OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Benchmarking FedAvg and FedCurv for Image Classification Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Classic Machine Learning techniques require training on data available in a single data lake. However, aggregating data from different owners is not always convenient for different reasons, including security, privacy and secrecy. Data carry a value that might vanish when shared with others; the ability to avoid sharing the data enables industrial applications where security and privacy are of paramount importance, making it possible to train global models by implementing only local policies which can be run independently and even on air-gapped data centres. Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach which has emerged as an effective way to address privacy concerns by only sharing local AI models while keeping the data decentralized. Two critical challenges of Federated Learning are managing the heterogeneous systems in the same federated network and dealing with real data, which are often not independently and identically distributed (non-IID) among the clients. In this paper, we focus on the second problem, i.e., the problem of statistical heterogeneity of the data in the same federated network. In this setting, local models might be strayed far from the local optimum of the complete dataset, thus possibly hindering the convergence of the federated model. Several Federated Learning algorithms, such as FedAvg, FedProx and Federated Curvature (FedCurv), aiming at tackling the non-IID setting, have already been proposed. This work provides an empirical assessment of the behaviour of FedAvg and FedCurv in common non-IID scenarios. Results show that the number of epochs per round is an important hyper-parameter that, when tuned appropriately, can lead to significant performance gains while reducing the communication cost. As a side product of this work, we release the non-IID version of the datasets we used so to facilitate further comparisons from the FL community.
Diffusion Action Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal action segmentation is crucial for understanding long-form videos. Previous works on this task commonly adopt an iterative refinement paradigm by using multi-stage models. We propose a novel framework via denoising diffusion models, which nonetheless shares the same inherent spirit of such iterative refinement. In this framework, action predictions are iteratively generated from random noise with input video features as conditions. To enhance the modeling of three striking characteristics of human actions, including the position prior, the boundary ambiguity, and the relational dependency, we devise a unified masking strategy for the conditioning inputs in our framework. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., GTEA, 50Salads, and Breakfast, are performed and the proposed method achieves superior or comparable results to state-of-the-art methods, showing the effectiveness of a generative approach for action segmentation.
$\varepsilon$ KÚ <MASK>: Integrating Yorùbá cultural greetings into machine translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This paper investigates the performance of massively multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) systems in translating Yorùbá greetings ($\varepsilon$ kú [MASK]), which are a big part of Yorùbá language and culture, into English. To evaluate these models, we present IkiniYorùbá, a Yorùbá-English translation dataset containing some Yorùbá greetings, and sample use cases. We analysed the performance of different multilingual NMT systems including Google and NLLB and show that these models struggle to accurately translate Yorùbá greetings into English. In addition, we trained a Yorùbá-English model by finetuning an existing NMT model on the training split of IkiniYorùbá and this achieved better performance when compared to the pre-trained multilingual NMT models, although they were trained on a large volume of data.
Neural Network Entropy (NNetEn): Entropy-Based EEG Signal and Chaotic Time Series Classification, Python Package for NNetEn Calculation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Entropy measures are effective features for time series classification problems. Traditional entropy measures, such as Shannon entropy, use probability distribution function. However, for the effective separation of time series, new entropy estimation methods are required to characterize the chaotic dynamic of the system. Our concept of Neural Network Entropy (NNetEn) is based on the classification of special datasets in relation to the entropy of the time series recorded in the reservoir of the neural network. NNetEn estimates the chaotic dynamics of time series in an original way and does not take into account probability distribution functions. We propose two new classification metrics: R2 Efficiency and Pearson Efficiency. The efficiency of NNetEn is verified on separation of two chaotic time series of sine mapping using dispersion analysis. For two close dynamic time series (r = 1.1918 and r = 1.2243), the F-ratio has reached the value of 124 and reflects high efficiency of the introduced method in classification problems. The electroenceph-alography signal classification for healthy persons and patients with Alzheimer disease illustrates the practical application of the NNetEn features. Our computations demonstrate the synergistic effect of increasing classification accuracy when applying traditional entropy measures and the NNetEn concept conjointly. An implementation of the algorithms in Python is presented.
