OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
IBMEA: Exploring Variational Information Bottleneck for Multi-modal Entity Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities between multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs), where the entities can be associated with related images. Most existing studies integrate multi-modal information heavily relying on the automatically-learned fusion module, rarely suppressing the redundant information for MMEA explicitly. To this end, we explore variational information bottleneck for multi-modal entity alignment (IBMEA), which emphasizes the alignment-relevant information and suppresses the alignment-irrelevant information in generating entity representations. Specifically, we devise multi-modal variational encoders to generate modal-specific entity representations as probability distributions. Then, we propose four modal-specific information bottleneck regularizers, limiting the misleading clues in refining modal-specific entity representations. Finally, we propose a modal-hybrid information contrastive regularizer to integrate all the refined modal-specific representations, enhancing the entity similarity between MMKGs to achieve MMEA. We conduct extensive experiments on two cross-KG and three bilingual MMEA datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, and also shows promising and robust performance in low-resource and high-noise data scenarios.
GP-VLS: A general-purpose vision language model for surgery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Surgery requires comprehensive medical knowledge, visual assessment skills, and procedural expertise. While recent surgical AI models have focused on solving task-specific problems, there is a need for general-purpose systems that can understand surgical scenes and interact through natural language. This paper introduces GP-VLS, a general-purpose vision language model for surgery that integrates medical and surgical knowledge with visual scene understanding. For comprehensively evaluating general-purpose surgical models, we propose SurgiQual, which evaluates across medical and surgical knowledge benchmarks as well as surgical vision-language questions. To train GP-VLS, we develop six new datasets spanning medical knowledge, surgical textbooks, and vision-language pairs for tasks like phase recognition and tool identification. We show that GP-VLS significantly outperforms existing open- and closed-source models on surgical vision-language tasks, with 8-21% improvements in accuracy across SurgiQual benchmarks. GP-VLS also demonstrates strong performance on medical and surgical knowledge tests compared to open-source alternatives. Overall, GP-VLS provides an open-source foundation for developing AI assistants to support surgeons across a wide range of tasks and scenarios. The code and data for this work is publicly available at gpvls-surgery-vlm.github.io.
Application State Management (ASM) in the Modern Web and Mobile Applications: A Comprehensive Review
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid evolution of web and mobile applications has necessitated robust mechanisms for managing application state to ensure consistency, performance, and user-friendliness. This comprehensive review examines the most effective Application State Management (ASM) techniques, categorized into Local State Management, State Management Libraries, and Server-Side State Management. By analyzing popular front end frameworks the study delves into local state management mechanisms. It also evaluates the state of front end management libraries, highlighting their implementations, benefits, and limitations. Server-side state management techniques, particularly caching, are discussed for their roles in enhancing data retrieval efficiency. This paper offers actionable insights for developers to build scalable, responsive applications, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application. This study's critical analysis and recommendations aim to guide future research and development in ASM, contributing to the advancement of modern application architecture.
Investigating Critical Period Effects in Language Acquisition through Neural Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Humans appear to have a critical period (CP) for language acquisition: Second language (L2) acquisition becomes harder after early childhood, and ceasing exposure to a first language (L1) after this period (but not before) typically does not lead to substantial loss of L1 proficiency. It is unknown whether these CP effects result from innately determined brain maturation or as a stabilization of neural connections naturally induced by experience. In this study, we use language models (LMs) to test the extent to which these phenomena are peculiar to humans, or shared by a broader class of language learners. We vary the age of exposure by training LMs on language pairs in various experimental conditions, and find that LMs, which lack any direct analog to innate maturational stages, do not show CP effects when the age of exposure of L2 is delayed. Our results contradict the claim that CP effects are an inevitable result of statistical learning, and they are consistent with an innate mechanism for CP effects. We show that we can reverse-engineer the CP by introducing a regularizer partway through training to simulate a maturational decrease in plasticity. All in all, our results suggest that L1 learning on its own may not be enough to induce a CP, and additional engineering is necessary to make language models more cognitively plausible.
