OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Debunking Robot Rights Metaphysically, Ethically, and Legally
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

In this work we challenge arguments for robot rights on metaphysical, ethical and legal grounds. Metaphysically, we argue that machines are not the kinds of things that may be denied or granted rights. Building on theories of phenomenology and post-Cartesian approaches to cognitive science, we ground our position in the lived reality of actual humans in an increasingly ubiquitously connected, controlled, digitized, and surveilled society. Ethically, we argue that, given machines current and potential harms to the most marginalized in society, limits on (rather than rights for) machines should be at the centre of current AI ethics debate. From a legal perspective, the best analogy to robot rights is not human rights but corporate rights, a highly controversial concept whose most important effect has been the undermining of worker, consumer, and voter rights by advancing the power of capital to exercise outsized influence on politics and law. The idea of robot rights, we conclude, acts as a smoke screen, allowing theorists and futurists to fantasize about benevolently sentient machines with unalterable needs and desires protected by law. While such fantasies have motivated fascinating fiction and art, once they influence legal theory and practice articulating the scope of rights claims, they threaten to immunize from legal accountability the current AI and robotics that is fuelling surveillance capitalism, accelerating environmental destruction, and entrenching injustice and human suffering.
Low-Light Image Enhancement Framework for Improved Object Detection in Fisheye Lens Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This study addresses the evolving challenges in urban traffic monitoring detection systems based on fisheye lens cameras by proposing a framework that improves the efficacy and accuracy of these systems. In the context of urban infrastructure and transportation management, advanced traffic monitoring systems have become critical for managing the complexities of urbanization and increasing vehicle density. Traditional monitoring methods, which rely on static cameras with narrow fields of view, are ineffective in dynamic urban environments, necessitating the installation of multiple cameras, which raises costs. Fisheye lenses, which were recently introduced, provide wide and omnidirectional coverage in a single frame, making them a transformative solution. However, issues such as distorted views and blurriness arise, preventing accurate object detection on these images. Motivated by these challenges, this study proposes a novel approach that combines a ransformer-based image enhancement framework and ensemble learning technique to address these challenges and improve traffic monitoring accuracy, making significant contributions to the future of intelligent traffic management systems. Our proposed methodological framework won 5th place in the 2024 AI City Challenge, Track 4, with an F1 score of 0.5965 on experimental validation data. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed system. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/daitranskku/AIC2024-TRACK4-TEAM15.
Vision Augmentation Prediction Autoencoder with Attention Design (VAPAAD)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in sequence prediction have significantly improved the accuracy of video data interpretation; however, existing models often overlook the potential of attention-based mechanisms for next-frame prediction. This study introduces the Vision Augmentation Prediction Autoencoder with Attention Design (VAPAAD), an innovative approach that integrates attention mechanisms into sequence prediction, enabling nuanced analysis and understanding of temporal dynamics in video sequences. Utilizing the Moving MNIST dataset, we demonstrate VAPAAD's robust performance and superior handling of complex temporal data compared to traditional methods. VAPAAD combines data augmentation, ConvLSTM2D layers, and a custom-built self-attention mechanism to effectively focus on salient features within a sequence, enhancing predictive accuracy and context-aware analysis. This methodology not only adheres to human cognitive processes during video interpretation but also addresses limitations in conventional models, which often struggle with the variability inherent in video sequences. The experimental results confirm that VAPAAD outperforms existing models, especially in integrating attention mechanisms, which significantly improve predictive performance.
WB LUTs: Contrastive Learning for White Balancing Lookup Tables
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic white balancing (AWB), one of the first steps in an integrated signal processing (ISP) pipeline, aims to correct the color cast induced by the scene illuminant. An incorrect white balance (WB) setting or AWB failure can lead to an undesired blue or red tint in the rendered sRGB image. To address this, recent methods pose the post-capture WB correction problem as an image-to-image translation task and train deep neural networks to learn the necessary color adjustments at a lower resolution. These low resolution outputs are post-processed to generate high resolution WB corrected images, forming a bottleneck in the end-to-end run time. In this paper we present a 3D Lookup Table (LUT) based WB correction model called WB LUTs that can generate high resolution outputs in real time. We introduce a contrastive learning framework with a novel hard sample mining strategy, which improves the WB correction quality of baseline 3D LUTs by 25.5%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed WB LUTs perform competitively against state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets while being 300 times faster using 12.7 times less memory. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/skrmanne/3DLUT_sRGB_WB.
