OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Exploring Factors Affecting Student Learning Satisfaction during COVID-19 in South Korea
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding students' preferences and learning satisfaction during COVID-19 has focused on learning attributes such as self-efficacy, performance, and engagement. Although existing efforts have constructed statistical models capable of accurately identifying significant factors impacting learning satisfaction, they do not necessarily explain the complex relationships among these factors in depth. This study aimed to understand several facets related to student learning preferences and satisfaction during the pandemic such as individual learner characteristics, instructional design elements and social and environmental factors. Responses from 302 students from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea were collected between 2021 and 2022. Information gathered included their gender, study major, satisfaction and motivation levels when learning, perceived performance, emotional state and learning environment. Wilcoxon Rank sum test and Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM) were performed to determine significant differences in specific cohorts. The two core findings of the study are as follows:1) Using Wilcoxon Rank Sum test, we can attest with 95% confidence that students who took offline classes had significantly higher learning satisfaction, among other attributes, than those who took online classes, as with STEM versus HASS students; 2) An explainable boosting machine (EBM) model fitted to 95.08% accuracy determined the top five factors affecting students' learning satisfaction as their perceived performance, their perception on participating in class activities, their study majors, their ability to conduct discussions in class and the study space availability at home. Positive perceived performance and ability to discuss with classmates had a positive impact on learning satisfaction, while negative perception on class activities participation had a negative impact on learning satisfaction.
Artificial Intelligence from Idea to Implementation. How Can AI Reshape the Education Landscape?
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the evolution and impact of Artificial Intelligence technologies in today society. Beginning with a historical context while exploring a few general definitions of AI, the author provides a timeline of the used technologies, highlighting its periods of stagnation, commonly referred to as AI winters, and the subsequent resurgence fueled by relentless enthusiasm and investment. The narrative then transitions to focus on the transformative effects of AI on society at large, with a particular emphasis on educational applications. Through examples, the paper shows how AI technologies have moved from theoretical constructs to practical tools that are reshaping pedagogical approaches and student engagement. The essay concludes by discussing the prospects of AI in education, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach that considers both technological advancements and societal implications.
COEFF-KANs: A Paradigm to Address the Electrolyte Field with KANs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

To reduce the experimental validation workload for chemical researchers and accelerate the design and optimization of high-energy-density lithium metal batteries, we aim to leverage models to automatically predict Coulombic Efficiency (CE) based on the composition of liquid electrolytes. There are mainly two representative paradigms in existing methods: machine learning and deep learning. However, the former requires intelligent input feature selection and reliable computational methods, leading to error propagation from feature estimation to model prediction, while the latter (e.g. MultiModal-MoLFormer) faces challenges of poor predictive performance and overfitting due to limited diversity in augmented data. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel method COEFF (COlumbic EFficiency prediction via Fine-tuned models), which consists of two stages: pre-training a chemical general model and fine-tuning on downstream domain data. Firstly, we adopt the publicly available MoLFormer model to obtain feature vectors for each solvent and salt in the electrolyte. Then, we perform a weighted average of embeddings for each token across all molecules, with weights determined by the respective electrolyte component ratios. Finally, we input the obtained electrolyte features into a Multi-layer Perceptron or Kolmogorov-Arnold Network to predict CE. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA for predicting CE compared to all baselines. Data and code used in this work will be made publicly available after the paper is published.
An Efficient Inference Framework for Early-exit Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Building efficient inference framework has gained increasing interests for research community. Early-exit models, a variant of LLMs, improves the inference efficiency of LLMs by skipping rest layers and directly generate output tokens when they are confident enough. However, there is no work of LLM inference framework that takes early-exit models into consideration. This is non-trivial as prior art on LLM inference cannot be directly applied to early-exit models. In this work, we solves two key challenges in building efficient inference framework for early-exit models: (1) batch inference at iteration-level granularity; and (2) KV cache management. For the former, we propose to process the batch until all sequences surpass the early-exit confidence threshold. For the latter, we propose to fill the KV cache of rest layers before the iteration terminates. Our evaluation shows that, compared with the original vLLM operating at full layers, our solution achieves up to 1.25x speed up.
