OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CARLOS: An Open, Modular, and Scalable Simulation Framework for the Development and Testing of Software for C-ITS
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Future mobility systems and their components are increasingly defined by their software. The complexity of these cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) and the everchanging requirements posed at the software require continual software updates. The dynamic nature of the system and the practically innumerable scenarios in which different software components work together necessitate efficient and automated development and testing procedures that use simulations as one core methodology. The availability of such simulation architectures is a common interest among many stakeholders, especially in the field of automated driving. That is why we propose CARLOS - an open, modular, and scalable simulation framework for the development and testing of software in C-ITS that leverages the rich CARLA and ROS ecosystems. We provide core building blocks for this framework and explain how it can be used and extended by the community. Its architecture builds upon modern microservice and DevOps principles such as containerization and continuous integration. In our paper, we motivate the architecture by describing important design principles and showcasing three major use cases - software prototyping, data-driven development, and automated testing. We make CARLOS and example implementations of the three use cases publicly available at github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/carlos
Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Wildfire Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, both the frequency and intensity of wildfires have increased worldwide, primarily due to climate change. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for wildfire detection, leveraging semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for object detection, accompanied by a corresponding dataset designed for use by both academics and industries. Our dataset encompasses 30 times more diverse labeled scenes for the current largest benchmark wildfire dataset, HPWREN, and introduces a new labeling policy for wildfire detection. Inspired by CoordConv, we propose a robust baseline, Location-Aware Object Detection for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (LADA), utilizing a teacher-student based framework capable of extracting translational variance features characteristic of wildfires. With only using 1% target domain labeled data, our framework significantly outperforms our source-only baseline by a notable margin of 3.8% in mean Average Precision on the HPWREN wildfire dataset. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/BloomBerry/LADA.
Detecting Gender Bias in Course Evaluations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

An outtake from the findnings of a master thesis studying gender bias in course evaluations through the lense of machine learning and nlp. We use different methods to examine and explore the data and find differences in what students write about courses depending on gender of the examiner. Data from English and Swedish courses are evaluated and compared, in order to capture more nuance in the gender bias that might be found. Here we present the results from the work so far, but this is an ongoing project and there is more work to do.
Self-StrAE at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Making Self-Structuring AutoEncoders Learn More With Less
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents two simple improvements to the Self-Structuring AutoEncoder (Self-StrAE). Firstly, we show that including reconstruction to the vocabulary as an auxiliary objective improves representation quality. Secondly, we demonstrate that increasing the number of independent channels leads to significant improvements in embedding quality, while simultaneously reducing the number of parameters. Surprisingly, we demonstrate that this trend can be followed to the extreme, even to point of reducing the total number of non-embedding parameters to seven. Our system can be pre-trained from scratch with as little as 10M tokens of input data, and proves effective across English, Spanish and Afrikaans.
SGSH: Stimulate Large Language Models with Skeleton Heuristics for Knowledge Base Question Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge base question generation (KBQG) aims to generate natural language questions from a set of triplet facts extracted from KB. Existing methods have significantly boosted the performance of KBQG via pre-trained language models (PLMs) thanks to the richly endowed semantic knowledge. With the advance of pre-training techniques, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3.5) undoubtedly possess much more semantic knowledge. Therefore, how to effectively organize and exploit the abundant knowledge for KBQG becomes the focus of our study. In this work, we propose SGSH--a simple and effective framework to Stimulate GPT-3.5 with Skeleton Heuristics to enhance KBQG. The framework incorporates "skeleton heuristics", which provides more fine-grained guidance associated with each input to stimulate LLMs to generate optimal questions, encompassing essential elements like the question phrase and the auxiliary verb.More specifically, we devise an automatic data construction strategy leveraging ChatGPT to construct a skeleton training dataset, based on which we employ a soft prompting approach to train a BART model dedicated to generating the skeleton associated with each input. Subsequently, skeleton heuristics are encoded into the prompt to incentivize GPT-3.5 to generate desired questions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGSH derives the new state-of-the-art performance on the KBQG tasks.
