OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Topic Modelling: Going Beyond Token Outputs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Topic modelling is a text mining technique for identifying salient themes from a number of documents. The output is commonly a set of topics consisting of isolated tokens that often co-occur in such documents. Manual effort is often associated with interpreting a topic's description from such tokens. However, from a human's perspective, such outputs may not adequately provide enough information to infer the meaning of the topics; thus, their interpretability is often inaccurately understood. Although several studies have attempted to automatically extend topic descriptions as a means of enhancing the interpretation of topic models, they rely on external language sources that may become unavailable, must be kept up-to-date to generate relevant results, and present privacy issues when training on or processing data. This paper presents a novel approach towards extending the output of traditional topic modelling methods beyond a list of isolated tokens. This approach removes the dependence on external sources by using the textual data itself by extracting high-scoring keywords and mapping them to the topic model's token outputs. To measure the interpretability of the proposed outputs against those of the traditional topic modelling approach, independent annotators manually scored each output based on their quality and usefulness, as well as the efficiency of the annotation task. The proposed approach demonstrated higher quality and usefulness, as well as higher efficiency in the annotation task, in comparison to the outputs of a traditional topic modelling method, demonstrating an increase in their interpretability.
Estimating the severity of dental and oral problems via sentiment classification over clinical reports
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Analyzing authors' sentiments in texts as a technique for identifying text polarity can be practical and useful in various fields, including medicine and dentistry. Currently, due to factors such as patients' limited knowledge about their condition, difficulties in accessing specialist doctors, or fear of illness, particularly in pandemic conditions, there might be a delay between receiving a radiology report and consulting a doctor. In some cases, this delay can pose significant risks to the patient, making timely decision-making crucial. Having an automatic system that can inform patients about the deterioration of their condition by analyzing the text of radiology reports could greatly impact timely decision-making. In this study, a dataset comprising 1,134 cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) photo reports was collected from the Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. Each case was examined, and an expert labeled a severity level for the patient's condition on each document. After preprocessing all the text data, a deep learning model based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network architecture, known as CNN-LSTM, was developed to detect the severity level of the patient's problem based on sentiment analysis in the radiologist's report. The model's performance was evaluated on two datasets, each with two and four classes, in both imbalanced and balanced scenarios. Finally, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we compared its performance with that of other classification models. The results, along with one-way ANOVA and Tukey's test, indicated that our proposed model (CNN-LSTM) performed the best according to precision, recall, and f-measure criteria. This suggests that it can be a reliable model for estimating the severity of oral and dental diseases, thereby assisting patients.
Automated Scoring of Clinical Patient Notes using Advanced NLP and Pseudo Labeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Clinical patient notes are critical for documenting patient interactions, diagnoses, and treatment plans in medical practice. Ensuring accurate evaluation of these notes is essential for medical education and certification. However, manual evaluation is complex and time-consuming, often resulting in variability and resource-intensive assessments. To tackle these challenges, this research introduces an approach leveraging state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, specifically Masked Language Modeling (MLM) pretraining, and pseudo labeling. Our methodology enhances efficiency and effectiveness, significantly reducing training time without compromising performance. Experimental results showcase improved model performance, indicating a potential transformation in clinical note assessment.
CIMGEN: Controlled Image Manipulation by Finetuning Pretrained Generative Models on Limited Data
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Content creation and image editing can benefit from flexible user controls. A common intermediate representation for conditional image generation is a semantic map, that has information of objects present in the image. When compared to raw RGB pixels, the modification of semantic map is much easier. One can take a semantic map and easily modify the map to selectively insert, remove, or replace objects in the map. The method proposed in this paper takes in the modified semantic map and alter the original image in accordance to the modified map. The method leverages traditional pre-trained image-to-image translation GANs, such as CycleGAN or Pix2Pix GAN, that are fine-tuned on a limited dataset of reference images associated with the semantic maps. We discuss the qualitative and quantitative performance of our technique to illustrate its capacity and possible applications in the fields of image forgery and image editing. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image forgery technique in thwarting the numerous deep learning-based image forensic techniques, highlighting the urgent need to develop robust and generalizable image forensic tools in the fight against the spread of fake media.
