OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Achieving employees agile response in e-governance: Exploring the synergy of technology and group collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The transformation of technology and collaboration methods driven by the e-government system forces government employees to reconsider their daily workflow and collaboration with colleagues. Despite the extensive existing knowledge of technology usage and collaboration, there are limitations in explaining the synergy between technology usage and group collaboration in achieving agile response from the perspective of government employees, particularly in the e-government setting. To address these challenges, this study provides a holistic understanding of the successful pathway to agile response in e-governance from the perspective of government employees. This study explores a dual path to achieve agile response in e-governance through qualitative analysis, involving 34 in-depth semi-structured interviews with government employees in several government sectors in China. By employing three rounds of coding processes and adopting Interpretative Structural Modeling (ISM), this study identifies the five-layer mechanisms leading to agile response in e-governance, considering both government employee technology usage and group collaboration perspectives. Findings of this study provides suggestions and implications for achieving agile response in e-governance.
Towards the LLM-Based Generation of Formal Specifications from Natural-Language Contracts: Early Experiments with Symboleo
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Over the past decade, different domain-specific languages (DSLs) were proposed to formally specify requirements stated in legal contracts, mainly for analysis but also for code generation. Symboleo is a promising language in that area. However, writing formal specifications from natural-language contracts is a complex task, especial for legal experts who do not have formal language expertise. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment targeting the automated generation of Symboleo specifications from business contracts in English using Large Language Models (LLMs). Combinations (38) of prompt components are investigated (with/without the grammar, semantics explanations, 0 to 3 examples, and emotional prompts), mainly on GPT-4o but also to a lesser extent on 4 other LLMs. The generated specifications are manually assessed against 16 error types grouped into 3 severity levels. Early results on all LLMs show promising outcomes (even for a little-known DSL) that will likely accelerate the specification of legal contracts. However, several observed issues, especially around grammar/syntax adherence and environment variable identification (49%), suggest many areas where potential improvements should be investigated.
Bimanual Grasp Synthesis for Dexterous Robot Hands
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Humans naturally perform bimanual skills to handle large and heavy objects. To enhance robots' object manipulation capabilities, generating effective bimanual grasp poses is essential. Nevertheless, bimanual grasp synthesis for dexterous hand manipulators remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose the BimanGrasp algorithm for synthesizing bimanual grasps on 3D objects. The BimanGrasp algorithm generates grasp poses by optimizing an energy function that considers grasp stability and feasibility. Furthermore, the synthesized grasps are verified using the Isaac Gym physics simulation engine. These verified grasp poses form the BimanGrasp-Dataset, the first large-scale synthesized bimanual dexterous hand grasp pose dataset to our knowledge. The dataset comprises over 150k verified grasps on 900 objects, facilitating the synthesis of bimanual grasps through a data-driven approach. Last, we propose BimanGrasp-DDPM, a diffusion model trained on the BimanGrasp-Dataset. This model achieved a grasp synthesis success rate of 69.87\% and significant acceleration in computational speed compared to BimanGrasp algorithm.
Partial Identifiability and Misspecification in Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $π$. This problem is difficult, for several reasons. First of all, there are typically multiple reward functions which are compatible with a given policy; this means that the reward function is only *partially identifiable*, and that IRL contains a certain fundamental degree of ambiguity. Secondly, in order to infer $R$ from $π$, an IRL algorithm must have a *behavioural model* of how $π$ relates to $R$. However, the true relationship between human preferences and human behaviour is very complex, and practically impossible to fully capture with a simple model. This means that the behavioural model in practice will be *misspecified*, which raises the worry that it might lead to unsound inferences if applied to real-world data. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive mathematical analysis of partial identifiability and misspecification in IRL. Specifically, we fully characterise and quantify the ambiguity of the reward function for all of the behavioural models that are most common in the current IRL literature. We also provide necessary and sufficient conditions that describe precisely how the observed demonstrator policy may differ from each of the standard behavioural models before that model leads to faulty inferences about the reward function $R$. In addition to this, we introduce a cohesive framework for reasoning about partial identifiability and misspecification in IRL, together with several formal tools that can be used to easily derive the partial identifiability and misspecification robustness of new IRL models, or analyse other kinds of reward learning algorithms.
