OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Analysis of Cultural Dynamics Seen from an Event-based Social Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Culture is a collection of connected and potentially interactive patterns that characterize a social group or a passed-on idea that people acquire as members of society. While offline activities can provide a better picture of the geographical association of cultural traits than online activities, gathering such data on a large scale has been challenging. Here, we use multi-decade longitudinal records of cultural events from Meetup.com, the largest event-based social networking service, to examine the landscape of offline cultural events. We analyze the temporal and categorical event dynamics driven by cultural diversity using over 2 million event logs collected over 17 years in 90 countries. Our results show that the national economic status explains 44.6 percent of the variance in total event count, while cultural characteristics such as individualism and long-term orientation explain 32.8 percent of the variance in topic categories. Furthermore, our analysis using hierarchical clustering reveals cultural proximity between the topics of socio-cultural activities (e.g., politics, leisure, health, technology). We expect that this work provides a landscape of social and cultural activities across the world, which allows us to better understand their dynamical patterns as well as their associations with cultural characteristics.
Consistent Explanations in the Face of Model Indeterminacy via Ensembling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This work addresses the challenge of providing consistent explanations for predictive models in the presence of model indeterminacy, which arises due to the existence of multiple (nearly) equally well-performing models for a given dataset and task. Despite their similar performance, such models often exhibit inconsistent or even contradictory explanations for their predictions, posing challenges to end users who rely on these models to make critical decisions. Recognizing this issue, we introduce ensemble methods as an approach to enhance the consistency of the explanations provided in these scenarios. Leveraging insights from recent work on neural network loss landscapes and mode connectivity, we devise ensemble strategies to efficiently explore the underspecification set -- the set of models with performance variations resulting solely from changes in the random seed during training. Experiments on five benchmark financial datasets reveal that ensembling can yield significant improvements when it comes to explanation similarity, and demonstrate the potential of existing ensemble methods to explore the underspecification set efficiently. Our findings highlight the importance of considering model indeterminacy when interpreting explanations and showcase the effectiveness of ensembles in enhancing the reliability of explanations in machine learning.
PotatoPestNet: A CTInceptionV3-RS-Based Neural Network for Accurate Identification of Potato Pests
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Potatoes are the third-largest food crop globally, but their production frequently encounters difficulties because of aggressive pest infestations. The aim of this study is to investigate the various types and characteristics of these pests and propose an efficient PotatoPestNet AI-based automatic potato pest identification system. To accomplish this, we curated a reliable dataset consisting of eight types of potato pests. We leveraged the power of transfer learning by employing five customized, pre-trained transfer learning models: CMobileNetV2, CNASLargeNet, CXception, CDenseNet201, and CInceptionV3, in proposing a robust PotatoPestNet model to accurately classify potato pests. To improve the models' performance, we applied various augmentation techniques, incorporated a global average pooling layer, and implemented proper regularization methods. To further enhance the performance of the models, we utilized random search (RS) optimization for hyperparameter tuning. This optimization technique played a significant role in fine-tuning the models and achieving improved performance. We evaluated the models both visually and quantitatively, utilizing different evaluation metrics. The robustness of the models in handling imbalanced datasets was assessed using the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. Among the models, the Customized Tuned Inception V3 (CTInceptionV3) model, optimized through random search, demonstrated outstanding performance. It achieved the highest accuracy (91%), precision (91%), recall (91%), and F1-score (91%), showcasing its superior ability to accurately identify and classify potato pests.
Conformalizing Machine Translation Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Several uncertainty estimation methods have been recently proposed for machine translation evaluation. While these methods can provide a useful indication of when not to trust model predictions, we show in this paper that the majority of them tend to underestimate model uncertainty, and as a result they often produce misleading confidence intervals that do not cover the ground truth. We propose as an alternative the use of conformal prediction, a distribution-free method to obtain confidence intervals with a theoretically established guarantee on coverage. First, we demonstrate that split conformal prediction can ``correct'' the confidence intervals of previous methods to yield a desired coverage level. Then, we highlight biases in estimated confidence intervals, both in terms of the translation language pairs and the quality of translations. We apply conditional conformal prediction techniques to obtain calibration subsets for each data subgroup, leading to equalized coverage.