Deterministic Collision-Free Exploration of Unknown Anonymous Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

We consider the fundamental task of network exploration. A network is modeled as a simple connected undirected n-node graph with unlabeled nodes, and all ports at any node of degree d are arbitrarily numbered 0,.....,d-1. Each of two identical mobile agents, initially situated at distinct nodes, has to visit all nodes and stop. Agents execute the same deterministic algorithm and move in synchronous rounds: in each round, an agent can either remain at the same node or move to an adjacent node. Exploration must be collision-free: in every round at most one agent can be at any node. We assume that agents have vision of radius 2: an awake agent situated at a node v can see the subgraph induced by all nodes at a distance at most 2 from v, sees all port numbers in this subgraph, and the agents located at these nodes. Agents do not know the entire graph but they know an upper bound n on its size. The time of an exploration is the number of rounds since the wakeup of the later agent to the termination by both agents. We show a collision-free exploration algorithm working in time polynomial in n, for arbitrary graphs of size larger than 2. Moreover, we show that if agents have only vision of radius 1, then collision-free exploration is impossible, e.g., in any tree of diameter 2.
Predictability and Randomness
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Algorithmic theories of randomness can be related to theories of probabilistic sequence prediction through the notion of a predictor, defined as a function which supplies lower bounds on initial-segment probabilities of infinite sequences. An infinite binary sequence $z$ is called unpredictable iff its initial-segment "redundancy" $n+\log p(z(n))$ remains sufficiently low relative to every effective predictor $p$. A predictor which maximizes the initial-segment redundancy of a sequence is called optimal for that sequence. It turns out that a sequence is random iff it is unpredictable. More generally, a sequence is random relative to an arbitrary computable distribution iff the distribution is itself an optimal predictor for the sequence. Here "random" can be taken in the sense of Martin-Löf by using weak criteria of effectiveness, or in the sense of Schnorr by using stronger criteria of effectiveness. Under the weaker criteria of effectiveness it is possible to construct a universal predictor which is optimal for all infinite sequences. This predictor assigns nonvanishing limit probabilities precisely to the recursive sequences. Under the stronger criteria of effectiveness it is possible to establish a law of large numbers for sequences random relative to a computable distribution, which may be useful as a criterion of "rationality" for methods of probabilistic prediction. A remarkable feature of effective predictors is the fact that they are expressible in the special form first proposed by Solomonoff. In this form sequence prediction reduces to assigning high probabilities to initial segments with short and/or numerous encodings. This fact provides the link between theories of randomness and Solomonoff's theory of prediction.
Local Background Estimation for Improved Gas Plume Identification in Hyperspectral Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Deep learning identification models have shown promise for identifying gas plumes in Longwave IR hyperspectral images of urban scenes, particularly when a large library of gases are being considered. Because many gases have similar spectral signatures, it is important to properly estimate the signal from a detected plume. Typically, a scene's global mean spectrum and covariance matrix are estimated to whiten the plume's signal, which removes the background's signature from the gas signature. However, urban scenes can have many different background materials that are spatially and spectrally heterogeneous. This can lead to poor identification performance when the global background estimate is not representative of a given local background material. We use image segmentation, along with an iterative background estimation algorithm, to create local estimates for the various background materials that reside underneath a gas plume. Our method outperforms global background estimation on a set of simulated and real gas plumes. This method shows promise in increasing deep learning identification confidence, while being simple and easy to tune when considering diverse plumes.
No AI After Auschwitz? Bridging AI and Memory Ethics in the Context of Information Retrieval of Genocide-Related Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The growing application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of information retrieval (IR) affects different domains, including cultural heritage. By facilitating organisation and retrieval of large volumes of heritage-related content, AI-driven IR systems inform users about a broad range of historical phenomena, including genocides (e.g. the Holocaust). However, it is currently unclear to what degree IR systems are capable of dealing with multiple ethical challenges associated with the curation of genocide-related information. To address this question, this chapter provides an overview of ethical challenges associated with the human curation of genocide-related information using a three-part framework inspired by Belmont criteria (i.e. curation challenges associated with respect for individuals, beneficence and justice/fairness). Then, the chapter discusses to what degree the above-mentioned challenges are applicable to the ways in which AI-driven IR systems deal with genocide-related information and what can be the potential ways of bridging AI and memory ethics in this context.