Variational Inference Using Material Point Method
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

A new gradient-based particle sampling method, MPM-ParVI, based on material point method (MPM), is proposed for variational inference. MPM-ParVI simulates the deformation of a deformable body (e.g. a solid or fluid) under external effects driven by the target density; transient or steady configuration of the deformable body approximates the target density. The continuum material is modelled as an interacting particle system (IPS) using MPM, each particle carries full physical properties, interacts and evolves following conservation dynamics. This easy-to-implement ParVI method offers deterministic sampling and inference for a class of probabilistic models such as those encountered in Bayesian inference (e.g. intractable densities) and generative modelling (e.g. score-based).
Legal Aspects of Decentralized and Platform-Driven Economies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The sharing economy is sprawling across almost every sector and activity around the world. About a decade ago, there were only a handful of platform driven companies operating on the market. Zipcar, BlaBlaCar and Couchsurfing among them. Then Airbnb and Uber revolutionized the transportation and hospitality industries with a presence in virtually every major city. Access over ownership is the paradigm shift from the traditional business model that grants individuals the use of products or services without the necessity of buying them. Digital platforms, data and algorithm-driven companies as well as decentralized blockchain technologies have tremendous potential. But they are also changing the rules of the game. One of such technologies challenging the legal system are AI systems that will also reshape the current legal framework concerning the liability of operators, users and manufacturers. Therefore, this introductory chapter deals with explaining and describing the legal issues of some of these disruptive technologies. The chapter argues for a more forward-thinking and flexible regulatory structure.
Sun Off, Lights On: Photorealistic Monocular Nighttime Simulation for Robust Semantic Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Nighttime scenes are hard to semantically perceive with learned models and annotate for humans. Thus, realistic synthetic nighttime data become all the more important for learning robust semantic perception at night, thanks to their accurate and cheap semantic annotations. However, existing data-driven or hand-crafted techniques for generating nighttime images from daytime counterparts suffer from poor realism. The reason is the complex interaction of highly spatially varying nighttime illumination, which differs drastically from its daytime counterpart, with objects of spatially varying materials in the scene, happening in 3D and being very hard to capture with such 2D approaches. The above 3D interaction and illumination shift have proven equally hard to model in the literature, as opposed to other conditions such as fog or rain. Our method, named Sun Off, Lights On (SOLO), is the first to perform nighttime simulation on single images in a photorealistic fashion by operating in 3D. It first explicitly estimates the 3D geometry, the materials and the locations of light sources of the scene from the input daytime image and relights the scene by probabilistically instantiating light sources in a way that accounts for their semantics and then running standard ray tracing. Not only is the visual quality and photorealism of our nighttime images superior to competing approaches including diffusion models, but the former images are also proven more beneficial for semantic nighttime segmentation in day-to-night adaptation. Code and data will be made publicly available.
Mean Opinion Score as a New Metric for User-Evaluation of XAI Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This paper investigates the use of Mean Opinion Score (MOS), a common image quality metric, as a user-centric evaluation metric for XAI post-hoc explainers. To measure the MOS, a user experiment is proposed, which has been conducted with explanation maps of intentionally distorted images. Three methods from the family of feature attribution methods - Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), Multi-Layered Feature Explanation Method (MLFEM), and Feature Explanation Method (FEM) - are compared with this metric. Additionally, the correlation of this new user-centric metric with automatic metrics is studied via Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. MOS of MLFEM shows the highest correlation with automatic metrics of Insertion Area Under Curve (IAUC) and Deletion Area Under Curve (DAUC). However, the overall correlations are limited, which highlights the lack of consensus between automatic and user-centric metrics.
Haptic feedback of front car motion can improve driving control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the role of haptic feedback in a car-following scenario, where information about the motion of the front vehicle is provided through a virtual elastic connection with it. Using a robotic interface in a simulated driving environment, we examined the impact of varying levels of such haptic feedback on the driver's ability to follow the road while avoiding obstacles. The results of an experiment with 15 subjects indicate that haptic feedback from the front car's motion can significantly improve driving control (i.e., reduce motion jerk and deviation from the road) and reduce mental load (evaluated via questionnaire). This suggests that haptic communication, as observed between physically interacting humans, can be leveraged to improve safety and efficiency in automated driving systems, warranting further testing in real driving scenarios.
