists primarily of training an embedder and fine-tuning the embedder and model. Despite its high performance on a variety of downstream tasks, we do not understand precisely how each of these components contribute to ORCA's success. Therefore, we run a series of ablations and find that embedder training does not help 2D tasks at all, contrary to what the original paper posits. In 1D tasks, some amount of embedder training is necessary but more is not better. In 4 out of 6 datasets we experiment with, it is model fine-tuning that makes the biggest difference. Through our ablations and baselines, we contribute a better understanding of the individual components of ORCA.
Genetic Auto-prompt Learning for Pre-trained Code Intelligence Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

As Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), a popular approach for code intelligence, continue to grow in size, the computational cost of their usage has become prohibitively expensive. Prompt learning, a recent development in the field of natural language processing, emerges as a potential solution to address this challenge. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of prompt learning in code intelligence tasks. We unveil its reliance on manually designed prompts, which often require significant human effort and expertise. Moreover, we discover existing automatic prompt design methods are very limited to code intelligence tasks due to factors including gradient dependence, high computational demands, and limited applicability. To effectively address both issues, we propose Genetic Auto Prompt (GenAP), which utilizes an elaborate genetic algorithm to automatically design prompts. With GenAP, non-experts can effortlessly generate superior prompts compared to meticulously manual-designed ones. GenAP operates without the need for gradients or additional computational costs, rendering it gradient-free and cost-effective. Moreover, GenAP supports both understanding and generation types of code intelligence tasks, exhibiting great applicability. We conduct GenAP on three popular code intelligence PLMs with three canonical code intelligence tasks including defect prediction, code summarization, and code translation. The results suggest that GenAP can effectively automate the process of designing prompts. Specifically, GenAP outperforms all other methods across all three tasks (e.g., improving accuracy by an average of 2.13% for defect prediction). To the best of our knowledge, GenAP is the first work to automatically design prompts for code intelligence PLMs.
Multi-agent Reinforcement Traffic Signal Control based on Interpretable Influence Mechanism and Biased ReLU Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Traffic signal control is important in intelligent transportation system, of which cooperative control is difficult to realize but yet vital. Many methods model multi-intersection traffic networks as grids and address the problem using multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL). Despite these existing studies, there is an opportunity to further enhance our understanding of the connectivity and globality of the traffic networks by capturing the spatiotemporal traffic information with efficient neural networks in deep RL. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-agent actor-critic framework based on an interpretable influence mechanism with a centralized learning and decentralized execution method. Specifically, we first construct an actor-critic framework, for which the piecewise linear neural network (PWLNN), named biased ReLU (BReLU), is used as the function approximator to obtain a more accurate and theoretically grounded approximation. Finally, our proposed framework is validated on two synthetic traffic networks to coordinate signal control between intersections, achieving lower traffic delays across the entire traffic network compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
Learning User Embeddings from Human Gaze for Personalised Saliency Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Reusable embeddings of user behaviour have shown significant performance improvements for the personalised saliency prediction task. However, prior works require explicit user characteristics and preferences as input, which are often difficult to obtain. We present a novel method to extract user embeddings from pairs of natural images and corresponding saliency maps generated from a small amount of user-specific eye tracking data. At the core of our method is a Siamese convolutional neural encoder that learns the user embeddings by contrasting the image and personal saliency map pairs of different users. Evaluations on two public saliency datasets show that the generated embeddings have high discriminative power, are effective at refining universal saliency maps to the individual users, and generalise well across users and images. Finally, based on our model's ability to encode individual user characteristics, our work points towards other applications that can benefit from reusable embeddings of gaze behaviour.
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the development of various AI conversational agents, including role-playing conversational agents that mimic diverse characters and human behaviors. While prior research has predominantly focused on enhancing the conversational capability, role-specific knowledge, and stylistic attributes of these agents, there has been a noticeable gap in assessing their social intelligence. In this paper, we introduce SocialBench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the sociality of role-playing conversational agents at both individual and group levels of social interactions. The benchmark is constructed from a variety of sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on this benchmark using mainstream open-source and closed-source LLMs. We find that agents excelling in individual level does not imply their proficiency in group level. Moreover, the behavior of individuals may drift as a result of the influence exerted by other agents within the group. Experimental results on SocialBench confirm its significance as a testbed for assessing the social interaction of role-playing conversational agents. The benchmark is publicly accessible at https://github.com/X-PLUG/SocialBench.
