OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Extending RAIM with a Gaussian Mixture of Opportunistic Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

GNSS are indispensable for various applications, but they are vulnerable to spoofing attacks. The original receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) was not designed for securing GNSS. In this context, RAIM was extended with wireless signals, termed signals of opportunity (SOPs), or onboard sensors, typically assumed benign. However, attackers might also manipulate wireless networks, raising the need for a solution that considers untrustworthy SOPs. To address this, we extend RAIM by incorporating all opportunistic information, i.e., measurements from terrestrial infrastructures and onboard sensors, culminating in one function for robust GNSS spoofing detection. The objective is to assess the likelihood of GNSS spoofing by analyzing locations derived from extended RAIM solutions, which include location solutions from GNSS pseudorange subsets and wireless signal subsets of untrusted networks. Our method comprises two pivotal components: subset generation and location fusion. Subsets of ranging information are created and processed through positioning algorithms, producing temporary locations. Onboard sensors provide speed, acceleration, and attitude data, aiding in location filtering based on motion constraints. The filtered locations, modeled with uncertainty, are fused into a composite likelihood function normalized for GNSS spoofing detection. Theoretical assessments of GNSS-only and multi-infrastructure scenarios under uncoordinated and coordinated attacks are conducted. The detection of these attacks is feasible when the number of benign subsets exceeds a specific threshold. A real-world dataset from the Kista area is used for experimental validation. Comparative analysis against baseline methods shows a significant improvement in detection accuracy achieved by our Gaussian Mixture RAIM approach. Moreover, we discuss leveraging RAIM results for plausible location recovery.
Recommendation Fairness in Social Networks Over Time
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

In social recommender systems, it is crucial that the recommendation models provide equitable visibility for different demographic groups, such as gender or race. Most existing research has addressed this problem by only studying individual static snapshots of networks that typically change over time. To address this gap, we study the evolution of recommendation fairness over time and its relation to dynamic network properties. We examine three real-world dynamic networks by evaluating the fairness of six recommendation algorithms and analyzing the association between fairness and network properties over time. We further study how interventions on network properties influence fairness by examining counterfactual scenarios with alternative evolution outcomes and differing network properties. Our results on empirical datasets suggest that recommendation fairness improves over time, regardless of the recommendation method. We also find that two network properties, minority ratio, and homophily ratio, exhibit stable correlations with fairness over time. Our counterfactual study further suggests that an extreme homophily ratio potentially contributes to unfair recommendations even with a balanced minority ratio. Our work provides insights into the evolution of fairness within dynamic networks in social science. We believe that our findings will help system operators and policymakers to better comprehend the implications of temporal changes and interventions targeting fairness in social networks.
A Fuzzy Approach to Record Linkages
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Record Linkage is the process of identifying and unifying records from various independent data sources. Existing strategies, which can be either deterministic or probabilistic, often fail to link records satisfactorily under uncertainty. This paper describes an indigenously (locally) developed fuzzy linkage method, based on fuzzy set techniques, which can effectively account for this uncertainty prevalent in the disparate data sources and address the shortcomings of the existing approaches. Extensive testing, evaluation and comparisons have demonstrated the efficacy of this fuzzy approach for record linkages.
Exact Tensor Completion Powered by Slim Transforms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, a tensor completion problem is studied, which aims to perfectly recover the tensor from partial observations. The existing theoretical guarantee requires the involved transform to be orthogonal, which hinders its applications. In this paper, jumping out of the constraints of isotropy and self-adjointness, the theoretical guarantee of exact tensor completion with arbitrary linear transforms is established by directly operating the tensors in the transform domain. With the enriched choices of transforms, a new analysis obtained by the proof discloses why slim transforms outperform their square counterparts from a theoretical level. Our model and proof greatly enhance the flexibility of tensor completion and extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method.