PlaceFormer: Transformer-based Visual Place Recognition using Multi-Scale Patch Selection and Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual place recognition is a challenging task in the field of computer vision, and autonomous robotics and vehicles, which aims to identify a location or a place from visual inputs. Contemporary methods in visual place recognition employ convolutional neural networks and utilize every region within the image for the place recognition task. However, the presence of dynamic and distracting elements in the image may impact the effectiveness of the place recognition process. Therefore, it is meaningful to focus on task-relevant regions of the image for improved recognition. In this paper, we present PlaceFormer, a novel transformer-based approach for visual place recognition. PlaceFormer employs patch tokens from the transformer to create global image descriptors, which are then used for image retrieval. To re-rank the retrieved images, PlaceFormer merges the patch tokens from the transformer to form multi-scale patches. Utilizing the transformer's self-attention mechanism, it selects patches that correspond to task-relevant areas in an image. These selected patches undergo geometric verification, generating similarity scores across different patch sizes. Subsequently, spatial scores from each patch size are fused to produce a final similarity score. This score is then used to re-rank the images initially retrieved using global image descriptors. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that PlaceFormer outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency, requiring less time and memory.
IndiText Boost: Text Augmentation for Low Resource India Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Text Augmentation is an important task for low-resource languages. It helps deal with the problem of data scarcity. A data augmentation strategy is used to deal with the problem of data scarcity. Through the years, much work has been done on data augmentation for the English language. In contrast, very less work has been done on Indian languages. This is contrary to the fact that data augmentation is used to deal with data scarcity. In this work, we focus on implementing techniques like Easy Data Augmentation, Back Translation, Paraphrasing, Text Generation using LLMs, and Text Expansion using LLMs for text classification on different languages. We focus on 6 Indian languages namely: Sindhi, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, Telugu, and Sanskrit. According to our knowledge, no such work exists for text augmentation on Indian languages. We carry out binary as well as multi-class text classification to make our results more comparable. We get surprising results as basic data augmentation techniques surpass LLMs.
Probabilistic Demand Forecasting with Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Demand forecasting is a prominent business use case that allows retailers to optimize inventory planning, logistics, and core business decisions. One of the key challenges in demand forecasting is accounting for relationships and interactions between articles. Most modern forecasting approaches provide independent article-level predictions that do not consider the impact of related articles. Recent research has attempted addressing this challenge using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and showed promising results. This paper builds on previous research on GNNs and makes two contributions. First, we integrate a GNN encoder into a state-of-the-art DeepAR model. The combined model produces probabilistic forecasts, which are crucial for decision-making under uncertainty. Second, we propose to build graphs using article attribute similarity, which avoids reliance on a pre-defined graph structure. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms non-graph benchmarks. We also show that our approach produces article embeddings that encode article similarity and demand dynamics and are useful for other downstream business tasks beyond forecasting.
Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics in the presence of library and system uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The SINDy algorithm has been successfully used to identify the governing equations of dynamical systems from time series data. However, SINDy assumes the user has prior knowledge of the variables in the system and of a function library that can act as a basis for the system. In this paper, we demonstrate on real world data how the Augmented SINDy algorithm outperforms SINDy in the presence of system variable uncertainty. We then show SINDy can be further augmented to perform robustly when both kinds of uncertainty are present.
Generalization of Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Policies via Awareness and Communication of Capabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) are enabling impressive coordination in heterogeneous multi-robot teams. However, existing approaches often overlook the challenge of generalizing learned policies to teams of new compositions, sizes, and robots. While such generalization might not be important in teams of virtual agents that can retrain policies on-demand, it is pivotal in multi-robot systems that are deployed in the real-world and must readily adapt to inevitable changes. As such, multi-robot policies must remain robust to team changes -- an ability we call adaptive teaming. In this work, we investigate if awareness and communication of robot capabilities can provide such generalization by conducting detailed experiments involving an established multi-robot test bed. We demonstrate that shared decentralized policies, that enable robots to be both aware of and communicate their capabilities, can achieve adaptive teaming by implicitly capturing the fundamental relationship between collective capabilities and effective coordination. Videos of trained policies can be viewed at: https://sites.google.com/view/cap-comm
Unsocial Intelligence: an Investigation of the Assumptions of AGI Discourse
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Dreams of machines rivaling human intelligence have shaped the field of AI since its inception. Yet, the very meaning of human-level AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI) remains elusive and contested. Definitions of AGI embrace a diverse range of incompatible values and assumptions. Contending with the fractured worldviews of AGI discourse is vital for critiques that pursue different values and futures. To that end, we provide a taxonomy of AGI definitions, laying the ground for examining the key social, political, and ethical assumptions they make. We highlight instances in which these definitions frame AGI or human-level AI as a technical topic and expose the value-laden choices being implicitly made. Drawing on feminist, STS, and social science scholarship on the political and social character of intelligence in both humans and machines, we propose contextual, democratic, and participatory paths to imagining future forms of machine intelligence. The development of future forms of AI must involve explicit attention to the values it encodes, the people it includes or excludes, and a commitment to epistemic justice.
