OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
BRAU-Net++: U-Shaped Hybrid CNN-Transformer Network for Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for clinical quantification, disease diagnosis, treatment planning and many other applications. Both convolution-based and transformer-based u-shaped architectures have made significant success in various medical image segmentation tasks. The former can efficiently learn local information of images while requiring much more image-specific inductive biases inherent to convolution operation. The latter can effectively capture long-range dependency at different feature scales using self-attention, whereas it typically encounters the challenges of quadratic compute and memory requirements with sequence length increasing. To address this problem, through integrating the merits of these two paradigms in a well-designed u-shaped architecture, we propose a hybrid yet effective CNN-Transformer network, named BRAU-Net++, for an accurate medical image segmentation task. Specifically, BRAU-Net++ uses bi-level routing attention as the core building block to design our u-shaped encoder-decoder structure, in which both encoder and decoder are hierarchically constructed, so as to learn global semantic information while reducing computational complexity. Furthermore, this network restructures skip connection by incorporating channel-spatial attention which adopts convolution operations, aiming to minimize local spatial information loss and amplify global dimension-interaction of multi-scale features. Extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach surpasses other state-of-the-art methods including its baseline: BRAU-Net under almost all evaluation metrics. We achieve the average Dice-Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 82.47, 90.10, and 92.94 on Synapse multi-organ segmentation, ISIC-2018 Challenge, and CVC-ClinicDB, as well as the mIoU of 84.01 and 88.17 on ISIC-2018 Challenge and CVC-ClinicDB, respectively.
HexE -- Securing Audio Contents in Voice Chat using Puzzle and Timestamp
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Cryptography is the study of securing information. It is the physical process that scrambles the information by rearrangement and substitution of content, so that it becomes difficult for anyone to understand. In today's world, security has become an inevitable part of our day-to-day life, right from normal browsing to performing critical payment transactions. Hackers work endlessly to break the security present in the apps/websites on which we perform day-to-day operations and salvage valuable information. Because of this, many illegal activities have taken place which affect the user. One such illegal activity is tapping the voice communication between two users. If left unencrypted, the communication between the users is compromised, thereby causing issues. One way to prevent this act is to encrypt the audio in that the contents cannot have tampered with unless the receiver has the valid key to decrypt it. The proposed solution termed "HexE" aims to create a puzzle-based algorithm which would encrypt and decrypt the audio files without manipulating the file header, thus securing the contents. The algorithm works on an NxN SuDoKu-based puzzle which is accepted both by the sender and receiver. Using the timestamp of the event (UNIX based), a grid from the puzzle is chosen which in turn will act as the key for both encryption and decryption. If the timestamp is slightly adjusted, the process will end up in failure during decryption, thus ensuring confidentiality. Another approach to secure the audio files is to implement IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) alongside the puzzle algorithm in which the encrypted audio is stored on it and the receiver can fetch the audio provided if the valid IPFS Hash of the file is present. In this way, the audio file is secured.
Astraios: Parameter-Efficient Instruction Tuning Code Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The high cost of full-parameter fine-tuning (FFT) of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to a series of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. However, it remains unclear which methods provide the best cost-performance trade-off at different model scales. We introduce Astraios, a suite of 28 instruction-tuned OctoCoder models using 7 tuning methods and 4 model sizes up to 16 billion parameters. Through investigations across 5 tasks and 8 different datasets encompassing both code comprehension and code generation tasks, we find that FFT generally leads to the best downstream performance across all scales, and PEFT methods differ significantly in their efficacy based on the model scale. LoRA usually offers the most favorable trade-off between cost and performance. Further investigation into the effects of these methods on both model robustness and code security reveals that larger models tend to demonstrate reduced robustness and less security. At last, we explore the relationships among updated parameters, cross-entropy loss, and task performance. We find that the tuning effectiveness observed in small models generalizes well to larger models, and the validation loss in instruction tuning can be a reliable indicator of overall downstream performance.