Reinforcement Learning from Multi-role Debates as Feedback for Bias Mitigation in LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Bias in LLMs can harm user experience and societal outcomes. However, current bias mitigation methods often require intensive human feedback, lack transferability to other topics or yield overconfident and random outputs. We find that involving LLMs in role-playing scenario boosts their ability to recognize and mitigate biases. Based on this, we propose Reinforcement Learning from Multi-role Debates as Feedback (RLDF), a novel approach for bias mitigation replacing human feedback in traditional RLHF. We utilize LLMs in multi-role debates to create a dataset that includes both high-bias and low-bias instances for training the reward model in reinforcement learning. Our approach comprises two modes: (1) self-reflection, where the same LLM participates in multi-role debates, and (2) teacher-student, where a more advanced LLM like GPT-3.5-turbo guides the LLM to perform this task. Experimental results across different LLMs on BBQ and our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in bias mitigation. Our source code and datasets are available at \texttt{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RLDF-E344}.
Forensic Iris Image-Based Post-Mortem Interval Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Post-mortem iris recognition is an emerging application of iris-based human identification in a forensic setup. One factor that may be useful in conditioning iris recognition methods is the tissue decomposition level, which is correlated with the post-mortem interval (PMI), \ie the number of hours that have elapsed since death. PMI, however, is not always available, and its precise estimation remains one of the core challenges in forensic examination. This paper presents the first known to us method of the PMI estimation directly from iris images captured after death. To assess the feasibility of the iris-based PMI estimation, we designed models predicting the PMI from (a) near-infrared (NIR), (b) visible (RGB), and (c) multispectral (RGB+NIR) forensic iris images. Models were evaluated following a 10-fold cross-validation, in (S1) sample-disjoint, (S2) subject-disjoint, and (S3) cross-dataset scenarios. We explore two data balancing techniques for S3: resampling-based balancing (S3-real), and synthetic data-supplemented balancing (S3-synthetic). We found that using the multispectral data offers a spectacularly low mean absolute error (MAE) of $\approx 3.5$ hours in the scenario (S1), a bit worse MAE $\approx 17.5$ hours in the scenario (S2), and MAE $\approx 45.77$ hours in the scenario (S3). Additionally, supplementing the training set with synthetically-generated forensic iris images (S3-synthetic) significantly enhances the models' ability to generalize to new NIR, RGB and multispectral data collected in a different lab. This suggests that if the environmental conditions are favorable (\eg, bodies are kept in low temperatures), forensic iris images provide features that are indicative of the PMI and can be automatically estimated.
Insights from the Field: Exploring Students' Perspectives on Bad Unit Testing Practices
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Educating students about software testing practices is integral to the curricula of many computer science-related courses and typically involves students writing unit tests. Similar to production/source code, students might inadvertently deviate from established unit testing best practices, and introduce problematic code, referred to as test smells, into their test suites. Given the extensive catalog of test smells, it becomes challenging for students to identify test smells in their code, especially for those who lack experience with testing practices. In this experience report, we aim to increase students' awareness of bad unit testing practices, and detail the outcomes of having 184 students from three higher educational institutes utilize an IDE plugin to automatically detect test smells in their code. Our findings show that while students report on the plugin's usefulness in learning about and detecting test smells, they also identify specific test smells that they consider harmless. We anticipate that our findings will support academia in refining course curricula on unit testing and enabling educators to support students with code review strategies of test code.
CULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

As the utilization of large language models (LLMs) has proliferated world-wide, it is crucial for them to have adequate knowledge and fair representation for diverse global cultures. In this work, we uncover culture perceptions of three SOTA models on 110 countries and regions on 8 culture-related topics through culture-conditioned generations, and extract symbols from these generations that are associated to each culture by the LLM. We discover that culture-conditioned generation consist of linguistic "markers" that distinguish marginalized cultures apart from default cultures. We also discover that LLMs have an uneven degree of diversity in the culture symbols, and that cultures from different geographic regions have different presence in LLMs' culture-agnostic generation. Our findings promote further research in studying the knowledge and fairness of global culture perception in LLMs. Code and Data can be found here: https://github.com/huihanlhh/Culture-Gen/
Anomaly Correction of Business Processes Using Transformer Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Event log records all events that occur during the execution of business processes, so detecting and correcting anomalies in event log can provide reliable guarantee for subsequent process analysis. The previous works mainly include next event prediction based methods and autoencoder-based methods. These methods cannot accurately and efficiently detect anomalies and correct anomalies at the same time, and they all rely on the set threshold to detect anomalies. To solve these problems, we propose a business process anomaly correction method based on Transformer autoencoder. By using self-attention mechanism and autoencoder structure, it can efficiently process event sequences of arbitrary length, and can directly output corrected business process instances, so that it can adapt to various scenarios. At the same time, the anomaly detection is transformed into a classification problem by means of selfsupervised learning, so that there is no need to set a specific threshold in anomaly detection. The experimental results on several real-life event logs show that the proposed method is superior to the previous methods in terms of anomaly detection accuracy and anomaly correction results while ensuring high running efficiency.