SpacTor-T5: Pre-training T5 Models with Span Corruption and Replaced Token Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Pre-training large language models is known to be extremely resource intensive and often times inefficient, under-utilizing the information encapsulated in the training text sequences. In this paper, we present SpacTor, a new training procedure consisting of (1) a hybrid objective combining span corruption (SC) and token replacement detection (RTD), and (2) a two-stage curriculum that optimizes the hybrid objective over the initial $τ$ iterations, then transitions to standard SC loss. We show empirically that the effectiveness of the hybrid objective is tied to the two-stage pre-training schedule, and provide extensive analysis on why this is the case. In our experiments with encoder-decoder architectures (T5) on a variety of NLP tasks, SpacTor-T5 yields the same downstream performance as standard SC pre-training, while enabling a 50% reduction in pre-training iterations and 40% reduction in total FLOPs. Alternatively, given the same amount of computing budget, we find that SpacTor results in significantly improved downstream benchmark performance.
Topology-aware Embedding Memory for Continual Learning on Expanding Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Memory replay based techniques have shown great success for continual learning with incrementally accumulated Euclidean data. Directly applying them to continually expanding networks, however, leads to the potential memory explosion problem due to the need to buffer representative nodes and their associated topological neighborhood structures. To this end, we systematically analyze the key challenges in the memory explosion problem, and present a general framework, \textit{i.e.}, Parameter Decoupled Graph Neural Networks (PDGNNs) with Topology-aware Embedding Memory (TEM), to tackle this issue. The proposed framework not only reduces the memory space complexity from $\mathcal{O}(nd^L)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n)$~\footnote{$n$: memory budget, $d$: average node degree, $L$: the radius of the GNN receptive field}, but also fully utilizes the topological information for memory replay. Specifically, PDGNNs decouple trainable parameters from the computation ego-subnetwork via \textit{Topology-aware Embeddings} (TEs), which compress ego-subnetworks into compact vectors (\textit{i.e.}, TEs) to reduce the memory consumption. Based on this framework, we discover a unique \textit{pseudo-training effect} in continual learning on expanding networks and this effect motivates us to develop a novel \textit{coverage maximization sampling} strategy that can enhance the performance with a tight memory budget. Thorough empirical studies demonstrate that, by tackling the memory explosion problem and incorporating topological information into memory replay, PDGNNs with TEM significantly outperform state-of-the-art techniques, especially in the challenging class-incremental setting.
PAC Learnability for Reliable Communication over Discrete Memoryless Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In practical communication systems, knowledge of channel models is often absent, and consequently, transceivers need be designed based on empirical data. In this work, we study data-driven approaches to reliably choosing decoding metrics and code rates that facilitate reliable communication over unknown discrete memoryless channels (DMCs). Our analysis is inspired by the PAC (probably approximately correct) learning theory and does not rely on any assumptions on the statistical characteristics of DMCs. We show that a naive plug-in algorithm for choosing decoding metrics is likely to fail for finite training sets. We propose an alternative algorithm called the virtual sample algorithm and establish a non-asymptotic lower bound on its performance. The virtual sample algorithm is then used as a building block for constructing a learning algorithm that chooses a decoding metric and a code rate using which a transmitter and a receiver can reliably communicate at a rate arbitrarily close to the channel mutual information. Therefore, we conclude that DMCs are PAC learnable.