OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Nussbaum Function Based Approach for Tracking Control of Robot Manipulators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel Nussbaum function-based PID control for robotic manipulators. The integration of the Nussbaum function into the PID framework provides a solution with a simple structure that effectively tackles the challenge of unknown control directions. Stability is achieved through a combination of neural network-based estimation and Lyapunov analysis, facilitating automatic gain adjustment without the need for system dynamics. Our approach offers a gain determination with minimum parameter requirements, significantly reducing the complexity and enhancing the efficiency of robotic manipulator control. The paper guarantees that all signals within the closed-loop system remain bounded. Lastly, numerical simulations validate the theoretical framework, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy in enhancing robotic manipulator control.
Equipment Health Assessment: Time Series Analysis for Wind Turbine Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we leverage SCADA data from diverse wind turbines to predict power output, employing advanced time series methods, specifically Functional Neural Networks (FNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. A key innovation lies in the ensemble of FNN and LSTM models, capitalizing on their collective learning. This ensemble approach outperforms individual models, ensuring stable and accurate power output predictions. Additionally, machine learning techniques are applied to detect wind turbine performance deterioration, enabling proactive maintenance strategies and health assessment. Crucially, our analysis reveals the uniqueness of each wind turbine, necessitating tailored models for optimal predictions. These insight underscores the importance of providing automatized customization for different turbines to keep human modeling effort low. Importantly, the methodologies developed in this analysis are not limited to wind turbines; they can be extended to predict and optimize performance in various machinery, highlighting the versatility and applicability of our research across diverse industrial contexts.
Even-Ifs From If-Onlys: Are the Best Semi-Factual Explanations Found Using Counterfactuals As Guides?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, counterfactuals using "if-only" explanations have become very popular in eXplainable AI (XAI), as they describe which changes to feature-inputs of a black-box AI system result in changes to a (usually negative) decision-outcome. Even more recently, semi-factuals using "even-if" explanations have gained more attention. They elucidate the feature-input changes that do not change the decision-outcome of the AI system, with a potential to suggest more beneficial recourses. Some semi-factual methods use counterfactuals to the query-instance to guide semi-factual production (so-called counterfactual-guided methods), whereas others do not (so-called counterfactual-free methods). In this work, we perform comprehensive tests of 8 semi-factual methods on 7 datasets using 5 key metrics, to determine whether counterfactual guidance is necessary to find the best semi-factuals. The results of these tests suggests not, but rather that computing other aspects of the decision space lead to better semi-factual XAI.
Introducing a Novel Quantum-Resistant Secret Key Establishment Method
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel approach to secret key establishment that appears to be resistant to currently known quantum cryptanalytic algorithms. This quantum resistance arises because the security of our method does not rely on the difficulty of integer factorization or the discrete logarithm problem. Based on the analyses of Alice's public key, the communication exchange between Alice and Bob, and the scenario where Bob behaves as Eve, we can conclude that, even if Eve has access to a quantum computer capable of solving discrete logarithms, she is unable to determine Alice's private key. Additionally, our approach achieves Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), ensuring that the security of previously used keys is not compromised by any key that becomes compromised. Notably, our system offers competitive public and private key sizes compared to those currently available.
A Spark Optimizer for Adaptive, Fine-Grained Parameter Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

As Spark becomes a common big data analytics platform, its growing complexity makes automatic tuning of numerous parameters critical for performance. Our work on Spark parameter tuning is particularly motivated by two recent trends: Spark's Adaptive Query Execution (AQE) based on runtime statistics, and the increasingly popular Spark cloud deployments that make cost-performance reasoning crucial for the end user. This paper presents our design of a Spark optimizer that controls all tunable parameters of each query in the new AQE architecture to explore its performance benefits and, at the same time, casts the tuning problem in the theoretically sound multi-objective optimization (MOO) setting to better adapt to user cost-performance preferences. To this end, we propose a novel hybrid compile-time/runtime approach to multi-granularity tuning of diverse, correlated Spark parameters, as well as a suite of modeling and optimization techniques to solve the tuning problem in the MOO setting while meeting the stringent time constraint of 1-2 seconds for cloud use. Evaluation results using TPC-H and TPC-DS benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our approach: (i) When prioritizing latency, it achieves 63% and 65% reduction for TPC-H and TPC-DS, respectively, under an average solving time of 0.7-0.8 sec, outperforming the most competitive MOO method that reduces only 18-25% latency with 2.6-15 sec solving time. (ii) When shifting preferences between latency and cost, our approach dominates the solutions of alternative methods, exhibiting superior adaptability to varying preferences.