An Exploratory Study of the Relationship between SATD and Other Software Development Activities
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Technical Debt is a common issue that arises when short-term gains are prioritized over long-term costs, leading to a degradation in the quality of the code. Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a specific type of Technical Debt that involves documenting code to remind developers of its debt. Previous research has explored various aspects of SATD, including detection methods, distribution, and its impact on software quality. To better understand SATD, one comprehension technique is to examine its co-occurrence with other activities, such as refactoring and bug fixing. This study investigates the relationship between removing and adding SATD and activities such as refactoring, bug fixing, adding new features, and testing. To do so, we analyzed 77 open-source Java projects using TODO/FIXME/XXX removal or addition in inline comments as indicators of SATD. We examined the co-occurrence of SATD with each activity in each project through chi-square and odds ratio evaluations. Our results show that SATD removal occurs simultaneously with refactoring in 95% of projects, while its addition occurs in 89% of projects. Furthermore, we found that three types of refactoring - "move class", "remove method", and "move attribute" - occur more frequently in the presence of SATD. However, their distribution is similar in projects with and without SATD.
Classifying Graphemes in English Words Through the Application of a Fuzzy Inference System
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In Linguistics, a grapheme is a written unit of a writing system corresponding to a phonological sound. In Natural Language Processing tasks, written language is analysed through two different mediums, word analysis, and character analysis. This paper focuses on a third approach, the analysis of graphemes. Graphemes have advantages over word and character analysis by being self-contained representations of phonetic sounds. Due to the nature of splitting a word into graphemes being based on complex, non-binary rules, the application of fuzzy logic would provide a suitable medium upon which to predict the number of graphemes in a word. This paper proposes the application of a Fuzzy Inference System to split words into their graphemes. This Fuzzy Inference System results in a correct prediction of the number of graphemes in a word 50.18% of the time, with 93.51% being within a margin of +- 1 from the correct classification. Given the variety in language, graphemes are tied with pronunciation and therefore can change depending on a regional accent/dialect, the +- 1 accuracy represents the impreciseness of grapheme classification when regional variances are accounted for. To give a baseline of comparison, a second method involving a recursive IPA mapping exercise using a pronunciation dictionary was developed to allow for comparisons to be made.
Team UTSA-NLP at SemEval 2024 Task 5: Prompt Ensembling for Argument Reasoning in Civil Procedures with GPT4
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we present our system for the SemEval Task 5, The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure Challenge. Legal argument reasoning is an essential skill that all law students must master. Moreover, it is important to develop natural language processing solutions that can reason about a question given terse domain-specific contextual information. Our system explores a prompt-based solution using GPT4 to reason over legal arguments. We also evaluate an ensemble of prompting strategies, including chain-of-thought reasoning and in-context learning. Overall, our system results in a Macro F1 of .8095 on the validation dataset and .7315 (5th out of 21 teams) on the final test set. Code for this project is available at https://github.com/danschumac1/CivilPromptReasoningGPT4.
Towards Leveraging AutoML for Sustainable Deep Learning: A Multi-Objective HPO Approach on Deep Shift Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.
Fashion Style Editing with Generative Human Prior
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image editing has been a long-standing challenge in the research community with its far-reaching impact on numerous applications. Recently, text-driven methods started to deliver promising results in domains like human faces, but their applications to more complex domains have been relatively limited. In this work, we explore the task of fashion style editing, where we aim to manipulate the fashion style of human imagery using text descriptions. Specifically, we leverage a generative human prior and achieve fashion style editing by navigating its learned latent space. We first verify that the existing text-driven editing methods fall short for our problem due to their overly simplified guidance signal, and propose two directions to reinforce the guidance: textual augmentation and visual referencing. Combined with our empirical findings on the latent space structure, our Fashion Style Editing framework (FaSE) successfully projects abstract fashion concepts onto human images and introduces exciting new applications to the field.
Enhancing Portfolio Optimization with Transformer-GAN Integration: A Novel Approach in the Black-Litterman Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

This study presents an innovative approach to portfolio optimization by integrating Transformer models with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) within the Black-Litterman (BL) framework. Capitalizing on Transformers' ability to discern long-range dependencies and GANs' proficiency in generating accurate predictive models, our method enhances the generation of refined predictive views for BL portfolio allocations. This fusion of our model with BL's structured method for merging objective views with market equilibrium offers a potent tool for modern portfolio management, outperforming traditional forecasting methods. Our integrated approach not only demonstrates the potential to improve investment decision-making but also contributes a new approach to capture the complexities of financial markets for robust portfolio optimization.
