OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ChemLLM: A Chemical Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in chemistry applications. However, the community lacks an LLM specifically designed for chemistry. The main challenges are two-fold: firstly, most chemical data and scientific knowledge are stored in structured databases, which limits the model's ability to sustain coherent dialogue when used directly. Secondly, there is an absence of objective and fair benchmark that encompass most chemistry tasks. Here, we introduce ChemLLM, a comprehensive framework that features the first LLM dedicated to chemistry. It also includes ChemData, a dataset specifically designed for instruction tuning, and ChemBench, a robust benchmark covering nine essential chemistry tasks. ChemLLM is adept at performing various tasks across chemical disciplines with fluid dialogue interaction. Notably, ChemLLM achieves results comparable to GPT-4 on the core chemical tasks and demonstrates competitive performance with LLMs of similar size in general scenarios. ChemLLM paves a new path for exploration in chemical studies, and our method of incorporating structured chemical knowledge into dialogue systems sets a new standard for developing LLMs in various scientific fields. Codes, Datasets, and Model weights are publicly accessible at https://hf.co/AI4Chem
Multi-User SR-LDPC Codes via Coded Demixing with Applications to Cell-Free Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Novel sparse regression LDPC (SR-LDPC) codes exhibit excellent performance over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels in part due to their natural provision of shaping gains. Though SR-LDPC-like codes have been considered within the context of single-user error correction and massive random access, they are yet to be examined as candidates for coordinated multi-user communication scenarios. This article explores this gap in the literature and demonstrates that SR-LDPC codes, when combined with coded demixing techniques, offer a new framework for efficient non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in the context of coordinated multi-user communication channels. The ensuing communication scheme is referred to as MU-SR-LDPC coding. Empirical evidence suggests that, for a fixed SNR, MU-SR-LDPC coding can achieve a target bit error rate (BER) at a higher sum rate than orthogonal multiple access (OMA) techniques such as time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA). Importantly, MU-SR-LDPC codes enable a pragmatic solution path for user-centric cell-free communication systems with (local) joint decoding. Results are supported by numerical simulations.
DimVis: Interpreting Visual Clusters in Dimensionality Reduction With Explainable Boosting Machine
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques such as t-SNE and UMAP are popular for transforming complex datasets into simpler visual representations. However, while effective in uncovering general dataset patterns, these methods may introduce artifacts and suffer from interpretability issues. This paper presents DimVis, a visualization tool that employs supervised Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM) models (trained on user-selected data of interest) as an interpretation assistant for DR projections. Our tool facilitates high-dimensional data analysis by providing an interpretation of feature relevance in visual clusters through interactive exploration of UMAP projections. Specifically, DimVis uses a contrastive EBM model that is trained in real time to differentiate between the data inside and outside a cluster of interest. Taking advantage of the inherent explainable nature of the EBM, we then use this model to interpret the cluster itself via single and pairwise feature comparisons in a ranking based on the EBM model's feature importance. The applicability and effectiveness of DimVis are demonstrated via a use case and a usage scenario with real-world data. We also discuss the limitations and potential directions for future research.
Benchmarking Frameworks and Comparative Studies of Controller Area Network (CAN) Intrusion Detection Systems: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The development of intrusion detection systems (IDS) for the in-vehicle Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is one of the main efforts being taken to secure the in-vehicle network against various cyberattacks, which have the potential to cause vehicles to malfunction and result in dangerous accidents. These CAN IDS are evaluated in disparate experimental conditions that vary in terms of the workload used, the features used, the metrics reported, etc., which makes direct comparison difficult. Therefore, there have been several benchmarking frameworks and comparative studies designed to evaluate CAN IDS in similar experimental conditions to understand their relative performance and facilitate the selection of the best CAN IDS for implementation in automotive networks. This work provides a comprehensive survey of CAN IDS benchmarking frameworks and comparative studies in the current literature. A CAN IDS evaluation design space is also proposed in this work, which draws from the wider CAN IDS literature. This is not only expected to serve as a guide for designing CAN IDS evaluation experiments but is also used for categorizing current benchmarking efforts. The surveyed works have been discussed on the basis of the five aspects in the design space-namely IDS type, attack model, evaluation type, workload generation, and evaluation metrics-and recommendations for future work have been identified.