SWAG: Storytelling With Action Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Automated long-form story generation typically employs long-context large language models (LLMs) for one-shot creation, which can produce cohesive but not necessarily engaging content. We introduce Storytelling With Action Guidance (SWAG), a novel approach to storytelling with LLMs. Our approach frames story writing as a search problem through a two-model feedback loop: one LLM generates story content, and another auxiliary LLM is used to choose the next best "action" to steer the story's future direction. Our results show that SWAG can substantially outperform previous end-to-end story generation techniques when evaluated by GPT-4 and through human evaluation. Our SWAG pipeline using only small open-source models surpasses GPT-3.5-Turbo.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Picker Routing Problem in Warehousing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Order Picker Routing is a critical issue in Warehouse Operations Management. Due to the complexity of the problem and the need for quick solutions, suboptimal algorithms are frequently employed in practice. However, Reinforcement Learning offers an appealing alternative to traditional heuristics, potentially outperforming existing methods in terms of speed and accuracy. We introduce an attention based neural network for modeling picker tours, which is trained using Reinforcement Learning. Our method is evaluated against existing heuristics across a range of problem parameters to demonstrate its efficacy. A key advantage of our proposed method is its ability to offer an option to reduce the perceived complexity of routes.
nnMamba: 3D Biomedical Image Segmentation, Classification and Landmark Detection with State Space Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of biomedical image analysis, the quest for architectures capable of effectively capturing long-range dependencies is paramount, especially when dealing with 3D image segmentation, classification, and landmark detection. Traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) struggle with locality respective field, and Transformers have a heavy computational load when applied to high-dimensional medical images.In this paper, we introduce nnMamba, a novel architecture that integrates the strengths of CNNs and the advanced long-range modeling capabilities of State Space Sequence Models (SSMs). Specifically, we propose the Mamba-In-Convolution with Channel-Spatial Siamese learning (MICCSS) block to model the long-range relationship of the voxels. For the dense prediction and classification tasks, we also design the channel-scaling and channel-sequential learning methods. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets demonstrate nnMamba's superiority over state-of-the-art methods in a suite of challenging tasks, including 3D image segmentation, classification, and landmark detection. nnMamba emerges as a robust solution, offering both the local representation ability of CNNs and the efficient global context processing of SSMs, setting a new standard for long-range dependency modeling in medical image analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/lhaof/nnMamba
A 0.5V, 6.2$μ$W, 0.059mm$^{2}$ Sinusoidal Current Generator IC with 0.088% THD for Bio-Impedance Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents the first sub-10$μ$W, sub-0.1% total harmonic distortion (THD) sinusoidal current generator (CG) integrated circuit (IC) that is capable of 20kHz output for the bio-impedance (Bio-Z) sensing applications. To benefit from the ultra-low-power nature of near-threshold operation, a 9b pseudo-sine lookup table (LUT) is 3b $ΔΣ$ modulated in the digital domain, thus linearity burden of the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is avoided and only a 1.29$μ$W of logic power is consumed, from a 0.5V supply and a 2.56MHz clock frequency. A half-period (HP) reset is introduced in the capacitive DAC, leading to around 30dB reduction of in-band noise by avoiding the sampling of data-dependent glitches and attenuating the kT/C noise and the non-idealities of reset switches (SW).
Extended Version of: On the Structural Hardness of Answer Set Programming: Can Structure Efficiently Confine the Power of Disjunctions?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a generic problem modeling and solving framework with a strong focus on knowledge representation and a rapid growth of industrial applications. So far, the study of complexity resulted in characterizing hardness and determining their sources, fine-grained insights in the form of dichotomy-style results, as well as detailed parameterized complexity landscapes. Unfortunately, for the well-known parameter treewidth disjunctive programs require double-exponential runtime under reasonable complexity assumptions. This quickly becomes out of reach. We deal with the classification of structural parameters for disjunctive ASP on the program's rule structure (incidence graph). First, we provide a polynomial kernel to obtain single-exponential runtime in terms of vertex cover size, despite subset-minimization being not represented in the program's structure. Then we turn our attention to strictly better structural parameters between vertex cover size and treewidth. Here, we provide double-exponential lower bounds for the most prominent parameters in that range: treedepth, feedback vertex size, and cliquewidth. Based on this, we argue that unfortunately our options beyond vertex cover size are limited. Our results provide an in-depth hardness study, relying on a novel reduction from normal to disjunctive programs, trading the increase of complexity for an exponential parameter compression.
Matcha: An IDE Plugin for Creating Accurate Privacy Nutrition Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Apple and Google introduced their versions of privacy nutrition labels to the mobile app stores to better inform users of the apps' data practices. However, these labels are self-reported by developers and have been found to contain many inaccuracies due to misunderstandings of the label taxonomy. In this work, we present Matcha, an IDE plugin that uses automated code analysis to help developers create accurate Google Play data safety labels. Developers can benefit from Matcha's ability to detect user data accesses and transmissions while staying in control of the generated label by adding custom Java annotations and modifying an auto-generated XML specification. Our evaluation with 12 developers showed that Matcha helped our participants improved the accuracy of a label they created with Google's official tool for a real-world app they developed. We found that participants preferred Matcha for its accuracy benefits. Drawing on Matcha, we discuss general design recommendations for developer tools used to create accurate standardized privacy notices.