Attractor reconstruction with reservoir computers: The effect of the reservoir's conditional Lyapunov exponents on faithful attractor reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reservoir computing is a machine learning framework that has been shown to be able to replicate the chaotic attractor, including the fractal dimension and the entire Lyapunov spectrum, of the dynamical system on which it is trained. We quantitatively relate the generalized synchronization dynamics of a driven reservoir during the training stage to the performance of the trained reservoir computer at the attractor reconstruction task. We show that, in order to obtain successful attractor reconstruction and Lyapunov spectrum estimation, the largest conditional Lyapunov exponent of the driven reservoir must be significantly more negative than the most negative Lyapunov exponent of the target system. We also find that the maximal conditional Lyapunov exponent of the reservoir depends strongly on the spectral radius of the reservoir adjacency matrix, and therefore, for attractor reconstruction and Lyapunov spectrum estimation, small spectral radius reservoir computers perform better in general. Our arguments are supported by numerical examples on well-known chaotic systems.
Accurate Leukocyte Detection Based on Deformable-DETR and Multi-Level Feature Fusion for Aiding Diagnosis of Blood Diseases
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In standard hospital blood tests, the traditional process requires doctors to manually isolate leukocytes from microscopic images of patients' blood using microscopes. These isolated leukocytes are then categorized via automatic leukocyte classifiers to determine the proportion and volume of different types of leukocytes present in the blood samples, aiding disease diagnosis. This methodology is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it also has a high propensity for errors due to factors such as image quality and environmental conditions, which could potentially lead to incorrect subsequent classifications and misdiagnosis. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative method of leukocyte detection: the Multi-level Feature Fusion and Deformable Self-attention DETR (MFDS-DETR). To tackle the issue of leukocyte scale disparity, we designed the High-level Screening-feature Fusion Pyramid (HS-FPN), enabling multi-level fusion. This model uses high-level features as weights to filter low-level feature information via a channel attention module and then merges the screened information with the high-level features, thus enhancing the model's feature expression capability. Further, we address the issue of leukocyte feature scarcity by incorporating a multi-scale deformable self-attention module in the encoder and using the self-attention and cross-deformable attention mechanisms in the decoder, which aids in the extraction of the global features of the leukocyte feature maps. The effectiveness, superiority, and generalizability of the proposed MFDS-DETR method are confirmed through comparisons with other cutting-edge leukocyte detection models using the private WBCDD, public LISC and BCCD datasets. Our source code and private WBCCD dataset are available at https://github.com/JustlfC03/MFDS-DETR.
Improve Fidelity and Utility of Synthetic Credit Card Transaction Time Series from Data-centric Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Exploring generative model training for synthetic tabular data, specifically in sequential contexts such as credit card transaction data, presents significant challenges. This paper addresses these challenges, focusing on attaining both high fidelity to actual data and optimal utility for machine learning tasks. We introduce five pre-processing schemas to enhance the training of the Conditional Probabilistic Auto-Regressive Model (CPAR), demonstrating incremental improvements in the synthetic data's fidelity and utility. Upon achieving satisfactory fidelity levels, our attention shifts to training fraud detection models tailored for time-series data, evaluating the utility of the synthetic data. Our findings offer valuable insights and practical guidelines for synthetic data practitioners in the finance sector, transitioning from real to synthetic datasets for training purposes, and illuminating broader methodologies for synthesizing credit card transaction time series.
Online Continual Domain Adaptation for Semantic Image Segmentation Using Internal Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic segmentation models trained on annotated data fail to generalize well when the input data distribution changes over extended time period, leading to requiring re-training to maintain performance. Classic Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to address a similar problem when there is target domain with no annotated data points through transferring knowledge from a source domain with annotated data. We develop an online UDA algorithm for semantic segmentation of images that improves model generalization on unannotated domains in scenarios where source data access is restricted during adaptation. We perform model adaptation is by minimizing the distributional distance between the source latent features and the target features in a shared embedding space. Our solution promotes a shared domain-agnostic latent feature space between the two domains, which allows for classifier generalization on the target dataset. To alleviate the need of access to source samples during adaptation, we approximate the source latent feature distribution via an appropriate surrogate distribution, in this case a Gassian mixture model (GMM). We evaluate our approach on well established semantic segmentation datasets and demonstrate it compares favorably against state-of-the-art (SOTA) UDA semantic segmentation methods.
Towards Cognitive AI Systems: a Survey and Prospective on Neuro-Symbolic AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), primarily driven by deep neural networks, have significantly impacted various aspects of our lives. However, the current challenges surrounding unsustainable computational trajectories, limited robustness, and a lack of explainability call for the development of next-generation AI systems. Neuro-symbolic AI (NSAI) emerges as a promising paradigm, fusing neural, symbolic, and probabilistic approaches to enhance interpretability, robustness, and trustworthiness while facilitating learning from much less data. Recent NSAI systems have demonstrated great potential in collaborative human-AI scenarios with reasoning and cognitive capabilities. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of recent progress in NSAI and analyze the performance characteristics and computational operators of NSAI models. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and potential future directions of NSAI from both system and architectural perspectives.