Solving Deep Reinforcement Learning Tasks with Evolution Strategies and Linear Policy Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Although deep reinforcement learning methods can learn effective policies for challenging problems such as Atari games and robotics tasks, algorithms are complex, and training times are often long. This study investigates how Evolution Strategies perform compared to gradient-based deep reinforcement learning methods. We use Evolution Strategies to optimize the weights of a neural network via neuroevolution, performing direct policy search. We benchmark both deep policy networks and networks consisting of a single linear layer from observations to actions for three gradient-based methods, such as Proximal Policy Optimization. These methods are evaluated against three classical Evolution Strategies and Augmented Random Search, which all use linear policy networks. Our results reveal that Evolution Strategies can find effective linear policies for many reinforcement learning benchmark tasks, unlike deep reinforcement learning methods that can only find successful policies using much larger networks, suggesting that current benchmarks are easier to solve than previously assumed. Interestingly, Evolution Strategies also achieve results comparable to gradient-based deep reinforcement learning algorithms for higher-complexity tasks. Furthermore, we find that by directly accessing the memory state of the game, Evolution Strategies can find successful policies in Atari that outperform the policies found by Deep Q-Learning. Evolution Strategies also outperform Augmented Random Search in most benchmarks, demonstrating superior sample efficiency and robustness in training linear policy networks.
Free Open Source Communities Sustainability: Does It Make a Difference in Software Quality?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Context: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities' ability to stay viable and productive over time is pivotal for society as they maintain the building blocks that digital infrastructure, products, and services depend on. Sustainability may, however, be characterized from multiple aspects, and less is known how these aspects interplay and impact community outputs, and software quality specifically. Objective: This study, therefore, aims to empirically explore how the different aspects of FOSS sustainability impact software quality. Method: 16 sustainability metrics across four categories were sampled and applied to a set of 217 OSS projects sourced from the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program. The impact of a decline in the sustainability metrics was analyzed against eight software quality metrics using Bayesian data analysis, which incorporates probability distributions to represent the regression coefficients and intercepts. Results: Findings suggest that selected sustainability metrics do not significantly affect defect density or code coverage. However, a positive impact of community age was observed on specific code quality metrics, such as risk complexity, number of very large files, and code duplication percentage. Interestingly, findings show that even when communities are experiencing sustainability, certain code quality metrics are negatively impacted. Conclusion: Findings imply that code quality practices are not consistently linked to sustainability, and defect management and prevention may be prioritized over the former. Results suggest that growth, resulting in a more complex and large codebase, combined with a probable lack of understanding of code quality standards, may explain the degradation in certain aspects of code quality.
Latent Enhancing AutoEncoder for Occluded Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large occlusions result in a significant decline in image classification accuracy. During inference, diverse types of unseen occlusions introduce out-of-distribution data to the classification model, leading to accuracy dropping as low as 50%. As occlusions encompass spatially connected regions, conventional methods involving feature reconstruction are inadequate for enhancing classification performance. We introduce LEARN: Latent Enhancing feAture Reconstruction Network -- An auto-encoder based network that can be incorporated into the classification model before its classifier head without modifying the weights of classification model. In addition to reconstruction and classification losses, training of LEARN effectively combines intra- and inter-class losses calculated over its latent space -- which lead to improvement in recovering latent space of occluded data, while preserving its class-specific discriminative information. On the OccludedPASCAL3D+ dataset, the proposed LEARN outperforms standard classification models (VGG16 and ResNet-50) by a large margin and up to 2% over state-of-the-art methods. In cross-dataset testing, our method improves the average classification accuracy by more than 5% over the state-of-the-art methods. In every experiment, our model consistently maintains excellent accuracy on in-distribution data.
Evaluation Metrics for Automated Typographic Poster Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2024
Year: 2024

Computational Design approaches facilitate the generation of typographic design, but evaluating these designs remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a set of heuristic metrics for typographic design evaluation, focusing on their legibility, which assesses the text visibility, aesthetics, which evaluates the visual quality of the design, and semantic features, which estimate how effectively the design conveys the content semantics. We experiment with a constrained evolutionary approach for generating typographic posters, incorporating the proposed evaluation metrics with varied setups, and treating the legibility metrics as constraints. We also integrate emotion recognition to identify text semantics automatically and analyse the performance of the approach and the visual characteristics outputs.