Two-Stage Stance Labeling: User-Hashtag Heuristics with Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The high volume and rapid evolution of content on social media present major challenges for studying the stance of social media users. In this work, we develop a two stage stance labeling method that utilizes the user-hashtag bipartite graph and the user-user interaction graph. In the first stage, a simple and efficient heuristic for stance labeling uses the user-hashtag bipartite graph to iteratively update the stance association of user and hashtag nodes via a label propagation mechanism. This set of soft labels is then integrated with the user-user interaction graph to train a graph neural network (GNN) model using semi-supervised learning. We evaluate this method on two large-scale datasets containing tweets related to climate change from June 2021 to June 2022 and gun control from January 2022 to January 2023. Our experiments demonstrate that enriching text-based embeddings of users with network information from the user interaction graph using our semi-supervised GNN method outperforms both classifiers trained on user textual embeddings and zero-shot classification using LLMs such as GPT4. We discuss the need for integrating nuanced understanding from social science with the scalability of computational methods to better understand how polarization on social media occurs for divisive issues such as climate change and gun control.
Generative Text Steganography with Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have blurred the boundary of high-quality text generation between humans and machines, which is favorable for generative text steganography. While, current advanced steganographic mapping is not suitable for LLMs since most users are restricted to accessing only the black-box API or user interface of the LLMs, thereby lacking access to the training vocabulary and its sampling probabilities. In this paper, we explore a black-box generative text steganographic method based on the user interfaces of large language models, which is called LLM-Stega. The main goal of LLM-Stega is that the secure covert communication between Alice (sender) and Bob (receiver) is conducted by using the user interfaces of LLMs. Specifically, We first construct a keyword set and design a new encrypted steganographic mapping to embed secret messages. Furthermore, to guarantee accurate extraction of secret messages and rich semantics of generated stego texts, an optimization mechanism based on reject sampling is proposed. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LLM-Stega outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
Improving Disturbance Estimation and Suppression via Learning among Systems with Mismatched Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Iterative learning control (ILC) is a method for reducing system tracking or estimation errors over multiple iterations by using information from past iterations. The disturbance observer (DOB) is used to estimate and mitigate disturbances within the system, while the system is being affected by them. ILC enhances system performance by introducing a feedforward signal in each iteration. However, its effectiveness may diminish if the conditions change during the iterations. On the other hand, although DOB effectively mitigates the effects of new disturbances, it cannot entirely eliminate them as it operates reactively. Therefore, neither ILC nor DOB alone can ensure sufficient robustness in challenging scenarios. This study focuses on the simultaneous utilization of ILC and DOB to enhance system robustness. The proposed methodology specifically targets dynamically different linearized systems performing repetitive tasks. The systems share similar forms but differ in dynamics (e.g. sizes, masses, and controllers). Consequently, the design of learning filters must account for these differences in dynamics. To validate the approach, the study establishes a theoretical framework for designing learning filters in conjunction with DOB. The validity of the framework is then confirmed through numerical studies and experimental tests conducted on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although UAVs are nonlinear systems, the study employs a linearized controller as they operate in proximity to the hover condition. A video introduction of this paper is available via this link: https://zh.engr.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/310/2024/02/ILCDOB_v3f.mp4.