Understanding the Benefits of Image Augmentations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image Augmentations are widely used to reduce overfitting in neural networks. However, the explainability of their benefits largely remains a mystery. We study which layers of residual neural networks (ResNets) are most affected by augmentations using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). We do so by analyzing models of varying widths and depths, as well as whether their weights are initialized randomly or through transfer learning. We find that the pattern of how the layers are affected depends on the model's depth, and that networks trained with augmentation that use information from two images affect the learned weights significantly more than augmentations that operate on a single image. Deeper layers of ResNets initialized with ImageNet-1K weights and fine-tuned receive more impact from the augmentations than early layers. Understanding the effects of image augmentations on CNNs will have a variety of applications, such as determining how far back one needs to fine-tune a network and which layers should be frozen when implementing layer freezing algorithms.
Iterative Design of An Accessible Crypto Wallet for Blind Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Crypto wallets are a key touch-point for cryptocurrency use. People use crypto wallets to make transactions, manage crypto assets, and interact with decentralized apps (dApps). However, as is often the case with emergent technologies, little attention has been paid to understanding and improving accessibility barriers in crypto wallet software. We present a series of user studies that explored how both blind and sighted individuals use MetaMask, one of the most popular non-custodial crypto wallets. We uncovered inter-related accessibility, learnability, and security issues with MetaMask. We also report on an iterative redesign of MetaMask to make it more accessible for blind users. This process involved multiple evaluations with 44 novice crypto wallet users, including 20 sighted users, 23 blind users, and one user with low vision. Our study results show notable improvements for accessibility after two rounds of design iterations. Based on the results, we discuss design implications for creating more accessible and secure crypto wallets for blind users.
Circular Rectifiction of 3D Video and Efficient Modification of 3D-HEVC
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Video acquired from multiple cameras located along a line is often rectified to video virtually obtained from cameras with ideally parallel optical axes collocated on a single plane and principal points on a line. Such an approach simplifies video processing including depth estimation and compression. Nowadays, for many application video, like virtual reality or virtual navigation, the content is often acquired by cameras located nearly on a circle or on a part of that. Therefore, we introduce new operation of circular rectification that results in multiview video virtually obtained from cameras located on an ideal arc and with optical axes that are collocated on a single plane and they intersect in a single point. For the circularly rectified video, depth estimation and compression are simplified. The standard 3DHEVC codec was designed for rectified video and its efficiency is limited for video acquired from cameras located on an arc. Therefore, we developed a 3-D HEVC codec modified in order to compress efficiently circularly rectified video. The experiments demonstrate its better performance than for the standard 3D-HEVC codec.
Energy efficient cell-free massive MIMO on 5G deployments: sleep modes strategies and user stream management
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes the utilization of cell-free massive MIMO (CF-M-MIMO) processing on top of the regular micro/macrocellular deployments typically found in current 5G networks. Towards this end, it contemplates the connection of all base stations to a central processing unit (CPU) through fronthaul links, thus enabling the joint processing of all serviced user equipment (UE), yet avoiding the expensive deployment and maintenance of dozens of randomly scattered access points (APs). Moreover, it allows the implementation of centralized strategies to exploit the sleep mode capabilities of current baseband/RF hardware to (de)activate selected Base Stations (BSs) in order to maximize the network energy efficiency and to react to changes in UE behaviour and/or operator requirements. In line with current cellular network deployments, it considers the use of multiple antennas at the UE side that unavoidably introduces the need to effectively manage the number of streams to be directed to each UE in order to balance multiplexing gains and increased pilot contamination.
The Weight Distributions of Two Classes of Linear Codes From Perfect Nonlinear Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we employ general results on the value distributions of perfect nonlinear functions from $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$ to $\mathbb{F}_p$ together with a specific group action to give a unified approach to determining the weight distributions of two classes of linear codes over $\mathbb{F}_p$ constructed from perfect nonlinear functions, where $p$ is an odd prime number and $m\in\mathbb{N}_+$.
Boosting Adversarial Robustness using Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Advances in adversarial defenses have led to a significant improvement in the robustness of Deep Neural Networks. However, the robust accuracy of present state-ofthe-art defenses is far from the requirements in critical applications such as robotics and autonomous navigation systems. Further, in practical use cases, network prediction alone might not suffice, and assignment of a confidence value for the prediction can prove crucial. In this work, we propose a generic method for introducing stochasticity in the network predictions, and utilize this for smoothing decision boundaries and rejecting low confidence predictions, thereby boosting the robustness on accepted samples. The proposed Feature Level Stochastic Smoothing based classification also results in a boost in robustness without rejection over existing adversarial training methods. Finally, we combine the proposed method with adversarial detection methods, to achieve the benefits of both approaches.