Evaluating GPT-4 and ChatGPT on Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

As large language models (LLMs) gain popularity among speakers of diverse languages, we believe that it is crucial to benchmark them to better understand model behaviors, failures, and limitations in languages beyond English. In this work, we evaluate LLM APIs (ChatGPT, GPT-3, and GPT-4) on the Japanese national medical licensing examinations from the past five years, including the current year. Our team comprises native Japanese-speaking NLP researchers and a practicing cardiologist based in Japan. Our experiments show that GPT-4 outperforms ChatGPT and GPT-3 and passes all six years of the exams, highlighting LLMs' potential in a language that is typologically distant from English. However, our evaluation also exposes critical limitations of the current LLM APIs. First, LLMs sometimes select prohibited choices that should be strictly avoided in medical practice in Japan, such as suggesting euthanasia. Further, our analysis shows that the API costs are generally higher and the maximum context size is smaller for Japanese because of the way non-Latin scripts are currently tokenized in the pipeline. We release our benchmark as Igaku QA as well as all model outputs and exam metadata. We hope that our results and benchmark will spur progress on more diverse applications of LLMs. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/jungokasai/IgakuQA.
No Place to Hide: Dual Deep Interaction Channel Network for Fake News Detection based on Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Online Social Network (OSN) has become a hotbed of fake news due to the low cost of information dissemination. Although the existing methods have made many attempts in news content and propagation structure, the detection of fake news is still facing two challenges: one is how to mine the unique key features and evolution patterns, and the other is how to tackle the problem of small samples to build the high-performance model. Different from popular methods which take full advantage of the propagation topology structure, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for fake news detection from perspectives of semantic, emotion and data enhancement, which excavates the emotional evolution patterns of news participants during the propagation process, and a dual deep interaction channel network of semantic and emotion is designed to obtain a more comprehensive and fine-grained news representation with the consideration of comments. Meanwhile, the framework introduces a data enhancement module to obtain more labeled data with high quality based on confidence which further improves the performance of the classification model. Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Evaluation Challenges for Geospatial ML
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

As geospatial machine learning models and maps derived from their predictions are increasingly used for downstream analyses in science and policy, it is imperative to evaluate their accuracy and applicability. Geospatial machine learning has key distinctions from other learning paradigms, and as such, the correct way to measure performance of spatial machine learning outputs has been a topic of debate. In this paper, I delineate unique challenges of model evaluation for geospatial machine learning with global or remotely sensed datasets, culminating in concrete takeaways to improve evaluations of geospatial model performance.
Robust LSTM-based Vehicle Velocity Observer for Regular and Near-limits Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Accurate velocity estimation is key to vehicle control. While the literature describes how model-based and learning-based observers are able to estimate a vehicle's velocity in normal driving conditions, the challenge remains to estimate the velocity in near-limits maneuvers while using only conventional in-car sensors. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network architecture based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to accurately estimate the vehicle's velocity in different driving conditions, including maneuvers at the limits of handling. The approach has been tested on real vehicle data and it provides more accurate estimations than state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based methods, for both regular and near-limits driving scenarios. Our approach is robust since the performance of the state-of-the-art observers deteriorates with higher dynamics, while our method adapts to different maneuvers, providing accurate estimations even at the vehicle's limits of handling.
Markerless 3D human pose tracking through multiple cameras and AI: Enabling high accuracy, robustness, and real-time performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Tracking 3D human motion in real-time is crucial for numerous applications across many fields. Traditional approaches involve attaching artificial fiducial objects or sensors to the body, limiting their usability and comfort-of-use and consequently narrowing their application fields. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have allowed for markerless solutions. However, most of these methods operate in 2D, while those providing 3D solutions compromise accuracy and real-time performance. To address this challenge and unlock the potential of visual pose estimation methods in real-world scenarios, we propose a markerless framework that combines multi-camera views and 2D AI-based pose estimation methods to track 3D human motion. Our approach integrates a Weighted Least Square (WLS) algorithm that computes 3D human motion from multiple 2D pose estimations provided by an AI-driven method. The method is integrated within the Open-VICO framework allowing simulation and real-world execution. Several experiments have been conducted, which have shown high accuracy and real-time performance, demonstrating the high level of readiness for real-world applications and the potential to revolutionize human motion capture.
BERTino: an Italian DistilBERT model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The recent introduction of Transformers language representation models allowed great improvements in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, if on one hand the performances achieved by this kind of architectures are surprising, on the other their usability is limited by the high number of parameters which constitute their network, resulting in high computational and memory demands. In this work we present BERTino, a DistilBERT model which proposes to be the first lightweight alternative to the BERT architecture specific for the Italian language. We evaluated BERTino on the Italian ISDT, Italian ParTUT, Italian WikiNER and multiclass classification tasks, obtaining F1 scores comparable to those obtained by a BERTBASE with a remarkable improvement in training and inference speed.