A Case for Validation Buffer in Pessimistic Actor-Critic
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we investigate the issue of error accumulation in critic networks updated via pessimistic temporal difference objectives. We show that the critic approximation error can be approximated via a recursive fixed-point model similar to that of the Bellman value. We use such recursive definition to retrieve the conditions under which the pessimistic critic is unbiased. Building on these insights, we propose Validation Pessimism Learning (VPL) algorithm. VPL uses a small validation buffer to adjust the levels of pessimism throughout the agent training, with the pessimism set such that the approximation error of the critic targets is minimized. We investigate the proposed approach on a variety of locomotion and manipulation tasks and report improvements in sample efficiency and performance.
Towards Full Authorship with AI: Supporting Revision with AI-Generated Views
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are shaping a new user interface (UI) paradigm in writing tools by enabling users to generate text through prompts. This paradigm shifts some creative control from the user to the system, thereby diminishing the user's authorship and autonomy in the writing process. To restore autonomy, we introduce Textfocals, a UI prototype designed to investigate a human-centered approach that emphasizes the user's role in writing. Textfocals supports the writing process by providing LLM-generated summaries, questions, and advice (i.e., LLM views) in a sidebar of a text editor, encouraging reflection and self-driven revision in writing without direct text generation. Textfocals' UI affordances, including contextually adaptive views and scaffolding for prompt selection and customization, offer a novel way to interact with LLMs where users maintain full authorship of their writing. A formative user study with Textfocals showed promising evidence that this approach might help users develop underdeveloped ideas, cater to the rhetorical audience, and clarify their writing. However, the study also showed interaction design challenges related to document navigation and scoping, prompt engineering, and context management. Our work highlights the breadth of the design space of writing support interfaces powered by generative AI that maintain authorship integrity.
Continuous Mean-Zero Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning (CMZ-DRIL)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine-learning paradigms such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning can generate highly performant agents in a variety of complex environments. However, commonly used methods require large quantities of data and/or a known reward function. This paper presents a method called Continuous Mean-Zero Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning (CMZ-DRIL) that employs a novel reward structure to improve the performance of imitation-learning agents that have access to only a handful of expert demonstrations. CMZ-DRIL uses reinforcement learning to minimize uncertainty among an ensemble of agents trained to model the expert demonstrations. This method does not use any environment-specific rewards, but creates a continuous and mean-zero reward function from the action disagreement of the agent ensemble. As demonstrated in a waypoint-navigation environment and in two MuJoCo environments, CMZ-DRIL can generate performant agents that behave more similarly to the expert than primary previous approaches in several key metrics.
Automated Continuous Force-Torque Sensor Bias Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Six axis force-torque sensors are commonly attached to the wrist of serial robots to measure the external forces and torques acting on the robot's end-effector. These measurements are used for load identification, contact detection, and human-robot interaction amongst other applications. Typically, the measurements obtained from the force-torque sensor are more accurate than estimates computed from joint torque readings, as the former is independent of the robot's dynamic and kinematic models. However, the force-torque sensor measurements are affected by a bias that drifts over time, caused by the compounding effects of temperature changes, mechanical stresses, and other factors. In this work, we present a pipeline that continuously estimates the bias and the drift of the bias of a force-torque sensor attached to the wrist of a robot. The first component of the pipeline is a Kalman filter that estimates the kinematic state (position, velocity, and acceleration) of the robot's joints. The second component is a kinematic model that maps the joint-space kinematics to the task-space kinematics of the force-torque sensor. Finally, the third component is a Kalman filter that estimates the bias and the drift of the bias of the force-torque sensor assuming that the inertial parameters of the gripper attached to the distal end of the force-torque sensor are known with certainty.