PIANIST: Learning Partially Observable World Models with LLMs for Multi-Agent Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Effective extraction of the world knowledge in LLMs for complex decision-making tasks remains a challenge. We propose a framework PIANIST for decomposing the world model into seven intuitive components conducive to zero-shot LLM generation. Given only the natural language description of the game and how input observations are formatted, our method can generate a working world model for fast and efficient MCTS simulation. We show that our method works well on two different games that challenge the planning and decision making skills of the agent for both language and non-language based action taking, without any training on domain-specific training data or explicitly defined world model.
Multi-ToM: Evaluating Multilingual Theory of Mind Capabilities in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the cognitive ability to infer and attribute mental states to oneself and others. As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated for social and cognitive capabilities, it remains unclear to what extent these models demonstrate ToM across diverse languages and cultural contexts. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive study of multilingual ToM capabilities aimed at addressing this gap. Our approach includes two key components: (1) We translate existing ToM datasets into multiple languages, effectively creating a multilingual ToM dataset and (2) We enrich these translations with culturally specific elements to reflect the social and cognitive scenarios relevant to diverse populations. We conduct extensive evaluations of six state-of-the-art LLMs to measure their ToM performance across both the translated and culturally adapted datasets. The results highlight the influence of linguistic and cultural diversity on the models' ability to exhibit ToM, and questions their social reasoning capabilities. This work lays the groundwork for future research into enhancing LLMs' cross-cultural social cognition and contributes to the development of more culturally aware and socially intelligent AI systems. All our data and code are publicly available.
Exploring Performance Contrasts in TableQA: Step-by-Step Reasoning Boosts Bigger Language Models, Limits Smaller Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a detailed prompting flow, termed Table-Logic, to investigate the performance contrasts between bigger and smaller language models (LMs) utilizing step-by-step reasoning methods in the TableQA task. The method processes tasks by sequentially identifying critical columns and rows given question and table with its structure, determining necessary aggregations, calculations, or comparisons, and finally inferring the results to generate a precise prediction. By deploying this method, we observe a 7.8% accuracy improvement in bigger LMs like Llama-3-70B compared to the vanilla on HybridQA, while smaller LMs like Llama-2-7B shows an 11% performance decline. We empirically investigate the potential causes of performance contrasts by exploring the capabilities of bigger and smaller LMs from various dimensions in TableQA task. Our findings highlight the limitations of the step-by-step reasoning method in small models and provide potential insights for making improvements.
Predicting Emergent Capabilities by Finetuning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

A fundamental open challenge in modern LLM scaling is the lack of understanding around emergent capabilities. In particular, language model pretraining loss is known to be highly predictable as a function of compute. However, downstream capabilities are far less predictable -- sometimes even exhibiting emergent jumps -- which makes it challenging to anticipate the capabilities of future models. In this work, we first pose the task of emergence prediction: given access to current LLMs that have random few-shot accuracy on a task, can we predict whether future models (GPT-N+1) will have non-trivial accuracy on that task? We then discover a simple insight for this problem: finetuning LLMs on a given task can shift the point in scaling at which emergence occurs towards less capable models. To operationalize this insight, we can finetune LLMs with varying amounts of data and fit a parametric function that predicts when emergence will occur (i.e., "emergence laws"). We validate this approach using four standard NLP benchmarks where large-scale open-source LLMs already demonstrate emergence (MMLU, GSM8K, CommonsenseQA, and CoLA). Using only small-scale LLMs, we find that, in some cases, we can accurately predict whether models trained with up to 4x more compute have emerged. Finally, we present a case study of two realistic uses for emergence prediction.
ROADS: Robust Prompt-driven Multi-Class Anomaly Detection under Domain Shift
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in anomaly detection have shifted focus towards Multi-class Unified Anomaly Detection (MUAD), offering more scalable and practical alternatives compared to traditional one-class-one-model approaches. However, existing MUAD methods often suffer from inter-class interference and are highly susceptible to domain shifts, leading to substantial performance degradation in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel robust prompt-driven MUAD framework, called ROADS, to address these challenges. ROADS employs a hierarchical class-aware prompt integration mechanism that dynamically encodes class-specific information into our anomaly detector to mitigate interference among anomaly classes. Additionally, ROADS incorporates a domain adapter to enhance robustness against domain shifts by learning domain-invariant representations. Extensive experiments on MVTec-AD and VISA datasets demonstrate that ROADS surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both anomaly detection and localization, with notable improvements in out-of-distribution settings.