BERT4ETH: A Pre-trained Transformer for Ethereum Fraud Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

As various forms of fraud proliferate on Ethereum, it is imperative to safeguard against these malicious activities to protect susceptible users from being victimized. While current studies solely rely on graph-based fraud detection approaches, it is argued that they may not be well-suited for dealing with highly repetitive, skew-distributed and heterogeneous Ethereum transactions. To address these challenges, we propose BERT4ETH, a universal pre-trained Transformer encoder that serves as an account representation extractor for detecting various fraud behaviors on Ethereum. BERT4ETH features the superior modeling capability of Transformer to capture the dynamic sequential patterns inherent in Ethereum transactions, and addresses the challenges of pre-training a BERT model for Ethereum with three practical and effective strategies, namely repetitiveness reduction, skew alleviation and heterogeneity modeling. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that BERT4ETH outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant enhancements in terms of the phishing account detection and de-anonymization tasks. The code for BERT4ETH is available at: https://github.com/git-disl/BERT4ETH.
Online Modifications for Event-based Signal Temporal Logic Specifications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we present a grammar and control synthesis framework for online modification of Event-based Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications, during execution. These modifications allow a user to change the robots' task in response to potential future violations, changes to the environment, or user-defined task design changes. In cases where a modification is not possible, we provide feedback to the user and suggest alternative modifications. We demonstrate our task modification process using a Hello Robot Stretch satisfying an Event-based STL specification.
TPMCF: Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-Source Collaborative Features
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, with the rapid deployment of service APIs, personalized service recommendations have played a paramount role in the growth of the e-commerce industry. Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters determining the service performance, often used for recommendation, fluctuate over time. Thus, the QoS prediction is essential to identify a suitable service among functionally equivalent services over time. The contemporary temporal QoS prediction methods hardly achieved the desired accuracy due to various limitations, such as the inability to handle data sparsity and outliers and capture higher-order temporal relationships among user-service interactions. Even though some recent recurrent neural-network-based architectures can model temporal relationships among QoS data, prediction accuracy degrades due to the absence of other features (e.g., collaborative features) to comprehend the relationship among the user-service interactions. This paper addresses the above challenges and proposes a scalable strategy for Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-source Collaborative-Features (TPMCF), achieving high prediction accuracy and faster responsiveness. TPMCF combines the collaborative-features of users/services by exploiting user-service relationship with the spatio-temporal auto-extracted features by employing graph convolution and transformer encoder with multi-head self-attention. We validated our proposed method on WS-DREAM-2 datasets. Extensive experiments showed TPMCF outperformed major state-of-the-art approaches regarding prediction accuracy while ensuring high scalability and reasonably faster responsiveness.
Disentangling Domain Ontologies
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we introduce and illustrate the novel phenomenon of Conceptual Entanglement which emerges due to the representational manifoldness immanent while incrementally modelling domain ontologies step-by-step across the following five levels: perception, labelling, semantic alignment, hierarchical modelling and intensional definition. In turn, we propose Conceptual Disentanglement, a multi-level conceptual modelling strategy which enforces and explicates, via guiding principles, semantic bijections with respect to each level of conceptual entanglement (across all the above five levels) paving the way for engineering conceptually disentangled domain ontologies. We also briefly argue why state-of-the-art ontology development methodologies and approaches are insufficient with respect to our characterization.
Can We Revitalize Interventional Healthcare with AI-XR Surgical Metaverses?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advancements in technology, particularly in machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and the metaverse, offer great potential for revolutionizing surgical science. The combination of artificial intelligence and extended reality (AI-XR) technologies has the potential to create a surgical metaverse, a virtual environment where surgeries can be planned and performed. This paper aims to provide insight into the various potential applications of an AI-XR surgical metaverse and the challenges that must be addressed to bring its full potential to fruition. It is important for the community to focus on these challenges to fully realize the potential of the AI-XR surgical metaverses. Furthermore, to emphasize the need for secure and robust AI-XR surgical metaverses and to demonstrate the real-world implications of security threats to the AI-XR surgical metaverses, we present a case study in which the ``an immersive surgical attack'' on incision point localization is performed in the context of preoperative planning in a surgical metaverse.