Inevitable-Metaverse: A Novel Twitter Dataset for Public Sentiments on Metaverse
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Metaverse has emerged as a novel technology with the objective to merge the physical world into the virtual world. This technology has seen a lot of interest and investment in recent times from prominent organizations including Facebook which has changed its company name to Meta with the goal of being the leader in developing this technology. Although people in general are excited about the prospects of metaverse due to potential use cases such as virtual meetings and virtual learning environments, there are also concerns due to potential negative consequences. For instance, people are concerned about their data privacy as well as spending a lot of their time on the metaverse leading to negative impacts in real life. Therefore, this research aims to further investigate the public sentiments regarding metaverse on social media. A total of 86565 metaverse-related tweets were used to perform lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Furthermore, various machine and deep learning models with various text features were utilized to predict the sentiment class. The BERT transformer model was demonstrated to be the best at predicting the sentiment categories with 92.6% accuracy and 0.91 F-measure on the test dataset. Finally, the implications and future research directions were also discussed.
Distilling Text Style Transfer With Self-Explanation From LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Text Style Transfer (TST) seeks to alter the style of text while retaining its core content. Given the constraints of limited parallel datasets for TST, we propose CoTeX, a framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) alongside chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to facilitate TST. CoTeX distills the complex rewriting and reasoning capabilities of LLMs into more streamlined models capable of working with both non-parallel and parallel data. Through experimentation across four TST datasets, CoTeX is shown to surpass traditional supervised fine-tuning and knowledge distillation methods, particularly in low-resource settings. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation, comparing CoTeX against current unsupervised, supervised, in-context learning (ICL) techniques, and instruction-tuned LLMs. Furthermore, CoTeX distinguishes itself by offering transparent explanations for its style transfer process.
Face Swap via Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This technical report presents a diffusion model based framework for face swapping between two portrait images. The basic framework consists of three components, i.e., IP-Adapter, ControlNet, and Stable Diffusion's inpainting pipeline, for face feature encoding, multi-conditional generation, and face inpainting respectively. Besides, I introduce facial guidance optimization and CodeFormer based blending to further improve the generation quality. Specifically, we engage a recent light-weighted customization method (i.e., DreamBooth-LoRA), to guarantee the identity consistency by 1) using a rare identifier "sks" to represent the source identity, and 2) injecting the image features of source portrait into each cross-attention layer like the text features. Then I resort to the strong inpainting ability of Stable Diffusion, and utilize canny image and face detection annotation of the target portrait as the conditions, to guide ContorlNet's generation and align source portrait with the target portrait. To further correct face alignment, we add the facial guidance loss to optimize the text embedding during the sample generation. The code is available at: https://github.com/somuchtome/Faceswap
Grid-based Fast and Structural Visual Odometry
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), researchers have always pursued better performance in terms of accuracy and time cost. Traditional algorithms typically rely on fundamental geometric elements in images to establish connections between frames. However, these elements suffer from disadvantages such as uneven distribution and slow extraction. In addition, geometry elements like lines have not been fully utilized in the process of pose estimation. To address these challenges, we propose GFS-VO, a grid-based RGB-D visual odometry algorithm that maximizes the utilization of both point and line features. Our algorithm incorporates fast line extraction and a stable line homogenization scheme to improve feature processing. To fully leverage hidden elements in the scene, we introduce Manhattan Axes (MA) to provide constraints between local map and current frame. Additionally, we have designed an algorithm based on breadth-first search for extracting plane normal vectors. To evaluate the performance of GFS-VO, we conducted extensive experiments. The results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm exhibits significant improvements in both time cost and accuracy compared to existing approaches.
Sensitivity Analysis On Loss Landscape
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Gradients can be employed for sensitivity analysis. Here, we leverage the advantages of the Loss Landscape to comprehend which independent variables impact the dependent variable. We seek to grasp the loss landscape by utilizing first, second, and third derivatives through automatic differentiation. we know that Spearman's rank correlation coefficient can detect the monotonic relationship between two variables. However, I have found that second-order gradients, with certain configurations and parameters, provide information that can be visualized similarly to Spearman results, In this approach, we incorporate a loss function with an activation function, resulting in a non-linear pattern. Each exploration of the loss landscape through retraining yields new valuable information. Furthermore, the first and third derivatives are also beneficial, as they indicate the extent to which independent variables influence the dependent variable.