Weakly Supervised Intracranial Hemorrhage Segmentation with YOLO and an Uncertainty Rectified Segment Anything Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is a life-threatening condition that requires rapid and accurate diagnosis to improve treatment outcomes and patient survival rates. Recent advancements in supervised deep learning have greatly improved the analysis of medical images, but often rely on extensive datasets with high-quality annotations, which are costly, time-consuming, and require medical expertise to prepare. To mitigate the need for large amounts of expert-prepared segmentation data, we have developed a novel weakly supervised ICH segmentation method that utilizes the YOLO object detection model and an uncertainty-rectified Segment Anything Model (SAM). In addition, we have proposed a novel point prompt generator for this model to further improve segmentation results with YOLO-predicted bounding box prompts. Our approach achieved a high accuracy of 0.933 and an AUC of 0.796 in ICH detection, along with a mean Dice score of 0.629 for ICH segmentation, outperforming existing weakly supervised and popular supervised (UNet and Swin-UNETR) approaches. Overall, the proposed method provides a robust and accurate alternative to the more commonly used supervised techniques for ICH quantification without requiring refined segmentation ground truths during model training.
Graphite: A Graph-based Extreme Multi-Label Short Text Classifier for Keyphrase Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Keyphrase Recommendation has been a pivotal problem in advertising and e-commerce where advertisers/sellers are recommended keyphrases (search queries) to bid on to increase their sales. It is a challenging task due to the plethora of items shown on online platforms and various possible queries that users search while showing varying interest in the displayed items. Moreover, query/keyphrase recommendations need to be made in real-time and in a resource-constrained environment. This problem can be framed as an Extreme Multi-label (XML) Short text classification by tagging the input text with keywords as labels. Traditional neural network models are either infeasible or have slower inference latency due to large label spaces. We present Graphite, a graph-based classifier model that provides real-time keyphrase recommendations that are on par with standard text classification models. Furthermore, it doesn't utilize GPU resources, which can be limited in production environments. Due to its lightweight nature and smaller footprint, it can train on very large datasets, where state-of-the-art XML models fail due to extreme resource requirements. Graphite is deterministic, transparent, and intrinsically more interpretable than neural network-based models. We present a comprehensive analysis of our model's performance across forty categories spanning eBay's English-speaking sites.
RE#: High Performance Derivative-Based Regex Matching with Intersection, Complement and Lookarounds
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2024
Year: 2024

We present a tool and theory RE# for regular expression matching that is built on symbolic derivatives, does not use backtracking, and, in addition to the classical operators, also supports complement, intersection and lookarounds. We develop the theory formally and show that the main matching algorithm has input-linear complexity both in theory as well as experimentally. We apply thorough evaluation on popular benchmarks that show that RE# is over 71% faster than the next fastest regex engine in Rust on the baseline, and outperforms all state-of-the-art engines on extensions of the benchmarks often by several orders of magnitude.
Toward Efficient Permutation for Hierarchical N:M Sparsity on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

N:M sparsity pruning is a powerful technique for compressing deep neural networks, utilizing NVIDIA's Sparse Tensor Core technology. This method benefits from hardware support for sparse indexing, enabling the adoption of fine-grained sparsity to maintain model accuracy while minimizing the overhead typically associated with irregular data access. Although restricted to a fixed level of sparsity due to its reliance on hardware, N:M sparsity can be combined with coarser sparsity techniques to achieve diverse compression ratios. Initially, column-wise vector sparsity is applied to a dense model, followed by row-wise N:M sparsity on the preserved column vectors. We call this multi-level approach as hierarchical N:M (HiNM) sparsity. Similar to earlier single-level sparsity techniques, HiNM sparsity necessitates an effective channel permutation strategy to maximize the accuracy of the compressed networks. However, it introduces further complexities by requiring the rearrangement of both input and output channels, addressing challenges such as permutation sequence, HiNM-sparsity-aware permutation, and maintaining consistency in channel ordering across layers. In this paper, we introduce a channel permutation method designed specifically for HiNM sparsity, named gyro-permutation. This method is crafted to exploit the unique characteristics of HiNM pruning, incorporating a strategic policy in each permutation phase, including channel sampling, clustering, and assignment, to circumvent local minima. Additionally, we have developed a GPU kernel that facilitates independent layer permutation during the execution of HiNM sparse networks. Our extensive experimental evaluations on various DNN models demonstrate that our gyro-permutation significantly enhances the accuracy of HiNM sparse networks, allowing them to reach performance levels comparable to those of unstructured sparse networks.