Integrating Large Language Models into a Tri-Modal Architecture for Automated Depression Classification on the DAIC-WOZ
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a pervasive mental health condition that affects 300 million people worldwide. This work presents a novel, BiLSTM-based tri-modal model-level fusion architecture for the binary classification of depression from clinical interview recordings. The proposed architecture incorporates Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, Facial Action Units, and uses a two-shot learning based GPT-4 model to process text data. This is the first work to incorporate large language models into a multi-modal architecture for this task. It achieves impressive results on the DAIC-WOZ AVEC 2016 Challenge cross-validation split and Leave-One-Subject-Out cross-validation split, surpassing all baseline models and multiple state-of-the-art models. In Leave-One-Subject-Out testing, it achieves an accuracy of 91.01%, an F1-Score of 85.95%, a precision of 80%, and a recall of 92.86%.
Polynomial Regression as a Task for Understanding In-context Learning Through Finetuning and Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Simple function classes have emerged as toy problems to better understand in-context-learning in transformer-based architectures used for large language models. But previously proposed simple function classes like linear regression or multi-layer-perceptrons lack the structure required to explore things like prompting and alignment within models capable of in-context-learning. We propose univariate polynomial regression as a function class that is just rich enough to study prompting and alignment, while allowing us to visualize and understand what is going on clearly.
Learning to Select the Best Forecasting Tasks for Clinical Outcome Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose to meta-learn an a self-supervised patient trajectory forecast learning rule by meta-training on a meta-objective that directly optimizes the utility of the patient representation over the subsequent clinical outcome prediction. This meta-objective directly targets the usefulness of a representation generated from unlabeled clinical measurement forecast for later supervised tasks. The meta-learned can then be directly used in target risk prediction, and the limited available samples can be used for further fine-tuning the model performance. The effectiveness of our approach is tested on a real open source patient EHR dataset MIMIC-III. We are able to demonstrate that our attention-based patient state representation approach can achieve much better performance for predicting target risk with low resources comparing with both direct supervised learning and pretraining with all-observation trajectory forecast.
Defogger: A Visual Analysis Approach for Data Exploration of Sensitive Data Protected by Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Differential privacy ensures the security of individual privacy but poses challenges to data exploration processes because the limited privacy budget incapacitates the flexibility of exploration and the noisy feedback of data requests leads to confusing uncertainty. In this study, we take the lead in describing corresponding exploration scenarios, including underlying requirements and available exploration strategies. To facilitate practical applications, we propose a visual analysis approach to the formulation of exploration strategies. Our approach applies a reinforcement learning model to provide diverse suggestions for exploration strategies according to the exploration intent of users. A novel visual design for representing uncertainty in correlation patterns is integrated into our prototype system to support the proposed approach. Finally, we implemented a user study and two case studies. The results of these studies verified that our approach can help develop strategies that satisfy the exploration intent of users.
Seamless Website Fingerprinting in Multiple Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Website fingerprinting (WF) attacks identify the websites visited over anonymized connections by analyzing patterns in network traffic flows, such as packet sizes, directions, or interval times using a machine learning classifier. Previous studies showed WF attacks achieve high classification accuracy. However, several issues call into question whether existing WF approaches are realizable in practice and thus motivate a re-exploration. Due to Tor's performance issues and resulting poor browsing experience, the vast majority of users opt for Virtual Private Networking (VPN) despite VPNs weaker privacy protections. Many other past assumptions are increasingly unrealistic as web technology advances. Our work addresses several key limitations of prior art. First, we introduce a new approach that classifies entire websites rather than individual web pages. Site-level classification uses traffic from all site components, including advertisements, multimedia, and single-page applications. Second, our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) uses only the jitter and size of 500 contiguous packets from any point in a TCP stream, in contrast to prior work requiring heuristics to find page boundaries. Our seamless approach makes eavesdropper attack models realistic. Using traces from a controlled browser, we show our CNN matches observed traffic to a website with over 90% accuracy. We found the training traffic quality is critical as classification accuracy is significantly reduced when the training data lacks variability in network location, performance, and clients' computational capability. We enhanced the base CNN's efficacy using domain adaptation, allowing it to discount irrelevant features, such as network location. Lastly, we evaluate several defensive strategies against seamless WF attacks.
Deep State-Space Generative Model For Correlated Time-to-Event Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Capturing the inter-dependencies among multiple types of clinically-critical events is critical not only to accurate future event prediction, but also to better treatment planning. In this work, we propose a deep latent state-space generative model to capture the interactions among different types of correlated clinical events (e.g., kidney failure, mortality) by explicitly modeling the temporal dynamics of patients' latent states. Based on these learned patient states, we further develop a new general discrete-time formulation of the hazard rate function to estimate the survival distribution of patients with significantly improved accuracy. Extensive evaluations over real EMR data show that our proposed model compares favorably to various state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our method also uncovers meaningful insights about the latent correlations among mortality and different types of organ failures.
