OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Iris: Dynamic Privacy Preserving Search in Authenticated Chord Peer-to-Peer Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

In structured peer-to-peer networks, like Chord, users find data by asking a number of intermediate nodes in the network. Each node provides the identity of the closet known node to the address of the data, until eventually the node responsible for the data is reached. This structure means that the intermediate nodes learn the address of the sought after data. Revealing this information to other nodes makes Chord unsuitable for applications that require query privacy so in this paper we present a scheme Iris to provide query privacy while maintaining compatibility with the existing Chord protocol. This means that anyone using it will be able to execute a privacy preserving query but it does not require other nodes in the network to use it (or even know about it). In order to better capture the privacy achieved by the iterative nature of the search we propose a new privacy notion, inspired by $k$-anonymity. This new notion called $(α,δ)$-privacy, allows us to formulate privacy guarantees against adversaries that collude and take advantage of the total amount of information leaked in all iterations of the search. We present a security analysis of the proposed algorithm based on the privacy notion we introduce. We also develop a prototype of the algorithm in Matlab and evaluate its performance. Our analysis proves Iris to be $(α,δ)$-private while introducing a modest performance overhead. Importantly the overhead is tunable and proportional to the required level of privacy, so no privacy means no overhead.
Human-AI collaboration is not very collaborative yet: A taxonomy of interaction patterns in AI-assisted decision making from a systematic review
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) in decision support systems has disproportionately focused on technological advancements, often overlooking the alignment between algorithmic outputs and human expectations. A human-centered perspective attempts to alleviate this concern by designing AI solutions for seamless integration with existing processes. Determining what information AI should provide to aid humans is vital, a concept underscored by explainable AI's efforts to justify AI predictions. However, how the information is presented, e.g., the sequence of recommendations and solicitation of interpretations, is equally crucial as complex interactions may emerge between humans and AI. While empirical studies have evaluated human-AI dynamics across domains, a common vocabulary for human-AI interaction protocols is lacking. To promote more deliberate consideration of interaction designs, we introduce a taxonomy of interaction patterns that delineate various modes of human-AI interactivity. We summarize the results of a systematic review of AI-assisted decision making literature and identify trends and opportunities in existing interactions across application domains from 105 articles. We find that current interactions are dominated by simplistic collaboration paradigms, leading to little support for truly interactive functionality. Our taxonomy offers a tool to understand interactivity with AI in decision-making and foster interaction designs for achieving clear communication, trustworthiness, and collaboration.
Re-evaluating Retrosynthesis Algorithms with Syntheseus
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Automated Synthesis Planning has recently re-emerged as a research area at the intersection of chemistry and machine learning. Despite the appearance of steady progress, we argue that imperfect benchmarks and inconsistent comparisons mask systematic shortcomings of existing techniques, and unnecessarily hamper progress. To remedy this, we present a synthesis planning library with an extensive benchmarking framework, called syntheseus, which promotes best practice by default, enabling consistent meaningful evaluation of single-step models and multi-step planning algorithms. We demonstrate the capabilities of syntheseus by re-evaluating several previous retrosynthesis algorithms, and find that the ranking of state-of-the-art models changes in controlled evaluation experiments. We end with guidance for future works in this area, and call the community to engage in the discussion on how to improve benchmarks for synthesis planning.
General-Purpose Retrieval-Enhanced Medical Prediction Model Using Near-Infinite History
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Machine learning (ML) has recently shown promising results in medical predictions using electronic health records (EHRs). However, since ML models typically have a limited capability in terms of input sizes, selecting specific medical events from EHRs for use as input is necessary. This selection process, often relying on expert opinion, can cause bottlenecks in development. We propose Retrieval-Enhanced Medical prediction model (REMed) to address such challenges. REMed can essentially evaluate unlimited medical events, select the relevant ones, and make predictions. This allows for an unrestricted input size, eliminating the need for manual event selection. We verified these properties through experiments involving 27 clinical prediction tasks across four independent cohorts, where REMed outperformed the baselines. Notably, we found that the preferences of REMed align closely with those of medical experts. We expect our approach to significantly expedite the development of EHR prediction models by minimizing clinicians' need for manual involvement.
Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Existing research predominantly focuses on developing powerful language learning models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages, with few explorations in preserving efficacy in a multilingual context. To bridge this gap, this paper pioneers exploring and training powerful Multilingual Math Reasoning (xMR) LLMs. Firstly, by utilizing translation, we construct the first multilingual math reasoning instruction dataset, MGSM8KInstruct, encompassing ten distinct languages, thus addressing the issue of training data scarcity in xMR tasks. Based on the collected dataset, we propose different training strategies to build powerful xMR LLMs, named MathOctopus, notably outperform conventional open-source LLMs and exhibit superiority over ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. Notably, MathOctopus-13B reaches 47.6% accuracy which exceeds ChatGPT 46.3% on MGSM testset. Beyond remarkable results, we unearth several pivotal observations and insights from extensive experiments: (1) When extending the rejection sampling strategy to the multilingual context, it proves effective for model performances, albeit limited. (2) Employing parallel corpora for math Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) across multiple languages not only significantly enhances model performance multilingually but also elevates their monolingual performance. This indicates that crafting multilingual corpora can be regarded as a vital strategy for enhancing model performance in a specific language, especially in mathematical reasoning tasks. For instance, MathOctopus-7B improves its counterparts that trained on English from 42.2% to 50.8% on GSM8K testset. Codes are available at https://github.com/microsoft/MathOctopus.
A Systematic Evaluation of GPT-4V's Multimodal Capability for Medical Image Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

This work conducts an evaluation of GPT-4V's multimodal capability for medical image analysis, with a focus on three representative tasks of radiology report generation, medical visual question answering, and medical visual grounding. For the evaluation, a set of prompts is designed for each task to induce the corresponding capability of GPT-4V to produce sufficiently good outputs. Three evaluation ways including quantitative analysis, human evaluation, and case study are employed to achieve an in-depth and extensive evaluation. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4V excels in understanding medical images and is able to generate high-quality radiology reports and effectively answer questions about medical images. Meanwhile, it is found that its performance for medical visual grounding needs to be substantially improved. In addition, we observe the discrepancy between the evaluation outcome from quantitative analysis and that from human evaluation. This discrepancy suggests the limitations of conventional metrics in assessing the performance of large language models like GPT-4V and the necessity of developing new metrics for automatic quantitative analysis.
Learning Lyapunov-Stable Polynomial Dynamical Systems through Imitation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Imitation learning is a paradigm to address complex motion planning problems by learning a policy to imitate an expert's behavior. However, relying solely on the expert's data might lead to unsafe actions when the robot deviates from the demonstrated trajectories. Stability guarantees have previously been provided utilizing nonlinear dynamical systems, acting as high-level motion planners, in conjunction with the Lyapunov stability theorem. Yet, these methods are prone to inaccurate policies, high computational cost, sample inefficiency, or quasi stability when replicating complex and highly nonlinear trajectories. To mitigate this problem, we present an approach for learning a globally stable nonlinear dynamical system as a motion planning policy. We model the nonlinear dynamical system as a parametric polynomial and learn the polynomial's coefficients jointly with a Lyapunov candidate. To showcase its success, we compare our method against the state of the art in simulation and conduct real-world experiments with the Kinova Gen3 Lite manipulator arm. Our experiments demonstrate the sample efficiency and reproduction accuracy of our method for various expert trajectories, while remaining stable in the face of perturbations.
Deepfake detection by exploiting surface anomalies: the SurFake approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The ever-increasing use of synthetically generated content in different sectors of our everyday life, one for all media information, poses a strong need for deepfake detection tools in order to avoid the proliferation of altered messages. The process to identify manipulated content, in particular images and videos, is basically performed by looking for the presence of some inconsistencies and/or anomalies specifically due to the fake generation process. Different techniques exist in the scientific literature that exploit diverse ad-hoc features in order to highlight possible modifications. In this paper, we propose to investigate how deepfake creation can impact on the characteristics that the whole scene had at the time of the acquisition. In particular, when an image (video) is captured the overall geometry of the scene (e.g. surfaces) and the acquisition process (e.g. illumination) determine a univocal environment that is directly represented by the image pixel values; all these intrinsic relations are possibly changed by the deepfake generation process. By resorting to the analysis of the characteristics of the surfaces depicted in the image it is possible to obtain a descriptor usable to train a CNN for deepfake detection: we refer to such an approach as SurFake. Experimental results carried out on the FF++ dataset for different kinds of deepfake forgeries and diverse deep learning models confirm that such a feature can be adopted to discriminate between pristine and altered images; furthermore, experiments witness that it can also be combined with visual data to provide a certain improvement in terms of detection accuracy.