Agent-based Leader Election, MST, and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Leader election is one of the fundamental and well-studied problems in distributed computing. In this paper, we initiate the study of leader election using mobile agents. Suppose $n$ agents are positioned initially arbitrarily on the nodes of an arbitrary, anonymous, $n$-node, $m$-edge graph $G$. The agents relocate themselves autonomously on the nodes of $G$ and elect an agent as a leader such that the leader agent knows it is a leader and the other agents know they are not leaders. The objective is to minimize time and memory requirements. Following the literature, we consider the synchronous setting in which each agent performs its operations synchronously with others and hence the time complexity can be measured in rounds. The quest in this paper is to provide solutions without agents knowing any graph parameter, such as $n$, a priori. We first establish that, without agents knowing any graph parameter a priori, there exists a deterministic algorithm to elect an agent as a leader in $O(m)$ rounds with $O(n\log n)$ bits at each agent. Using this leader election result, we develop a deterministic algorithm for agents to construct a minimum spanning tree of $G$ in $O(m+n\log n)$ rounds using $O(n \log n)$ bits memory at each agent, without agents knowing any graph parameter a priori. Finally, using the same leader election result, we provide improved time/memory results for other fundamental distributed graph problems, namely, gathering, maximal independent set, and minimal dominating sets, removing the assumptions on agents knowing graph parameters a priori.
Reinforcement Learning for Online Testing of Autonomous Driving Systems: a Replication and Extension Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

In a recent study, Reinforcement Learning (RL) used in combination with many-objective search, has been shown to outperform alternative techniques (random search and many-objective search) for online testing of Deep Neural Network-enabled systems. The empirical evaluation of these techniques was conducted on a state-of-the-art Autonomous Driving System (ADS). This work is a replication and extension of that empirical study. Our replication shows that RL does not outperform pure random test generation in a comparison conducted under the same settings of the original study, but with no confounding factor coming from the way collisions are measured. Our extension aims at eliminating some of the possible reasons for the poor performance of RL observed in our replication: (1) the presence of reward components providing contrasting or useless feedback to the RL agent; (2) the usage of an RL algorithm (Q-learning) which requires discretization of an intrinsically continuous state space. Results show that our new RL agent is able to converge to an effective policy that outperforms random testing. Results also highlight other possible improvements, which open to further investigations on how to best leverage RL for online ADS testing.
HierCode: A Lightweight Hierarchical Codebook for Zero-shot Chinese Text Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Text recognition, especially for complex scripts like Chinese, faces unique challenges due to its intricate character structures and vast vocabulary. Traditional one-hot encoding methods struggle with the representation of hierarchical radicals, recognition of Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) characters, and on-device deployment due to their computational intensity. To address these challenges, we propose HierCode, a novel and lightweight codebook that exploits the innate hierarchical nature of Chinese characters. HierCode employs a multi-hot encoding strategy, leveraging hierarchical binary tree encoding and prototype learning to create distinctive, informative representations for each character. This approach not only facilitates zero-shot recognition of OOV characters by utilizing shared radicals and structures but also excels in line-level recognition tasks by computing similarity with visual features, a notable advantage over existing methods. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, including handwritten, scene, document, web, and ancient text, have showcased HierCode's superiority for both conventional and zero-shot Chinese character or text recognition, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance with significantly fewer parameters and fast inference speed.
Information-Theoretic Distillation for Reference-less Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The current winning recipe for automatic summarization is using proprietary large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT as is, or imitation learning from them as teacher models. While increasingly ubiquitous dependence on such large-scale language models is convenient, there remains an important question of whether small-scale models could have achieved competitive results, if we were to seek an alternative learning method -- that allows for a more cost-efficient, controllable, yet powerful summarizer. We present InfoSumm, a novel framework to distill a powerful summarizer based on the information-theoretic objective for summarization, without relying on either the LLM's capability or human-written references. To achieve this, we first propose a novel formulation of the desiderata of summarization (saliency, faithfulness and brevity) through the lens of mutual information between the original document and the summary. Based on this formulation, we start off from Pythia-2.8B as the teacher model, which is not yet capable of summarization, then self-train the model to optimize for the information-centric measures of ideal summaries. Distilling from the improved teacher, we arrive at a compact but powerful summarizer with only 568M parameters that performs competitively against ChatGPT, without ever relying on ChatGPT's capabilities. Extensive analysis demonstrates that our approach outperforms in-domain supervised models in human evaluation, let alone state-of-the-art unsupervised methods, and wins over ChatGPT in controllable summarization.