Collaboration in Virtual Reality: Survey and Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The application of Virtual Reality Environments (VRE) has been gaining momentum as a relatively new tool to assist with mitigating various difficulties including abstractness of concepts, lack of user engagement, perception of disconnection from other users. A VRE may offer both synchronous and asynchronous experiences, in addition to an immersive environment which promotes users' engagement. Past research has shown that, in general, VRE do improve the experiences they try to enhance in many aspects of human activity. Terms like immersiveness and 3D representation of real life objects and environments are, as it appears, the two most obvious positive effects of Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, despite these benefits it does not come without challenges. The main three concepts/challenges are the spatial design, the collaboration interaction between its members and the VRE, and the audio and video fidelity. Each of the three includes a number of other components that should be addressed for the total experience to be fine-tuned. These include mutual embodiment and shared perspectives, teleportation, gestural interaction, symmetric and asymmetric collaboration, physical and virtual co-location, inventory, and time and spatial synchronization. This paper comprises a survey of the literature, that identifies and explains the features introduced and the challenges involved with the VREs, and furthermore provides various interesting future research directions.
Local and Global Feature Attention Fusion Network for Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recognition of low-quality face images remains a challenge due to invisible or deformation in partial facial regions. For low-quality images dominated by missing partial facial regions, local region similarity contributes more to face recognition (FR). Conversely, in cases dominated by local face deformation, excessive attention to local regions may lead to misjudgments, while global features exhibit better robustness. However, most of the existing FR methods neglect the bias in feature quality of low-quality images introduced by different factors. To address this issue, we propose a Local and Global Feature Attention Fusion (LGAF) network based on feature quality. The network adaptively allocates attention between local and global features according to feature quality and obtains more discriminative and high-quality face features through local and global information complementarity. In addition, to effectively obtain fine-grained information at various scales and increase the separability of facial features in high-dimensional space, we introduce a Multi-Head Multi-Scale Local Feature Extraction (MHMS) module. Experimental results demonstrate that the LGAF achieves the best average performance on $4$ validation sets (CFP-FP, CPLFW, AgeDB, and CALFW), and the performance on TinyFace and SCFace outperforms the state-of-the-art methods (SoTA).
Image Generation Diversity Issues and How to Tame Them
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Generative methods now produce outputs nearly indistinguishable from real data but often fail to fully capture the data distribution. Unlike quality issues, diversity limitations in generative models are hard to detect visually, requiring specific metrics for assessment. In this paper, we draw attention to the current lack of diversity in generative models and the inability of common metrics to measure this. We achieve this by framing diversity as an image retrieval problem, where we measure how many real images can be retrieved using synthetic data as queries. This yields the Image Retrieval Score (IRS), an interpretable, hyperparameter-free metric that quantifies the diversity of a generative model's output. IRS requires only a subset of synthetic samples and provides a statistical measure of confidence. Our experiments indicate that current feature extractors commonly used in generative model assessment are inadequate for evaluating diversity effectively. Consequently, we perform an extensive search for the best feature extractors to assess diversity. Evaluation reveals that current diffusion models converge to limited subsets of the real distribution, with no current state-of-the-art models superpassing 77% of the diversity of the training data. To address this limitation, we introduce Diversity-Aware Diffusion Models (DiADM), a novel approach that improves diversity of unconditional diffusion models without loss of image quality. We do this by disentangling diversity from image quality by using a diversity aware module that uses pseudo-unconditional features as input. We provide a Python package offering unified feature extraction and metric computation to further facilitate the evaluation of generative models https://github.com/MischaD/beyondfid.
Learn from Foundation Model: Fruit Detection Model without Manual Annotation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent breakthroughs in large foundation models have enabled the possibility of transferring knowledge pre-trained on vast datasets to domains with limited data availability. Agriculture is one of the domains that lacks sufficient data. This study proposes a framework to train effective, domain-specific, small models from foundation models without manual annotation. Our approach begins with SDM (Segmentation-Description-Matching), a stage that leverages two foundation models: SAM2 (Segment Anything in Images and Videos) for segmentation and OpenCLIP (Open Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining) for zero-shot open-vocabulary classification. In the second stage, a novel knowledge distillation mechanism is utilized to distill compact, edge-deployable models from SDM, enhancing both inference speed and perception accuracy. The complete method, termed SDM-D (Segmentation-Description-Matching-Distilling), demonstrates strong performance across various fruit detection tasks object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation) without manual annotation. It nearly matches the performance of models trained with abundant labels. Notably, SDM-D outperforms open-set detection methods such as Grounding SAM and YOLO-World on all tested fruit detection datasets. Additionally, we introduce MegaFruits, a comprehensive fruit segmentation dataset encompassing over 25,000 images, and all code and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/AgRoboticsResearch/SDM-D.git.