Enhancing Cross-Modal Contextual Congruence for Crowdfunding Success using Knowledge-infused Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The digital landscape continually evolves with multimodality, enriching the online experience for users. Creators and marketers aim to weave subtle contextual cues from various modalities into congruent content to engage users with a harmonious message. This interplay of multimodal cues is often a crucial factor in attracting users' attention. However, this richness of multimodality presents a challenge to computational modeling, as the semantic contextual cues spanning across modalities need to be unified to capture the true holistic meaning of the multimodal content. This contextual meaning is critical in attracting user engagement as it conveys the intended message of the brand or the organization. In this work, we incorporate external commonsense knowledge from knowledge graphs to enhance the representation of multimodal data using compact Visual Language Models (VLMs) and predict the success of multi-modal crowdfunding campaigns. Our results show that external knowledge commonsense bridges the semantic gap between text and image modalities, and the enhanced knowledge-infused representations improve the predictive performance of models for campaign success upon the baselines without knowledge. Our findings highlight the significance of contextual congruence in online multimodal content for engaging and successful crowdfunding campaigns.
RAP: Retrieval-Augmented Planning with Contextual Memory for Multimodal LLM Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Owing to recent advancements, Large Language Models (LLMs) can now be deployed as agents for increasingly complex decision-making applications in areas including robotics, gaming, and API integration. However, reflecting past experiences in current decision-making processes, an innate human behavior, continues to pose significant challenges. Addressing this, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Planning (RAP) framework, designed to dynamically leverage past experiences corresponding to the current situation and context, thereby enhancing agents' planning capabilities. RAP distinguishes itself by being versatile: it excels in both text-only and multimodal environments, making it suitable for a wide range of tasks. Empirical evaluations demonstrate RAP's effectiveness, where it achieves SOTA performance in textual scenarios and notably enhances multimodal LLM agents' performance for embodied tasks. These results highlight RAP's potential in advancing the functionality and applicability of LLM agents in complex, real-world applications.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Hybrid Workplace Decision Support
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold the potential to perform a variety of text processing tasks and provide textual explanations for proposed actions or decisions. In the era of hybrid work, LLMs can provide intelligent decision support for workers who are designing their hybrid work plans. In particular, they can offer suggestions and explanations to workers balancing numerous decision factors, thereby enhancing their work experience. In this paper, we present a decision support model for workspaces in hybrid work environments, leveraging the reasoning skill of LLMs. We first examine LLM's capability of making suitable workspace suggestions. We find that its reasoning extends beyond the guidelines in the prompt and the LLM can manage the trade-off among the available resources in the workspaces. We conduct an extensive user study to understand workers' decision process for workspace choices and evaluate the effectiveness of the system. We observe that a worker's decision could be influenced by the LLM's suggestions and explanations. The participants in our study find the system to be convenient, regardless of whether reasons are provided or not. Our results show that employees can benefit from the LLM-empowered system for their workspace selection in hybrid workplace.
Symbol Correctness in Deep Neural Networks Containing Symbolic Layers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

To handle AI tasks that combine perception and logical reasoning, recent work introduces Neurosymbolic Deep Neural Networks (NS-DNNs), which contain -- in addition to traditional neural layers -- symbolic layers: symbolic expressions (e.g., SAT formulas, logic programs) that are evaluated by symbolic solvers during inference. We identify and formalize an intuitive, high-level principle that can guide the design and analysis of NS-DNNs: symbol correctness, the correctness of the intermediate symbols predicted by the neural layers with respect to a (generally unknown) ground-truth symbolic representation of the input data. We demonstrate that symbol correctness is a necessary property for NS-DNN explainability and transfer learning (despite being in general impossible to train for). Moreover, we show that the framework of symbol correctness provides a precise way to reason and communicate about model behavior at neural-symbolic boundaries, and gives insight into the fundamental tradeoffs faced by NS-DNN training algorithms. In doing so, we both identify significant points of ambiguity in prior work, and provide a framework to support further NS-DNN developments.