Multi-Task Learning for Post-transplant Cause of Death Analysis: A Case Study on Liver Transplant
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Organ transplant is the essential treatment method for some end-stage diseases, such as liver failure. Analyzing the post-transplant cause of death (CoD) after organ transplant provides a powerful tool for clinical decision making, including personalized treatment and organ allocation. However, traditional methods like Model for End-stage Liver Disease (MELD) score and conventional machine learning (ML) methods are limited in CoD analysis due to two major data and model-related challenges. To address this, we propose a novel framework called CoD-MTL leveraging multi-task learning to model the semantic relationships between various CoD prediction tasks jointly. Specifically, we develop a novel tree distillation strategy for multi-task learning, which combines the strength of both the tree model and multi-task learning. Experimental results are presented to show the precise and reliable CoD predictions of our framework. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the clinical importance of our method in the liver transplant.
PEOPL: Characterizing Privately Encoded Open Datasets with Public Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Allowing organizations to share their data for training of machine learning (ML) models without unintended information leakage is an open problem in practice. A promising technique for this still-open problem is to train models on the encoded data. Our approach, called Privately Encoded Open Datasets with Public Labels (PEOPL), uses a certain class of randomly constructed transforms to encode sensitive data. Organizations publish their randomly encoded data and associated raw labels for ML training, where training is done without knowledge of the encoding realization. We investigate several important aspects of this problem: We introduce information-theoretic scores for privacy and utility, which quantify the average performance of an unfaithful user (e.g., adversary) and a faithful user (e.g., model developer) that have access to the published encoded data. We then theoretically characterize primitives in building families of encoding schemes that motivate the use of random deep neural networks. Empirically, we compare the performance of our randomized encoding scheme and a linear scheme to a suite of computational attacks, and we also show that our scheme achieves competitive prediction accuracy to raw-sample baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate that multiple institutions, using independent random encoders, can collaborate to train improved ML models.
Dense Sparse Retrieval: Using Sparse Language Models for Inference Efficient Dense Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Vector-based retrieval systems have become a common staple for academic and industrial search applications because they provide a simple and scalable way of extending the search to leverage contextual representations for documents and queries. As these vector-based systems rely on contextual language models, their usage commonly requires GPUs, which can be expensive and difficult to manage. Given recent advances in introducing sparsity into language models for improved inference efficiency, in this paper, we study how sparse language models can be used for dense retrieval to improve inference efficiency. Using the popular retrieval library Tevatron and the MSMARCO, NQ, and TriviaQA datasets, we find that sparse language models can be used as direct replacements with little to no drop in accuracy and up to 4.3x improved inference speeds
Enhancing Large Language Models with Climate Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed the landscape of artificial intelligence by demonstrating their ability in generating human-like text across diverse topics. However, despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs lack recent information and often employ imprecise language, which can be detrimental in domains where accuracy is crucial, such as climate change. In this study, we make use of recent ideas to harness the potential of LLMs by viewing them as agents that access multiple sources, including databases containing recent and precise information about organizations, institutions, and companies. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a prototype agent that retrieves emission data from ClimateWatch (https://www.climatewatchdata.org/) and leverages general Google search. By integrating these resources with LLMs, our approach overcomes the limitations associated with imprecise language and delivers more reliable and accurate information in the critical domain of climate change. This work paves the way for future advancements in LLMs and their application in domains where precision is of paramount importance.
What Does the Indian Parliament Discuss? An Exploratory Analysis of the Question Hour in the Lok Sabha
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The TCPD-IPD dataset is a collection of questions and answers discussed in the Lower House of the Parliament of India during the Question Hour between 1999 and 2019. Although it is difficult to analyze such a huge collection manually, modern text analysis tools can provide a powerful means to navigate it. In this paper, we perform an exploratory analysis of the dataset. In particular, we present insightful corpus-level statistics and a detailed analysis of three subsets of the dataset. In the latter analysis, the focus is on understanding the temporal evolution of topics using a dynamic topic model. We observe that the parliamentary conversation indeed mirrors the political and socio-economic tensions of each period.
Branch Identification in Passive Optical Networks using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

A machine learning approach for improving monitoring in passive optical networks with almost equidistant branches is proposed and experimentally validated. It achieves a high diagnostic accuracy of 98.7% and an event localization error of 0.5m