Med-MoE: Mixture of Domain-Specific Experts for Lightweight Medical Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in general-purpose or domain-specific multimodal large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable progress for medical decision-making. However, they are designated for specific classification or generative tasks, and require model training or finetuning on large-scale datasets with sizeable parameters and tremendous computing, hindering their clinical utility across diverse resource-constrained scenarios in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel and lightweight framework Med-MoE (Mixture-of-Experts) that tackles both discriminative and generative multimodal medical tasks. The learning of Med-MoE consists of three steps: multimodal medical alignment, instruction tuning and routing, and domain-specific MoE tuning. After aligning multimodal medical images with LLM tokens, we then enable the model for different multimodal medical tasks with instruction tuning, together with a trainable router tailored for expert selection across input modalities. Finally, the model is tuned by integrating the router with multiple domain-specific experts, which are selectively activated and further empowered by meta expert. Comprehensive experiments on both open- and close-end medical question answering (Med-VQA) and image classification tasks across datasets such as VQA-RAD, SLAKE and Path-VQA demonstrate that our model can achieve performance superior to or on par with state-of-the-art baselines, while only requiring approximately 30\%-50\% of activated model parameters. Extensive analysis and ablations corroborate the effectiveness and practical utility of our method.
AniFrame: A Programming Language for 2D Drawing and Frame-Based Animation
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2024
Year: 2024

Creative coding is an experimentation-heavy activity that requires translating high-level visual ideas into code. However, most languages and libraries for creative coding may not be adequately intuitive for beginners. In this paper, we present AniFrame, a domain-specific language for drawing and animation. Designed for novice programmers, it (i) features animation-specific data types, operations, and built-in functions to simplify the creation and animation of composite objects, (ii) allows for fine-grained control over animation sequences through explicit specification of the target object and the start and end frames, (iii) reduces the learning curve through a Python-like syntax, type inferencing, and a minimal set of control structures and keywords that map closely to their semantic intent, and (iv) promotes computational expressivity through support for common mathematical operations, built-in trigonometric functions, and user-defined recursion. Our usability test demonstrates AniFrame's potential to enhance readability and writability for multiple creative coding use cases. AniFrame is open-source, and its implementation and reference are available at https://github.com/memgonzales/aniframe-language.
Learning from Offline and Online Experiences: A Hybrid Adaptive Operator Selection Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

In many practical applications, usually, similar optimisation problems or scenarios repeatedly appear. Learning from previous problem-solving experiences can help adjust algorithm components of meta-heuristics, e.g., adaptively selecting promising search operators, to achieve better optimisation performance. However, those experiences obtained from previously solved problems, namely offline experiences, may sometimes provide misleading perceptions when solving a new problem, if the characteristics of previous problems and the new one are relatively different. Learning from online experiences obtained during the ongoing problem-solving process is more instructive but highly restricted by limited computational resources. This paper focuses on the effective combination of offline and online experiences. A novel hybrid framework that learns to dynamically and adaptively select promising search operators is proposed. Two adaptive operator selection modules with complementary paradigms cooperate in the framework to learn from offline and online experiences and make decisions. An adaptive decision policy is maintained to balance the use of those two modules in an online manner. Extensive experiments on 170 widely studied real-value benchmark optimisation problems and a benchmark set with 34 instances for combinatorial optimisation show that the proposed hybrid framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Ablation study verifies the effectiveness of each component of the framework.
ControlMTR: Control-Guided Motion Transformer with Scene-Compliant Intention Points for Feasible Motion Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

The ability to accurately predict feasible multimodal future trajectories of surrounding traffic participants is crucial for behavior planning in autonomous vehicles. The Motion Transformer (MTR), a state-of-the-art motion prediction method, alleviated mode collapse and instability during training and enhanced overall prediction performance by replacing conventional dense future endpoints with a small set of fixed prior motion intention points. However, the fixed prior intention points make the MTR multi-modal prediction distribution over-scattered and infeasible in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose the ControlMTR framework to tackle the aforementioned issues by generating scene-compliant intention points and additionally predicting driving control commands, which are then converted into trajectories by a simple kinematic model with soft constraints. These control-generated trajectories will guide the directly predicted trajectories by an auxiliary loss function. Together with our proposed scene-compliant intention points, they can effectively restrict the prediction distribution within the road boundaries and suppress infeasible off-road predictions while enhancing prediction performance. Remarkably, without resorting to additional model ensemble techniques, our method surpasses the baseline MTR model across all performance metrics, achieving notable improvements of 5.22% in SoftmAP and a 4.15% reduction in MissRate. Our approach notably results in a 41.85% reduction in the cross-boundary rate of the MTR, effectively ensuring that the prediction distribution is confined within the drivable area.