Latent Field Discovery In Interacting Dynamical Systems With Neural Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Systems of interacting objects often evolve under the influence of field effects that govern their dynamics, yet previous works have abstracted away from such effects, and assume that systems evolve in a vacuum. In this work, we focus on discovering these fields, and infer them from the observed dynamics alone, without directly observing them. We theorize the presence of latent force fields, and propose neural fields to learn them. Since the observed dynamics constitute the net effect of local object interactions and global field effects, recently popularized equivariant networks are inapplicable, as they fail to capture global information. To address this, we propose to disentangle local object interactions -- which are $\mathrm{SE}(n)$ equivariant and depend on relative states -- from external global field effects -- which depend on absolute states. We model interactions with equivariant graph networks, and combine them with neural fields in a novel graph network that integrates field forces. Our experiments show that we can accurately discover the underlying fields in charged particles settings, traffic scenes, and gravitational n-body problems, and effectively use them to learn the system and forecast future trajectories.
NeRF Revisited: Fixing Quadrature Instability in Volume Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) rely on volume rendering to synthesize novel views. Volume rendering requires evaluating an integral along each ray, which is numerically approximated with a finite sum that corresponds to the exact integral along the ray under piecewise constant volume density. As a consequence, the rendered result is unstable w.r.t. the choice of samples along the ray, a phenomenon that we dub quadrature instability. We propose a mathematically principled solution by reformulating the sample-based rendering equation so that it corresponds to the exact integral under piecewise linear volume density. This simultaneously resolves multiple issues: conflicts between samples along different rays, imprecise hierarchical sampling, and non-differentiability of quantiles of ray termination distances w.r.t. model parameters. We demonstrate several benefits over the classical sample-based rendering equation, such as sharper textures, better geometric reconstruction, and stronger depth supervision. Our proposed formulation can be also be used as a drop-in replacement to the volume rendering equation of existing NeRF-based methods. Our project page can be found at pl-nerf.github.io.
ChipNeMo: Domain-Adapted LLMs for Chip Design
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

ChipNeMo aims to explore the applications of large language models (LLMs) for industrial chip design. Instead of directly deploying off-the-shelf commercial or open-source LLMs, we instead adopt the following domain adaptation techniques: domain-adaptive tokenization, domain-adaptive continued pretraining, model alignment with domain-specific instructions, and domain-adapted retrieval models. We evaluate these methods on three selected LLM applications for chip design: an engineering assistant chatbot, EDA script generation, and bug summarization and analysis. Our evaluations demonstrate that domain-adaptive pretraining of language models, can lead to superior performance in domain related downstream tasks compared to their base LLaMA2 counterparts, without degradations in generic capabilities. In particular, our largest model, ChipNeMo-70B, outperforms the highly capable GPT-4 on two of our use cases, namely engineering assistant chatbot and EDA scripts generation, while exhibiting competitive performance on bug summarization and analysis. These results underscore the potential of domain-specific customization for enhancing the effectiveness of large language models in specialized applications.
Magmaw: Modality-Agnostic Adversarial Attacks on Machine Learning-Based Wireless Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Machine Learning (ML) has been instrumental in enabling joint transceiver optimization by merging all physical layer blocks of the end-to-end wireless communication systems. Although there have been a number of adversarial attacks on ML-based wireless systems, the existing methods do not provide a comprehensive view including multi-modality of the source data, common physical layer protocols, and wireless domain constraints. This paper proposes Magmaw, a novel wireless attack methodology capable of generating universal adversarial perturbations for any multimodal signal transmitted over a wireless channel. We further introduce new objectives for adversarial attacks on downstream applications. We adopt the widely-used defenses to verify the resilience of Magmaw. For proof-of-concept evaluation, we build a real-time wireless attack platform using a software-defined radio system. Experimental results demonstrate that Magmaw causes significant performance degradation even in the presence of strong defense mechanisms. Furthermore, we validate the performance of Magmaw in two case studies: encrypted communication channel and channel modality-based ML model.
OpenForest: A data catalogue for machine learning in forest monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Forests play a crucial role in Earth's system processes and provide a suite of social and economic ecosystem services, but are significantly impacted by human activities, leading to a pronounced disruption of the equilibrium within ecosystems. Advancing forest monitoring worldwide offers advantages in mitigating human impacts and enhancing our comprehension of forest composition, alongside the effects of climate change. While statistical modeling has traditionally found applications in forest biology, recent strides in machine learning and computer vision have reached important milestones using remote sensing data, such as tree species identification, tree crown segmentation and forest biomass assessments. For this, the significance of open access data remains essential in enhancing such data-driven algorithms and methodologies. Here, we provide a comprehensive and extensive overview of 86 open access forest datasets across spatial scales, encompassing inventories, ground-based, aerial-based, satellite-based recordings, and country or world maps. These datasets are grouped in OpenForest, a dynamic catalogue open to contributions that strives to reference all available open access forest datasets. Moreover, in the context of these datasets, we aim to inspire research in machine learning applied to forest biology by establishing connections between contemporary topics, perspectives and challenges inherent in both domains. We hope to encourage collaborations among scientists, fostering the sharing and exploration of diverse datasets through the application of machine learning methods for large-scale forest monitoring. OpenForest is available at https://github.com/RolnickLab/OpenForest .