Restoring Real-World Degraded Events Improves Deblurring Quality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Due to its high speed and low latency, DVS is frequently employed in motion deblurring. Ideally, high-quality events would adeptly capture intricate motion information. However, real-world events are generally degraded, thereby introducing significant artifacts into the deblurred results. In response to this challenge, we model the degradation of events and propose RDNet to improve the quality of image deblurring. Specifically, we first analyze the mechanisms underlying degradation and simulate paired events based on that. These paired events are then fed into the first stage of the RDNet for training the restoration model. The events restored in this stage serve as a guide for the second-stage deblurring process. To better assess the deblurring performance of different methods on real-world degraded events, we present a new real-world dataset named DavisMCR. This dataset incorporates events with diverse degradation levels, collected by manipulating environmental brightness and target object contrast. Our experiments are conducted on synthetic datasets (GOPRO), real-world datasets (REBlur), and the proposed dataset (DavisMCR). The results demonstrate that RDNet outperforms classical event denoising methods in event restoration. Furthermore, RDNet exhibits better performance in deblurring tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. DavisMCR are available at https://github.com/Yeeesir/DVS_RDNet.
Interpreting and Mitigating Hallucination in MLLMs through Multi-agent Debate
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

MLLMs often generate outputs that are inconsistent with the visual content, a challenge known as hallucination. Previous methods focus on determining whether a generated output is hallucinated, without identifying which image region leads to the hallucination or interpreting why such hallucinations occur. In this paper, we argue that hallucination in MLLMs is partially due to a lack of slow-thinking and divergent-thinking in these models. To address this, we propose adopting a self-reflection scheme to promote slow-thinking. Furthermore, we consider eliminating hallucination as a complex reasoning task and propose a multi-agent debate approach to encourage divergent-thinking. Consequently, our approach can not only mitigate hallucinations but also interpret why they occur and detail the specifics of hallucination. In addition, we propose to distinguish creativity from hallucination in the context of MLLMs, and illustrate how to evaluate MLLMs' creativity capability. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that our approach exhibits generalized hallucinations-mitigating performance across several MLLMs.
DeepSpeech models show Human-like Performance and Processing of Cochlear Implant Inputs
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Cochlear implants(CIs) are arguably the most successful neural implant, having restored hearing to over one million people worldwide. While CI research has focused on modeling the cochlear activations in response to low-level acoustic features, we hypothesize that the success of these implants is due in large part to the role of the upstream network in extracting useful features from a degraded signal and learned statistics of language to resolve the signal. In this work, we use the deep neural network (DNN) DeepSpeech2, as a paradigm to investigate how natural input and cochlear implant-based inputs are processed over time. We generate naturalistic and cochlear implant-like inputs from spoken sentences and test the similarity of model performance to human performance on analogous phoneme recognition tests. Our model reproduces error patterns in reaction time and phoneme confusion patterns under noise conditions in normal hearing and CI participant studies. We then use interpretability techniques to determine where and when confusions arise when processing naturalistic and CI-like inputs. We find that dynamics over time in each layer are affected by context as well as input type. Dynamics of all phonemes diverge during confusion and comprehension within the same time window, which is temporally shifted backward in each layer of the network. There is a modulation of this signal during processing of CI which resembles changes in human EEG signals in the auditory stream. This reduction likely relates to the reduction of encoded phoneme identity. These findings suggest that we have a viable model in which to explore the loss of speech-related information in time and that we can use it to find population-level encoding signals to target when optimizing cochlear implant inputs to improve encoding of essential speech-related information and improve perception.
Neuromorphic on-chip reservoir computing with spiking neural network architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Reservoir computing is a promising approach for harnessing the computational power of recurrent neural networks while dramatically simplifying training. This paper investigates the application of integrate-and-fire neurons within reservoir computing frameworks for two distinct tasks: capturing chaotic dynamics of the Hénon map and forecasting the Mackey-Glass time series. Integrate-and-fire neurons can be implemented in low-power neuromorphic architectures such as Intel Loihi. We explore the impact of network topologies created through random interactions on the reservoir's performance. Our study reveals task-specific variations in network effectiveness, highlighting the importance of tailored architectures for distinct computational tasks. To identify optimal network configurations, we employ a meta-learning approach combined with simulated annealing. This method efficiently explores the space of possible network structures, identifying architectures that excel in different scenarios. The resulting networks demonstrate a range of behaviors, showcasing how inherent architectural features influence task-specific capabilities. We study the reservoir computing performance using a custom integrate-and-fire code, Intel's Lava neuromorphic computing software framework, and via an on-chip implementation in Loihi. We conclude with an analysis of the energy performance of the Loihi architecture.