Should I try multiple optimizers when fine-tuning pre-trained Transformers for NLP tasks? Should I tune their hyperparameters?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

NLP research has explored different neural model architectures and sizes, datasets, training objectives, and transfer learning techniques. However, the choice of optimizer during training has not been explored as extensively. Typically, some variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is employed, selected among numerous variants, using unclear criteria, often with minimal or no tuning of the optimizer's hyperparameters. Experimenting with five GLUE datasets, two models (DistilBERT and DistilRoBERTa), and seven popular optimizers (SGD, SGD with Momentum, Adam, AdaMax, Nadam, AdamW, and AdaBound), we find that when the hyperparameters of the optimizers are tuned, there is no substantial difference in test performance across the five more elaborate (adaptive) optimizers, despite differences in training loss. Furthermore, tuning just the learning rate is in most cases as good as tuning all the hyperparameters. Hence, we recommend picking any of the best-behaved adaptive optimizers (e.g., Adam) and tuning only its learning rate. When no hyperparameter can be tuned, SGD with Momentum is the best choice.
Semantic Object-level Modeling for Robust Visual Camera Relocalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Visual relocalization is crucial for autonomous visual localization and navigation of mobile robotics. Due to the improvement of CNN-based object detection algorithm, the robustness of visual relocalization is greatly enhanced especially in viewpoints where classical methods fail. However, ellipsoids (quadrics) generated by axis-aligned object detection may limit the accuracy of the object-level representation and degenerate the performance of visual relocalization system. In this paper, we propose a novel method of automatic object-level voxel modeling for accurate ellipsoidal representations of objects. As for visual relocalization, we design a better pose optimization strategy for camera pose recovery, to fully utilize the projection characteristics of 2D fitted ellipses and the 3D accurate ellipsoids. All of these modules are entirely intergrated into visual SLAM system. Experimental results show that our semantic object-level mapping and object-based visual relocalization methods significantly enhance the performance of visual relocalization in terms of robustness to new viewpoints.
Feature Mapping in Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, the training dynamics of PINNs with a feature mapping layer via the limiting Conjugate Kernel and Neural Tangent Kernel is investigated, shedding light on the convergence of PINNs; Although the commonly used Fourier-based feature mapping has achieved great success, we show its inadequacy in some physics scenarios. Via these two scopes, we propose conditionally positive definite Radial Basis Function as a better alternative. Lastly, we explore the feature mapping numerically in wide neural networks. Our empirical results reveal the efficacy of our method in diverse forward and inverse problem sets. Composing feature functions is found to be a practical way to address the expressivity and generalisability trade-off, viz., tuning the bandwidth of the kernels and the surjectivity of the feature mapping function. This simple technique can be implemented for coordinate inputs and benefits the broader PINNs research.
Tree Ensembles for Contextual Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a new framework for contextual multi-armed bandits based on tree ensembles. Our framework adapts two widely used bandit methods, Upper Confidence Bound and Thompson Sampling, for both standard and combinatorial settings. As part of this framework, we propose a novel method of estimating the uncertainty in tree ensemble predictions. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework via several experimental studies, employing XGBoost and random forests, two popular tree ensemble methods. Compared to state-of-the-art methods based on decision trees and neural networks, our methods exhibit superior performance in terms of both regret minimization and computational runtime, when applied to benchmark datasets and the real-world application of navigation over road networks.
Contextual Stochastic Vehicle Routing with Time Windows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We study the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) and stochastic travel times, in which the decision-maker observes related contextual information, represented as feature variables, before making routing decisions. Despite the extensive literature on stochastic VRPs, the integration of feature variables has received limited attention in this context. We introduce the contextual stochastic VRPTW, which minimizes the total transportation cost and expected late arrival penalties conditioned on the observed features. Since the joint distribution of travel times and features is unknown, we present novel data-driven prescriptive models that use historical data to provide an approximate solution to the problem. We distinguish the prescriptive models between point-based approximation, sample average approximation, and penalty-based approximation, each taking a different perspective on dealing with stochastic travel times and features. We develop specialized branch-price-and-cut algorithms to solve these data-driven prescriptive models. In our computational experiments, we compare the out-of-sample cost performance of different methods on instances with up to one hundred customers. Our results show that, surprisingly, a feature-dependent sample average approximation outperforms existing and novel methods in most settings.
Sophia-in-Audition: Virtual Production with a Robot Performer
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

We present Sophia-in-Audition (SiA), a new frontier in virtual production, by employing the humanoid robot Sophia within an UltraStage environment composed of a controllable lighting dome coupled with multiple cameras. We demonstrate Sophia's capability to replicate iconic film segments, follow real performers, and perform a variety of motions and expressions, showcasing her versatility as a virtual actor. Key to this process is the integration of facial motion transfer algorithms and the UltraStage's controllable lighting and multi-camera setup, enabling dynamic performances that align with the director's vision. Our comprehensive user studies indicate positive audience reception towards Sophia's performances, highlighting her potential to reduce the uncanny valley effect in virtual acting. Additionally, the immersive lighting in dynamic clips was highly rated for its naturalness and its ability to mirror professional film standards. The paper presents a first-of-its-kind multi-view robot performance video dataset with dynamic lighting, offering valuable insights for future enhancements in humanoid robotic performers and virtual production techniques. This research contributes significantly to the field by presenting a unique virtual production setup, developing tools for sophisticated performance control, and providing a comprehensive dataset and user study analysis for diverse applications.