SPMamba: State-space model is all you need in speech separation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Existing CNN-based speech separation models face local receptive field limitations and cannot effectively capture long time dependencies. Although LSTM and Transformer-based speech separation models can avoid this problem, their high complexity makes them face the challenge of computational resources and inference efficiency when dealing with long audio. To address this challenge, we introduce an innovative speech separation method called SPMamba. This model builds upon the robust TF-GridNet architecture, replacing its traditional BLSTM modules with bidirectional Mamba modules. These modules effectively model the spatiotemporal relationships between the time and frequency dimensions, allowing SPMamba to capture long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. Specifically, the bidirectional processing within the Mamba modules enables the model to utilize both past and future contextual information, thereby enhancing separation performance. Extensive experiments conducted on public datasets, including WSJ0-2Mix, WHAM!, and Libri2Mix, as well as the newly constructed Echo2Mix dataset, demonstrated that SPMamba significantly outperformed existing state-of-the-art models, achieving superior results while also reducing computational complexity. These findings highlighted the effectiveness of SPMamba in tackling the intricate challenges of speech separation in complex environments.
CLAPNQ: Cohesive Long-form Answers from Passages in Natural Questions for RAG systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a popular application for large language models. It is preferable that successful RAG systems provide accurate answers that are supported by being grounded in a passage without any hallucinations. While considerable work is required for building a full RAG pipeline, being able to benchmark performance is also necessary. We present ClapNQ, a benchmark Long-form Question Answering dataset for the full RAG pipeline. ClapNQ includes long answers with grounded gold passages from Natural Questions (NQ) and a corpus to perform either retrieval, generation, or the full RAG pipeline. The ClapNQ answers are concise, 3x smaller than the full passage, and cohesive, meaning that the answer is composed fluently, often by integrating multiple pieces of the passage that are not contiguous. RAG models must adapt to these properties to be successful at ClapNQ. We present baseline experiments and analysis for ClapNQ that highlight areas where there is still significant room for improvement in grounded RAG. CLAPNQ is publicly available at https://github.com/primeqa/clapnq
Visualization for Human-Centered AI Tools
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Human-centered AI (HCAI) puts the user in the driver's seat of so-called human-centered AI-infused tools (HCAI tools): interactive software tools that amplify, augment, empower, and enhance human performance using AI models. We discuss how interactive visualization can be a key enabling technology for creating such human-centered AI tools. To validate our approach, we first interviewed HCI, AI, and Visualization experts to define the characteristics of HCAI tools. We then present several examples of HCAI tools using visualization and use the examples to extract guidelines on how interactive visualization can support future HCAI tools.
From Seaweed to Security: The Emergence of Alginate in Compromising IoT Fingerprint Sensors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing integration of capacitive fingerprint recognition sensors in IoT devices presents new challenges in digital forensics, particularly in the context of advanced fingerprint spoofing. Previous research has highlighted the effectiveness of materials such as latex and silicone in deceiving biometric systems. In this study, we introduce Alginate, a biopolymer derived from brown seaweed, as a novel material with the potential for spoofing IoT-specific capacitive fingerprint sensors. Our research uses Alginate and cutting-edge image recognition techniques to unveil a nuanced IoT vulnerability that raises significant security and privacy concerns. Our proof-of-concept experiments employed authentic fingerprint molds to create Alginate replicas, which exhibited remarkable visual and tactile similarities to real fingerprints. The conductivity and resistivity properties of Alginate, closely resembling human skin, make it a subject of interest in the digital forensics field, especially regarding its ability to spoof IoT device sensors. This study calls upon the digital forensics community to develop advanced anti-spoofing strategies to protect the evolving IoT infrastructure against such sophisticated threats.
Distributed and Rate-Adaptive Feature Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We study the problem of distributed and rate-adaptive feature compression for linear regression. A set of distributed sensors collect disjoint features of regressor data. A fusion center is assumed to contain a pretrained linear regression model, trained on a dataset of the entire uncompressed data. At inference time, the sensors compress their observations and send them to the fusion center through communication-constrained channels, whose rates can change with time. Our goal is to design a feature compression {scheme} that can adapt to the varying communication constraints, while maximizing the inference performance at the fusion center. We first obtain the form of optimal quantizers assuming knowledge of underlying regressor data distribution. Under a practically reasonable approximation, we then propose a distributed compression scheme which works by quantizing a one-dimensional projection of the sensor data. We also propose a simple adaptive scheme for handling changes in communication constraints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the distributed adaptive compression scheme through simulated experiments.