A Definition of Open-Ended Learning Problems for Goal-Conditioned Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

A lot of recent machine learning research papers have ``open-ended learning'' in their title. But very few of them attempt to define what they mean when using the term. Even worse, when looking more closely there seems to be no consensus on what distinguishes open-ended learning from related concepts such as continual learning, lifelong learning or autotelic learning. In this paper, we contribute to fixing this situation. After illustrating the genealogy of the concept and more recent perspectives about what it truly means, we outline that open-ended learning is generally conceived as a composite notion encompassing a set of diverse properties. In contrast with previous approaches, we propose to isolate a key elementary property of open-ended processes, which is to produce elements from time to time (e.g., observations, options, reward functions, and goals), over an infinite horizon, that are considered novel from an observer's perspective. From there, we build the notion of open-ended learning problems and focus in particular on the subset of open-ended goal-conditioned reinforcement learning problems in which agents can learn a growing repertoire of goal-driven skills. Finally, we highlight the work that remains to be performed to fill the gap between our elementary definition and the more involved notions of open-ended learning that developmental AI researchers may have in mind.
A cost-benefit source-receptor framework for implementation of Blue-Green flood risk management
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2024
Year: 2024

As floods are a major and growing source of risk in urban areas, there is a necessity to improve flood risk management frameworks and civil protection through planning interventions that modify surface flow pathways and introduce storage. Despite the complexity of densely urbanised areas, modern flood models can represent urban features and flow characteristics to help researchers, local authorities, and insurance companies to develop and improve efficient flood risk frameworks to achieve resilience in cities. A cost-benefit driven source-receptor flood risk framework is developed in this study to identify (1) locations contributing to surface flooding (sources), (2) buildings and locations at high flood risk (receptors), (3) the cost-benefit nexus between the source and the receptor, and finally (4) ways to mitigate flooding at the receptor by adding Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) in critical locations. The analysis is based on five steps to identify the source and the receptor in a study area based on the flood exposure of buildings, damages arising from flooding and available green spaces with the best potential to add sustainable and resilient solutions to reduce flooding. The framework was developed using the detailed hydrodynamic model CityCAT in a case study of the city centre of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The novelty of this analysis is that firstly, multiple storm magnitudes (i.e. small and large floods) are used combined with a method to locate the areas and the buildings at flood risk and a prioritized set of best places to add interventions upstream and downstream. Secondly, planning decisions are informed by considering the benefit from reduced damages to properties and the cost to construct resilient BGI options rather than a restricted hydraulic analysis considering only flood depths and storages in isolation from real-world economics.
Enhancing Traffic Object Detection in Variable Illumination with RGB-Event Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Traffic object detection under variable illumination is challenging due to the information loss caused by the limited dynamic range of conventional frame-based cameras. To address this issue, we introduce bio-inspired event cameras and propose a novel Structure-aware Fusion Network (SFNet) that extracts sharp and complete object structures from the event stream to compensate for the lost information in images through cross-modality fusion, enabling the network to obtain illumination-robust representations for traffic object detection. Specifically, to mitigate the sparsity or blurriness issues arising from diverse motion states of traffic objects in fixed-interval event sampling methods, we propose the Reliable Structure Generation Network (RSGNet) to generate Speed Invariant Frames (SIF), ensuring the integrity and sharpness of object structures. Next, we design a novel Adaptive Feature Complement Module (AFCM) which guides the adaptive fusion of two modality features to compensate for the information loss in the images by perceiving the global lightness distribution of the images, thereby generating illumination-robust representations. Finally, considering the lack of large-scale and high-quality annotations in the existing event-based object detection datasets, we build a DSEC-Det dataset, which consists of 53 sequences with 63,931 images and more than 208,000 labels for 8 classes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed SFNet can overcome the perceptual boundaries of conventional cameras and outperform the frame-based method by 8.0% in mAP50 and 5.9% in mAP50:95. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/YN-Yang/SFNet.