Integrating Cognitive AI with Generative Models for Enhanced Question Answering in Skill-based Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In online learning, the ability to provide quick and accurate feedback to learners is crucial. In skill-based learning, learners need to understand the underlying concepts and mechanisms of a skill to be able to apply it effectively. While videos are a common tool in online learning, they cannot comprehend or assess the skills being taught. Additionally, while Generative AI methods are effective in searching and retrieving answers from a text corpus, it remains unclear whether these methods exhibit any true understanding. This limits their ability to provide explanations of skills or help with problem-solving. This paper proposes a novel approach that merges Cognitive AI and Generative AI to address these challenges. We employ a structured knowledge representation, the TMK (Task-Method-Knowledge) model, to encode skills taught in an online Knowledge-based AI course. Leveraging techniques such as Large Language Models, Chain-of-Thought, and Iterative Refinement, we outline a framework for generating reasoned explanations in response to learners' questions about skills.
Multi-modal Crowd Counting via Modal Emulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-modal crowd counting is a crucial task that uses multi-modal cues to estimate the number of people in crowded scenes. To overcome the gap between different modalities, we propose a modal emulation-based two-pass multi-modal crowd-counting framework that enables efficient modal emulation, alignment, and fusion. The framework consists of two key components: a \emph{multi-modal inference} pass and a \emph{cross-modal emulation} pass. The former utilizes a hybrid cross-modal attention module to extract global and local information and achieve efficient multi-modal fusion. The latter uses attention prompting to coordinate different modalities and enhance multi-modal alignment. We also introduce a modality alignment module that uses an efficient modal consistency loss to align the outputs of the two passes and bridge the semantic gap between modalities. Extensive experiments on both RGB-Thermal and RGB-Depth counting datasets demonstrate its superior performance compared to previous methods. Code available at https://github.com/Mr-Monday/Multi-modal-Crowd-Counting-via-Modal-Emulation.
Solving Short-Term Relocalization Problems In Monocular Keyframe Visual SLAM Using Spatial And Semantic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In Monocular Keyframe Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (MKVSLAM) frameworks, when incremental position tracking fails, global pose has to be recovered in a short-time window, also known as short-term relocalization. This capability is crucial for mobile robots to have reliable navigation, build accurate maps, and have precise behaviors around human collaborators. This paper focuses on the development of robust short-term relocalization capabilities for mobile robots using a monocular camera system. A novel multimodal keyframe descriptor is introduced, that contains semantic information of objects detected in the environment and the spatial information of the camera. Using this descriptor, a new Keyframe-based Place Recognition (KPR) method is proposed that is formulated as a multi-stage keyframe filtering algorithm, leading to a new relocalization pipeline for MKVSLAM systems. The proposed approach is evaluated over several indoor GPS denied datasets and demonstrates accurate pose recovery, in comparison to a bag-of-words approach.
VersusDebias: Universal Zero-Shot Debiasing for Text-to-Image Models via SLM-Based Prompt Engineering and Generative Adversary
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the rapid development of Text-to-Image (T2I) models, biases in human image generation against demographic social groups become a significant concern, impacting fairness and ethical standards in AI. Some researchers propose their methods to tackle with the issue. However, existing methods are designed for specific models with fixed prompts, limiting their adaptability to the fast-evolving models and diverse practical scenarios. Moreover, they neglect the impact of hallucinations, leading to discrepancies between expected and actual results. To address these issues, we introduce VersusDebias, a novel and universal debiasing framework for biases in arbitrary T2I models, consisting of an array generation (AG) module and an image generation (IG) module. The self-adaptive AG module generates specialized attribute arrays to post-process hallucinations and debias multiple attributes simultaneously. The IG module employs a small language model to modify prompts according to the arrays and drives the T2I model to generate debiased images, enabling zero-shot debiasing. Extensive experiments demonstrate VersusDebias's capability to debias any models across gender, race, and age simultaneously. In both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, VersusDebias outperforms existing methods, showcasing its exceptional utility. Our work is accessible at https://github.com/VersusDebias/VersusDebias to ensure reproducibility and facilitate further research.