PLE-SLAM: A Visual-Inertial SLAM Based on Point-Line Features and Efficient IMU Initialization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Visual-inertial SLAM is crucial in various fields, such as aerial vehicles, industrial robots, and autonomous driving. The fusion of camera and inertial measurement unit (IMU) makes up for the shortcomings of a signal sensor, which significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of localization in challenging environments. This article presents PLE-SLAM, an accurate and real-time visual-inertial SLAM algorithm based on point-line features and efficient IMU initialization. First, we use parallel computing methods to extract features and compute descriptors to ensure real-time performance. Adjacent short line segments are merged into long line segments, and isolated short line segments are directly deleted. Second, a rotation-translation-decoupled initialization method is extended to use both points and lines. Gyroscope bias is optimized by tightly coupling IMU measurements and image observations. Accelerometer bias and gravity direction are solved by an analytical method for efficiency. To improve the system's intelligence in handling complex environments, a scheme of leveraging semantic information and geometric constraints to eliminate dynamic features and A solution for loop detection and closed-loop frame pose estimation using CNN and GNN are integrated into the system. All networks are accelerated to ensure real-time performance. The experiment results on public datasets illustrate that PLE-SLAM is one of the state-of-the-art visual-inertial SLAM systems.
Explainable Adaptive Tree-based Model Selection for Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Tree-based models have been successfully applied to a wide variety of tasks, including time series forecasting. They are increasingly in demand and widely accepted because of their comparatively high level of interpretability. However, many of them suffer from the overfitting problem, which limits their application in real-world decision-making. This problem becomes even more severe in online-forecasting settings where time series observations are incrementally acquired, and the distributions from which they are drawn may keep changing over time. In this context, we propose a novel method for the online selection of tree-based models using the TreeSHAP explainability method in the task of time series forecasting. We start with an arbitrary set of different tree-based models. Then, we outline a performance-based ranking with a coherent design to make TreeSHAP able to specialize the tree-based forecasters across different regions in the input time series. In this framework, adequate model selection is performed online, adaptively following drift detection in the time series. In addition, explainability is supported on three levels, namely online input importance, model selection, and model output explanation. An extensive empirical study on various real-world datasets demonstrates that our method achieves excellent or on-par results in comparison to the state-of-the-art approaches as well as several baselines.
Two families of linear codes with desirable properties from some functions over finite fields
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Linear codes are widely studied in coding theory as they have nice applications in distributed storage, combinatorics, lattices, cryptography and so on. Constructing linear codes with desirable properties is an interesting research topic. In this paper, based on the augmentation technique, we present two families of linear codes from some functions over finite fields. The first family of linear codes is constructed from monomial functions over finite fields. The locality of them is determined and the weight distributions of two subfamilies of the codes are also given. An infinite family of locally recoverable codes which are at least almost optimal and some optimal recoverable codes are obtained from the linear codes. In particular, the two subfamilies of the codes are proved to be both optimally or almost optimally extendable and self-orthogonal. The second family of linear codes is constructed from weakly regular bent functions over finite fields and their weight distribution is determined. This family of codes is proved to have locality 3 for some cases and is conjectured to have locality 2 for other cases. Particularly, two families of optimal locally recoverable codes are derived from the linear codes. Besides, this family of codes is also proved to be both optimally or almost optimally extendable and self-orthogonal.