Guided Sketch-Based Program Induction by Search Gradients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Many tasks can be easily solved using machine learning techniques. However, some tasks cannot readily be solved using statistical models, requiring a symbolic approach instead. Program induction is one of the ways that such tasks can be solved by means of capturing an interpretable and generalizable algorithm through training. However, contemporary approaches to program induction are not sophisticated enough to readily be applied to various types of tasks as they tend to be formulated as a single, all-encompassing model, usually parameterized by neural networks. In an attempt to make program induction a viable solution for many scenarios, we propose a framework for learning parameterized programs via search gradients using evolution strategies. This formulation departs from traditional program induction as it allows for the programmer to impart task-specific code to the program 'sketch', while also enjoying the benefits of accelerated learning through end-to-end gradient-based optimization.
A Robotic Cyber-Physical System for Automated Reality Capture and Visualization in Construction Progress Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Effective progress monitoring is crucial for the successful delivery of the construction project within the stipulated time and budget. Construction projects are often monitored irregularly through time-consuming physical site visits by multiple project stakeholders. Remote monitoring using robotic cyber-physical systems (CPS) can make the process more efficient and safer. This article presents a conceptual framework for robotic CPS for automated reality capture and visualization for remote progress monitoring in construction. The CPS integrates quadruped robot, Building Information Modelling (BIM), and 360° reality capturing to autonomously capture, and visualize up-to-date site information. Additionally, the study explores the factors affecting acceptance of the proposed robotic CPS through semi-structured interviews with seventeen progress monitoring experts. The findings will guide construction management teams in adopting CPS in construction and drive further research in the human-centered development of CPS for construction.
Domain Adaptable Fine-Tune Distillation Framework For Advancing Farm Surveillance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this study, we propose an automated framework for camel farm monitoring, introducing two key contributions: the Unified Auto-Annotation framework and the Fine-Tune Distillation framework. The Unified Auto-Annotation approach combines two models, GroundingDINO (GD), and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), to automatically annotate raw datasets extracted from surveillance videos. Building upon this foundation, the Fine-Tune Distillation framework conducts fine-tuning of student models using the auto-annotated dataset. This process involves transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a student model, resembling a variant of Knowledge Distillation. The Fine-Tune Distillation framework aims to be adaptable to specific use cases, enabling the transfer of knowledge from the large models to the small models, making it suitable for domain-specific applications. By leveraging our raw dataset collected from Al-Marmoom Camel Farm in Dubai, UAE, and a pre-trained teacher model, GroundingDINO, the Fine-Tune Distillation framework produces a lightweight deployable model, YOLOv8. This framework demonstrates high performance and computational efficiency, facilitating efficient real-time object detection. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/Razaimam45/Fine-Tune-Distillation}{https://github.com/Razaimam45/Fine-Tune-Distillation}
Refined Sample Complexity for Markov Games with Independent Linear Function Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Markov Games (MG) is an important model for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). It was long believed that the "curse of multi-agents" (i.e., the algorithmic performance drops exponentially with the number of agents) is unavoidable until several recent works (Daskalakis et al., 2023; Cui et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023). While these works resolved the curse of multi-agents, when the state spaces are prohibitively large and (linear) function approximations are deployed, they either had a slower convergence rate of $O(T^{-1/4})$ or brought a polynomial dependency on the number of actions $A_{\max}$ -- which is avoidable in single-agent cases even when the loss functions can arbitrarily vary with time. This paper first refines the AVLPR framework by Wang et al. (2023), with an insight of designing *data-dependent* (i.e., stochastic) pessimistic estimation of the sub-optimality gap, allowing a broader choice of plug-in algorithms. When specialized to MGs with independent linear function approximations, we propose novel *action-dependent bonuses* to cover occasionally extreme estimation errors. With the help of state-of-the-art techniques from the single-agent RL literature, we give the first algorithm that tackles the curse of multi-agents, attains the optimal $O(T^{-1/2})$ convergence rate, and avoids $\text{poly}(A_{\max})$ dependency simultaneously.