Leveraging Machine Learning for Early Autism Detection via INDT-ASD Indian Database
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) has advanced quickly, particularly throughout the area of health care. The diagnosis of neurodevelopment problems using ML is a very important area of healthcare. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is one of the developmental disorders that is growing the fastest globally. The clinical screening tests used to identify autistic symptoms are expensive and time-consuming. But now that ML has been advanced, it's feasible to identify autism early on. Previously, many different techniques have been used in investigations. Still, none of them have produced the anticipated outcomes when it comes to the capacity to predict autistic features utilizing a clinically validated Indian ASD database. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a simple, quick, and inexpensive technique for identifying ASD by using ML. Various machine learning classifiers, including Adaboost (AB), Gradient Boost (GB), Decision Tree (DT), Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Support Vector Machine (SVM), were used to develop the autism prediction model. The proposed method was tested with records from the AIIMS Modified INDT-ASD (AMI) database, which were collected through an application developed by AIIMS in Delhi, India. Feature engineering has been applied to make the proposed solution easier than already available solutions. Using the proposed model, we succeeded in predicting ASD using a minimized set of 20 questions rather than the 28 questions presented in AMI with promising accuracy. In a comparative evaluation, SVM emerged as the superior model among others, with 100 $\pm$ 0.05\% accuracy, higher recall by 5.34\%, and improved accuracy by 2.22\%-6.67\% over RF. We have also introduced a web-based solution supporting both Hindi and English.
Classification and Regression Error Bounds for Inhomogenous Data With Applications to Wireless Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we study classification and regression error bounds for inhomogenous data that are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. First, we consider classification of data in the presence of non-stationary noise and establish ergodic type sufficient conditions that guarantee the achievability of the Bayes error bound, using universal rules. We then perform a similar analysis for $k$-nearest neighbour regression and obtain optimal error bounds for the same. Finally, we illustrate applications of our results in the context of wireless networks.
OFMPNet: Deep End-to-End Model for Occupancy and Flow Prediction in Urban Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The task of motion prediction is pivotal for autonomous driving systems, providing crucial data to choose a vehicle behavior strategy within its surroundings. Existing motion prediction techniques primarily focus on predicting the future trajectory of each agent in the scene individually, utilizing its past trajectory data. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end neural network methodology designed to predict the future behaviors of all dynamic objects in the environment. This approach leverages the occupancy map and the scene's motion flow. We are investigatin various alternatives for constructing a deep encoder-decoder model called OFMPNet. This model uses a sequence of bird's-eye-view road images, occupancy grid, and prior motion flow as input data. The encoder of the model can incorporate transformer, attention-based, or convolutional units. The decoder considers the use of both convolutional modules and recurrent blocks. Additionally, we propose a novel time-weighted motion flow loss, whose application has shown a substantial decrease in end-point error. Our approach has achieved state-of-the-art results on the Waymo Occupancy and Flow Prediction benchmark, with a Soft IoU of 52.1% and an AUC of 76.75% on Flow-Grounded Occupancy.
Symbolic Prompt Program Search: A Structure-Aware Approach to Efficient Compile-Time Prompt Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In many modern LLM applications, such as retrieval augmented generation, prompts have become programs themselves. In these settings, prompt programs are repeatedly called with different user queries or data instances. A big practical challenge is optimizing such prompt programs. Recent work has mostly focused on either simple prompt programs or assumed that the general structure of a prompt program is fixed. We introduce SAMMO, a framework to perform symbolic prompt program search for compile-time optimizations of prompt programs. SAMMO represents prompt programs on a symbolic level which allows for a rich set of transformations that can be searched over during optimization. We show that SAMMO generalizes previous methods and improves the performance of complex prompts on (1) instruction tuning, (2) RAG pipeline tuning, and (3) prompt compression, across several different LLMs. We make all code available open-source at https://github.com/microsoft/sammo .