Spiker+: a framework for the generation of efficient Spiking Neural Networks FPGA accelerators for inference at the edge
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Including Artificial Neural Networks in embedded systems at the edge allows applications to exploit Artificial Intelligence capabilities directly within devices operating at the network periphery. This paper introduces Spiker+, a comprehensive framework for generating efficient, low-power, and low-area customized Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) accelerators on FPGA for inference at the edge. Spiker+ presents a configurable multi-layer hardware SNN, a library of highly efficient neuron architectures, and a design framework, enabling the development of complex neural network accelerators with few lines of Python code. Spiker+ is tested on two benchmark datasets, the MNIST and the Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD). On the MNIST, it demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art SNN accelerators. It outperforms them in terms of resource allocation, with a requirement of 7,612 logic cells and 18 Block RAMs (BRAMs), which makes it fit in very small FPGA, and power consumption, draining only 180mW for a complete inference on an input image. The latency is comparable to the ones observed in the state-of-the-art, with 780us/img. To the authors' knowledge, Spiker+ is the first SNN accelerator tested on the SHD. In this case, the accelerator requires 18,268 logic cells and 51 BRAM, with an overall power consumption of 430mW and a latency of 54 us for a complete inference on input data. This underscores the significance of Spiker+ in the hardware-accelerated SNN landscape, making it an excellent solution to deploy configurable and tunable SNN architectures in resource and power-constrained edge applications.
Privacy Preserving Personal Assistant with On-Device Diarization and Spoken Dialogue System for Home and Beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

In the age of personal voice assistants, the question of privacy arises. These digital companions often lack memory of past interactions, while relying heavily on the internet for speech processing, raising privacy concerns. Modern smartphones now enable on-device speech processing, making cloud-based solutions unnecessary. Personal assistants for the elderly should excel at memory recall, especially in medical examinations. The e-ViTA project developed a versatile conversational application with local processing and speaker recognition. This paper highlights the importance of speaker diarization enriched with sensor data fusion for contextualized conversation preservation. The use cases applied to the e-VITA project have shown that truly personalized dialogue is pivotal for individual voice assistants. Secure local processing and sensor data fusion ensure virtual companions meet individual user needs without compromising privacy or data security.
CXL and the Return of Scale-Up Database Engines
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

The trend toward specialized processing devices such as TPUs, DPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs has exposed the weaknesses of PCIe in interconnecting these devices and their hosts. Several attempts have been proposed to improve, augment, or downright replace PCIe, and more recently, these efforts have converged into a standard called Compute Express Link (CXL). CXL is already on version 2.0 in terms of commercial availability, but its potential to radically change the conventional server architecture has only just started to surface. For example, CXL can increase the bandwidth and quantity of memory available to any single machine beyond what that machine can originally provide, most importantly, in a manner that is fully transparent to software applications. We argue, however, that CXL can have a broader impact beyond memory expansion and deeply affect the architecture of data-intensive systems. In a nutshell, while the cloud favored scale-out approaches that grew in capacity by adding full servers to a rack, CXL brings back scale-up architectures that can grow by fine-tuning individual resources, all while transforming the rack into a large shared-memory machine. In this paper, we describe why such architectural transformations are now possible, how they benefit emerging heterogeneous hardware platforms for data-intensive systems, and the associated research challenges.
Distilling Local Texture Features for Colorectal Tissue Classification in Low Data Regimes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-class colorectal tissue classification is a challenging problem that is typically addressed in a setting, where it is assumed that ample amounts of training data is available. However, manual annotation of fine-grained colorectal tissue samples of multiple classes, especially the rare ones like stromal tumor and anal cancer is laborious and expensive. To address this, we propose a knowledge distillation-based approach, named KD-CTCNet, that effectively captures local texture information from few tissue samples, through a distillation loss, to improve the standard CNN features. The resulting enriched feature representation achieves improved classification performance specifically in low data regimes. Extensive experiments on two public datasets of colorectal tissues reveal the merits of the proposed contributions, with a consistent gain achieved over different approaches across low data settings. The code and models are publicly available on GitHub.
Whole-examination AI estimation of fetal biometrics from 20-week ultrasound scans
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The current approach to fetal anomaly screening is based on biometric measurements derived from individually selected ultrasound images. In this paper, we introduce a paradigm shift that attains human-level performance in biometric measurement by aggregating automatically extracted biometrics from every frame across an entire scan, with no need for operator intervention. We use a convolutional neural network to classify each frame of an ultrasound video recording. We then measure fetal biometrics in every frame where appropriate anatomy is visible. We use a Bayesian method to estimate the true value of each biometric from a large number of measurements and probabilistically reject outliers. We performed a retrospective experiment on 1457 recordings (comprising 48 million frames) of 20-week ultrasound scans, estimated fetal biometrics in those scans and compared our estimates to the measurements sonographers took during the scan. Our method achieves human-level performance in estimating fetal biometrics and estimates well-calibrated credible intervals in which the true biometric value is expected to lie.