MPIPN: A Multi Physics-Informed PointNet for solving parametric acoustic-structure systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning is employed for solving physical systems governed by general nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs). However, complex multi-physics systems such as acoustic-structure coupling are often described by a series of PDEs that incorporate variable physical quantities, which are referred to as parametric systems. There are lack of strategies for solving parametric systems governed by PDEs that involve explicit and implicit quantities. In this paper, a deep learning-based Multi Physics-Informed PointNet (MPIPN) is proposed for solving parametric acoustic-structure systems. First, the MPIPN induces an enhanced point-cloud architecture that encompasses explicit physical quantities and geometric features of computational domains. Then, the MPIPN extracts local and global features of the reconstructed point-cloud as parts of solving criteria of parametric systems, respectively. Besides, implicit physical quantities are embedded by encoding techniques as another part of solving criteria. Finally, all solving criteria that characterize parametric systems are amalgamated to form distinctive sequences as the input of the MPIPN, whose outputs are solutions of systems. The proposed framework is trained by adaptive physics-informed loss functions for corresponding computational domains. The framework is generalized to deal with new parametric conditions of systems. The effectiveness of the MPIPN is validated by applying it to solve steady parametric acoustic-structure coupling systems governed by the Helmholtz equations. An ablation experiment has been implemented to demonstrate the efficacy of physics-informed impact with a minority of supervised data. The proposed method yields reasonable precision across all computational domains under constant parametric conditions and changeable combinations of parametric conditions for acoustic-structure systems.
Query Recovery from Easy to Hard: Jigsaw Attack against SSE
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Searchable symmetric encryption schemes often unintentionally disclose certain sensitive information, such as access, volume, and search patterns. Attackers can exploit such leakages and other available knowledge related to the user's database to recover queries. We find that the effectiveness of query recovery attacks depends on the volume/frequency distribution of keywords. Queries containing keywords with high volumes/frequencies are more susceptible to recovery, even when countermeasures are implemented. Attackers can also effectively leverage these ``special'' queries to recover all others. By exploiting the above finding, we propose a Jigsaw attack that begins by accurately identifying and recovering those distinctive queries. Leveraging the volume, frequency, and co-occurrence information, our attack achieves $90\%$ accuracy in three tested datasets, which is comparable to previous attacks (Oya et al., USENIX' 22 and Damie et al., USENIX' 21). With the same runtime, our attack demonstrates an advantage over the attack proposed by Oya et al (approximately $15\%$ more accuracy when the keyword universe size is 15k). Furthermore, our proposed attack outperforms existing attacks against widely studied countermeasures, achieving roughly $60\%$ and $85\%$ accuracy against the padding and the obfuscation, respectively. In this context, with a large keyword universe ($\geq$3k), it surpasses current state-of-the-art attacks by more than $20\%$.
Run-time Introspection of 2D Object Detection in Automated Driving Systems Using Learning Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Reliable detection of various objects and road users in the surrounding environment is crucial for the safe operation of automated driving systems (ADS). Despite recent progresses in developing highly accurate object detectors based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), they still remain prone to detection errors, which can lead to fatal consequences in safety-critical applications such as ADS. An effective remedy to this problem is to equip the system with run-time monitoring, named as introspection in the context of autonomous systems. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel introspection solution, which operates at the frame level for DNN-based 2D object detection and leverages neural network activation patterns. The proposed approach pre-processes the neural activation patterns of the object detector's backbone using several different modes. To provide extensive comparative analysis and fair comparison, we also adapt and implement several state-of-the-art (SOTA) introspection mechanisms for error detection in 2D object detection, using one-stage and two-stage object detectors evaluated on KITTI and BDD datasets. We compare the performance of the proposed solution in terms of error detection, adaptability to dataset shift, and, computational and memory resource requirements. Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed introspection solution outperforms SOTA methods, achieving an absolute reduction in the missed error ratio of 9% to 17% in the BDD dataset.
A Compositional Typed Semantics for Universal Dependencies
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we can take advantage of language-general connections between meaning and syntax, and build on cross-linguistically parallel syntactic structures. We introduce UD Type Calculus, a compositional, principled, and language-independent system of semantic types and logical forms for lexical items which builds on a widely-used language-general dependency syntax framework. We explain the essential features of UD Type Calculus, which all involve giving dependency relations denotations just like those of words. These allow UD-TC to derive correct meanings for sentences with a wide range of syntactic structures by making use of dependency labels. Finally, we present evaluation results on a large existing corpus of sentences and their logical forms, showing that UD-TC can produce meanings comparable with our baseline.