Open Sentence Embeddings for Portuguese with the Serafim PT* encoders family
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Sentence encoder encode the semantics of their input, enabling key downstream applications such as classification, clustering, or retrieval. In this paper, we present Serafim PT*, a family of open-source sentence encoders for Portuguese with various sizes, suited to different hardware/compute budgets. Each model exhibits state-of-the-art performance and is made openly available under a permissive license, allowing its use for both commercial and research purposes. Besides the sentence encoders, this paper contributes a systematic study and lessons learned concerning the selection criteria of learning objectives and parameters that support top-performing encoders.
The Interpretability of Codebooks in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning is Limited
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Interpretability of deep reinforcement learning systems could assist operators with understanding how they interact with their environment. Vector quantization methods -- also called codebook methods -- discretize a neural network's latent space that is often suggested to yield emergent interpretability. We investigate whether vector quantization in fact provides interpretability in model-based reinforcement learning. Our experiments, conducted in the reinforcement learning environment Crafter, show that the codes of vector quantization models are inconsistent, have no guarantee of uniqueness, and have a limited impact on concept disentanglement, all of which are necessary traits for interpretability. We share insights on why vector quantization may be fundamentally insufficient for model interpretability.
FreeShell: A Context-Free 4D Printing Technique for Fabricating Complex 3D Triangle Mesh Shells
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Freeform thin-shell surfaces are critical in various fields, but their fabrication is complex and costly. Traditional methods are wasteful and require custom molds, while 3D printing needs extensive support structures and post-processing. Thermoshrinkage actuated 4D printing is an effective method through flat structures fabricating 3D shell. However, existing research faces issues related to precise deformation and limited robustness. Addressing these issues is challenging due to three key factors: (1) Difficulty in finding a universal method to control deformation across different materials; (2) Variability in deformation influenced by factors such as printing speed, layer thickness, and heating temperature; (3) Environmental factors affecting the deformation process. To overcome these challenges, we introduce FreeShell, a robust 4D printing technique that uses thermoshrinkage to create precise 3D shells. This method prints triangular tiles connected by shrinkable connectors from a single material. Upon heating, the connectors shrink, moving the tiles to form the desired 3D shape, simplifying fabrication and reducing material and environment dependency. An optimized algorithm for flattening 3D meshes ensures precision in printing. FreeShell demonstrates its effectiveness through various examples and experiments, showcasing accuracy, robustness, and strength, representing advancement in fabricating complex freeform surfaces.
Lock-Free Computation of PageRank in Dynamic Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

PageRank is a metric that assigns importance to the vertices of a graph based on its neighbors and their scores. Recently, there has been increasing interest in computing PageRank on dynamic graphs, where the graph structure evolves due to edge insertions and deletions. However, traditional barrier-based approaches for updating PageRanks encounter significant wait times on certain graph structures, leading to high overall runtimes. Additionally, the growing trend of multicore architectures with increased core counts has raised concerns about random thread delays and failures. In this study, we propose a lock-free algorithm for updating PageRank scores on dynamic graphs. First, we introduce our Dynamic Frontier (DF) approach, which identifies and processes vertices likely to change PageRanks with minimal overhead. Subsequently, we integrate DF with our lock-free and fault-tolerant PageRank ($DF_{LF}$), incorporating a helping mechanism among threads between its two phases. Experimental results demonstrate that $DF_{LF}$ not only eliminates waiting times at iteration barriers but also withstands random thread delays and crashes. On average, it is 4.6x faster than lock-free Naive-dynamic PageRank ($ND_{LF}$).
Is Generative AI an Existential Threat to Human Creatives? Insights from Financial Economics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

With the phenomenal rise of generative AI models (e.g., large language models such as GPT or large image models such as Diffusion), there are increasing concerns about human creatives' futures. Specifically, as generative models' power further increases, will they eventually replace all human creatives' jobs? We argue that the answer is "no," even if existing generative AI models' capabilities reach their theoretical limit. Our theory has a close analogy to a familiar insight in financial economics on the impossibility of an informationally efficient market [Grossman and Stiglitz (1980)]: If generative AI models can provide all the content humans need at low variable costs, then there is no incentive for humans to spend costly resources on content creation as they cannot profit from it. But if no human creates new content, then generative AI can only learn from stale information and be unable to generate up-to-date content that reflects new happenings in the physical world. This creates a paradox.