MH-MoE: Multi-Head Mixture-of-Experts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-Head Mixture-of-Experts (MH-MoE) demonstrates superior performance by using the multi-head mechanism to collectively attend to information from various representation spaces within different experts. In this paper, we present a novel implementation of MH-MoE that maintains both FLOPs and parameter parity with sparse Mixture of Experts models. Experimental results on language models show that the new implementation yields quality improvements over both vanilla MoE and fine-grained MoE models. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that MH-MoE is compatible with 1-bit Large Language Models (LLMs) such as BitNet.
DoubleCCA: Improving Foundation Model Group Robustness with Random Sentence Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a novel method to improve the robustness of foundation models to group-based biases. We propose a simple yet effective method, called DoubleCCA, that leverages random sentences and Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to enrich the text embeddings of the foundation model. First, we generate various random sentences that augment the original prompts, which extends the original prompts with random words or character sequences. Second, we use an additional sentence embedding model to generate different text embeddings with respect to these random sentences. We then use CCA double twice to align the representations and reconstruct them back to the original representation space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a variety of tasks and datasets, showing that it outperforms existing methods in terms of both performance and robustness. Our method is simple to implement and can be easily integrated into existing models, making it a practical solution for improving the robustness of foundation models to group-based biases.
Asynchronous I/O -- With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

The performance of storage hardware has improved vastly recently, leaving the traditional I/O stack incapable of exploiting these gains due to increasingly large relative overheads. Newer asynchronous I/O APIs, such as io_uring, have significantly improved performance by reducing such overheads, but exhibit limited adoption in practice. In this paper, we discuss the complexities that the usage of these contemporary I/O APIs introduces to applications, which we believe are mostly responsible for their low adoption rate. Finally, we share implications and trade offs made by architectures that may be used to integrate asynchronous I/O into DB applications.
Probing for Consciousness in Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This study explores the potential for artificial agents to develop core consciousness, as proposed by Antonio Damasio's theory of consciousness. According to Damasio, the emergence of core consciousness relies on the integration of a self model, informed by representations of emotions and feelings, and a world model. We hypothesize that an artificial agent, trained via reinforcement learning (RL) in a virtual environment, can develop preliminary forms of these models as a byproduct of its primary task. The agent's main objective is to learn to play a video game and explore the environment. To evaluate the emergence of world and self models, we employ probes-feedforward classifiers that use the activations of the trained agent's neural networks to predict the spatial positions of the agent itself. Our results demonstrate that the agent can form rudimentary world and self models, suggesting a pathway toward developing machine consciousness. This research provides foundational insights into the capabilities of artificial agents in mirroring aspects of human consciousness, with implications for future advancements in artificial intelligence.
Utilizing Uncertainty in 2D Pose Detectors for Probabilistic 3D Human Mesh Recovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Monocular 3D human pose and shape estimation is an inherently ill-posed problem due to depth ambiguities, occlusions, and truncations. Recent probabilistic approaches learn a distribution over plausible 3D human meshes by maximizing the likelihood of the ground-truth pose given an image. We show that this objective function alone is not sufficient to best capture the full distributions. Instead, we propose to additionally supervise the learned distributions by minimizing the distance to distributions encoded in heatmaps of a 2D pose detector. Moreover, we reveal that current methods often generate incorrect hypotheses for invisible joints which is not detected by the evaluation protocols. We demonstrate that person segmentation masks can be utilized during training to significantly decrease the number of invalid samples and introduce two metrics to evaluate it. Our normalizing flow-based approach predicts plausible 3D human mesh hypotheses that are consistent with the image evidence while maintaining high diversity for ambiguous body parts. Experiments on 3DPW and EMDB show that we outperform other state-of-the-art probabilistic methods. Code is available for research purposes at https://github.com/twehrbein/humr.