Multi-modal Pre-training for Medical Vision-language Understanding and Generation: An Empirical Study with A New Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With the availability of large-scale, comprehensive, and general-purpose vision-language (VL) datasets such as MSCOCO, vision-language pre-training (VLP) has become an active area of research and proven to be effective for various VL tasks such as visual-question answering. However, studies on VLP in the medical domain have so far been scanty. To provide a comprehensive perspective on VLP for medical VL tasks, we conduct a thorough experimental analysis to study key factors that may affect the performance of VLP with a unified vision-language Transformer. To allow making sound and quick pre-training decisions, we propose RadioGraphy Captions (RGC), a high-quality, multi-modality radiographic dataset containing 18,434 image-caption pairs collected from an open-access online database MedPix. RGC can be used as a pre-training dataset or a new benchmark for medical report generation and medical image-text retrieval. By utilizing RGC and other available datasets for pre-training, we develop several key insights that can guide future medical VLP research and new strong baselines for various medical VL tasks.
Investigating Practices and Opportunities for Cross-functional Collaboration around AI Fairness in Industry Practice
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

An emerging body of research indicates that ineffective cross-functional collaboration -- the interdisciplinary work done by industry practitioners across roles -- represents a major barrier to addressing issues of fairness in AI design and development. In this research, we sought to better understand practitioners' current practices and tactics to enact cross-functional collaboration for AI fairness, in order to identify opportunities to support more effective collaboration. We conducted a series of interviews and design workshops with 23 industry practitioners spanning various roles from 17 companies. We found that practitioners engaged in bridging work to overcome frictions in understanding, contextualization, and evaluation around AI fairness across roles. In addition, in organizational contexts with a lack of resources and incentives for fairness work, practitioners often piggybacked on existing requirements (e.g., for privacy assessments) and AI development norms (e.g., the use of quantitative evaluation metrics), although they worry that these tactics may be fundamentally compromised. Finally, we draw attention to the invisible labor that practitioners take on as part of this bridging and piggybacking work to enact interdisciplinary collaboration for fairness. We close by discussing opportunities for both FAccT researchers and AI practitioners to better support cross-functional collaboration for fairness in the design and development of AI systems.
REACT2023: the first Multi-modal Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The Multi-modal Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge (REACT2023) is the first competition event focused on evaluating multimedia processing and machine learning techniques for generating human-appropriate facial reactions in various dyadic interaction scenarios, with all participants competing strictly under the same conditions. The goal of the challenge is to provide the first benchmark test set for multi-modal information processing and to foster collaboration among the audio, visual, and audio-visual affective computing communities, to compare the relative merits of the approaches to automatic appropriate facial reaction generation under different spontaneous dyadic interaction conditions. This paper presents: (i) novelties, contributions and guidelines of the REACT2023 challenge; (ii) the dataset utilized in the challenge; and (iii) the performance of baseline systems on the two proposed sub-challenges: Offline Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation and Online Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation, respectively. The challenge baseline code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/reactmultimodalchallenge/baseline_react2023}.
ARIST: An Effective API Argument Recommendation Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Learning and remembering to use APIs are difficult. Several techniques have been proposed to assist developers in using APIs. Most existing techniques focus on recommending the right API methods to call, but very few techniques focus on recommending API arguments. In this paper, we propose ARIST, a novel automated argument recommendation approach which suggests arguments by predicting developers' expectations when they define and use API methods. To implement this idea in the recommendation process, ARIST combines program analysis (PA), language models (LMs), and several features specialized for the recommendation task which consider the functionality of formal parameters and the positional information of code elements (e.g., variables or method calls) in the given context. In ARIST, the LMs and the recommending features are used to suggest the promising candidates identified by PA. Meanwhile, PA navigates the LMs and the features working on the set of the valid candidates which satisfy syntax, accessibility, and type-compatibility constraints defined by the programming language in use. Our evaluation on a large dataset of real-world projects shows that ARIST improves the state-of-the-art approach by 19% and 18% in top-1 precision and recall for recommending arguments of frequently-used libraries. For general argument recommendation task, i.e., recommending arguments for every method call, ARIST outperforms the baseline approaches by up to 125% top-1 accuracy. Moreover, for newly-encountered projects, ARIST achieves more than 60% top-3 accuracy when evaluating on a larger dataset. For working/maintaining projects, with a personalized LM to capture developers' coding practice, ARIST can productively rank the expected arguments at the top-1 position in 7/10 requests.