Unified Discrete Diffusion for Categorical Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Discrete diffusion models have seen a surge of attention with applications on naturally discrete data such as language and graphs. Although discrete-time discrete diffusion has been established for a while, only recently Campbell et al. (2022) introduced the first framework for continuous-time discrete diffusion. However, their training and sampling processes differ significantly from the discrete-time version, necessitating nontrivial approximations for tractability. In this paper, we first present a series of mathematical simplifications of the variational lower bound that enable more accurate and easy-to-optimize training for discrete diffusion. In addition, we derive a simple formulation for backward denoising that enables exact and accelerated sampling, and importantly, an elegant unification of discrete-time and continuous-time discrete diffusion. Thanks to simpler analytical formulations, both forward and now also backward probabilities can flexibly accommodate any noise distribution, including different noise distributions for multi-element objects. Experiments show that our proposed USD3 (for Unified Simplified Discrete Denoising Diffusion) outperform all SOTA baselines on established datasets. We open-source our unified code at https://github.com/LingxiaoShawn/USD3.
SISP: A Benchmark Dataset for Fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic Satellite Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Fine-grained ship instance segmentation in satellite images holds considerable significance for monitoring maritime activities at sea. However, existing datasets often suffer from the scarcity of fine-grained information or pixel-wise localization annotations, as well as the insufficient image diversity and variations, thus limiting the research of this task. To this end, we propose a benchmark dataset for fine-grained Ship Instance Segmentation in Panchromatic satellite images, namely SISP, which contains 56,693 well-annotated ship instances with four fine-grained categories across 10,000 sliced images, and all the images are collected from SuperView-1 satellite with the resolution of 0.5m. Targets in the proposed SISP dataset have characteristics that are consistent with real satellite scenes, such as high class imbalance, various scenes, large variations in target densities and scales, and high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity, all of which make the SISP dataset more suitable for real-world applications. In addition, we introduce a Dynamic Feature Refinement-assist Instance segmentation network, namely DFRInst, as the benchmark method for ship instance segmentation in satellite images, which can fortify the explicit representation of crucial features, thus improving the performance of ship instance segmentation. Experiments and analysis are performed on the proposed SISP dataset to evaluate the benchmark method and several state-of-the-art methods to establish baselines for facilitating future research. The proposed dataset and source codes will be available at: https://github.com/Justlovesmile/SISP.
Attention-based Shape and Gait Representations Learning for Video-based Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Current state-of-the-art Video-based Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) primarily relies on appearance features extracted by deep learning models. These methods are not applicable for long-term analysis in real-world scenarios where persons have changed clothes, making appearance information unreliable. In this work, we deal with the practical problem of Video-based Cloth-Changing Person Re-ID (VCCRe-ID) by proposing "Attention-based Shape and Gait Representations Learning" (ASGL) for VCCRe-ID. Our ASGL framework improves Re-ID performance under clothing variations by learning clothing-invariant gait cues using a Spatial-Temporal Graph Attention Network (ST-GAT). Given the 3D-skeleton-based spatial-temporal graph, our proposed ST-GAT comprises multi-head attention modules, which are able to enhance the robustness of gait embeddings under viewpoint changes and occlusions. The ST-GAT amplifies the important motion ranges and reduces the influence of noisy poses. Then, the multi-head learning module effectively reserves beneficial local temporal dynamics of movement. We also boost discriminative power of person representations by learning body shape cues using a GAT. Experiments on two large-scale VCCRe-ID datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 12.2% in rank-1 accuracy and 7.0% in mAP.
Enhancing Embodied Object Detection through Language-Image Pre-training and Implicit Object Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Deep-learning and large scale language-image training have produced image object detectors that generalise well to diverse environments and semantic classes. However, single-image object detectors trained on internet data are not optimally tailored for the embodied conditions inherent in robotics. Instead, robots must detect objects from complex multi-modal data streams involving depth, localisation and temporal correlation, a task termed embodied object detection. Paradigms such as Video Object Detection (VOD) and Semantic Mapping have been proposed to leverage such embodied data streams, but existing work fails to enhance performance using language-image training. In response, we investigate how an image object detector pre-trained using language-image data can be extended to perform embodied object detection. We propose a novel implicit object memory that uses projective geometry to aggregate the features of detected objects across long temporal horizons. The spatial and temporal information accumulated in memory is then used to enhance the image features of the base detector. When tested on embodied data streams sampled from diverse indoor scenes, our approach improves the base object detector by 3.09 mAP, outperforming alternative external memories designed for VOD and Semantic Mapping. Our method also shows a significant improvement of 16.90 mAP relative to baselines that perform embodied object detection without first training on language-image data, and is robust to sensor noise and domain shift experienced in real-world deployment.