RestGPT: Connecting Large Language Models with Real-World RESTful APIs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in tackling a broad range of tasks. However, existing methods are mainly restricted to specifically designed tools and fail to fulfill complex instructions, having great limitations when confronted with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we explore a more realistic scenario by connecting LLMs with RESTful APIs, which adhere to the widely adopted REST software architectural style for web service development. To address the practical challenges of tackling complex instructions, we propose RestGPT, which exploits the power of LLMs and conducts a coarse-to-fine online planning mechanism to enhance the abilities of task decomposition and API selection. RestGPT also contains an API executor tailored for calling RESTful APIs, which can meticulously formulate parameters and parse API responses. To fully evaluate the performance of RestGPT, we propose RestBench, a high-quality benchmark which consists of two real-world scenarios and human-annotated instructions with gold solution paths. Experiments show that RestGPT is able to achieve impressive results in complex tasks and has strong robustness, which paves a new way towards AGI. RestGPT and RestBench is publicly available at https://restgpt.github.io/.
3rd Place Solution for PVUW Challenge 2023: Video Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In order to deal with the task of video panoptic segmentation in the wild, we propose a robust integrated video panoptic segmentation solution. In our solution, we regard the video panoptic segmentation task as a segmentation target querying task, represent both semantic and instance targets as a set of queries, and then combine these queries with video features extracted by neural networks to predict segmentation masks. In order to improve the learning accuracy and convergence speed of the solution, we add additional tasks of video semantic segmentation and video instance segmentation for joint training. In addition, we also add an additional image semantic segmentation model to further improve the performance of semantic classes. In addition, we also add some additional operations to improve the robustness of the model. Extensive experiments on the VIPSeg dataset show that the proposed solution achieves state-of-the-art performance with 50.04\% VPQ on the VIPSeg test set, which is 3rd place on the video panoptic segmentation track of the PVUW Challenge 2023.
Augmenting Greybox Fuzzing with Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Real-world programs expecting structured inputs often has a format-parsing stage gating the deeper program space. Neither a mutation-based approach nor a generative approach can provide a solution that is effective and scalable. Large language models (LLM) pre-trained with an enormous amount of natural language corpus have proved to be effective for understanding the implicit format syntax and generating format-conforming inputs. In this paper, propose ChatFuzz, a greybox fuzzer augmented by generative AI. More specifically, we pick a seed in the fuzzer's seed pool and prompt ChatGPT generative models to variations, which are more likely to be format-conforming and thus of high quality. We conduct extensive experiments to explore the best practice for harvesting the power of generative LLM models. The experiment results show that our approach improves the edge coverage by 12.77\% over the SOTA greybox fuzzer (AFL++) on 12 target programs from three well-tested benchmarks. As for vulnerability detection, \sys is able to perform similar to or better than AFL++ for programs with explicit syntax rules but not for programs with non-trivial syntax.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Guided by Signal Temporal Logic Specifications
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Reward design is a key component of deep reinforcement learning, yet some tasks and designer's objectives may be unnatural to define as a scalar cost function. Among the various techniques, formal methods integrated with DRL have garnered considerable attention due to their expressiveness and flexibility to define the reward and requirements for different states and actions of the agent. However, how to leverage Signal Temporal Logic (STL) to guide multi-agent reinforcement learning reward design remains unexplored. Complex interactions, heterogeneous goals and critical safety requirements in multi-agent systems make this problem even more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel STL-guided multi-agent reinforcement learning framework. The STL requirements are designed to include both task specifications according to the objective of each agent and safety specifications, and the robustness values of the STL specifications are leveraged to generate rewards. We validate the advantages of our method through empirical studies. The experimental results demonstrate significant reward performance improvements compared to MARL without STL guidance, along with a remarkable increase in the overall safety rate of the multi-agent systems.