OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Approaching Code Search for Python as a Translation Retrieval Problem with Dual Encoders
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Code search is vital in the maintenance and extension of software systems. Past works have used separate language models for the natural language and programming language artifacts on models with multiple encoders and different loss functions. Similarly, this work approaches code search for Python as a translation retrieval problem while the natural language queries and the programming language are treated as two types of languages. By using dual encoders, these two types of language sequences are projected onto a shared embedding space, in which the distance reflects the similarity between a given pair of query and code. However, in contrast to previous work, this approach uses a unified language model, and a dual encoder structure with a cosine similarity loss function. A unified language model helps the model take advantage of the considerable overlap of words between the artifacts, making the learning much easier. On the other hand, the dual encoders trained with cosine similarity loss helps the model learn the underlining patterns of which terms are important for predicting linked pairs of artifacts. Evaluation shows the proposed model achieves performance better than state-of-the-art code search models. In addition, this model is much less expensive in terms of time and complexity, offering a cheaper, faster, and better alternative.
A General Framework for Producing Interpretable Semantic Text Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic text embedding is essential to many tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). While black-box models are capable of generating high-quality embeddings, their lack of interpretability limits their use in tasks that demand transparency. Recent approaches have improved interpretability by leveraging domain-expert-crafted or LLM-generated questions, but these methods rely heavily on expert input or well-prompt design, which restricts their generalizability and ability to generate discriminative questions across a wide range of tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce \algo{CQG-MBQA} (Contrastive Question Generation - Multi-task Binary Question Answering), a general framework for producing interpretable semantic text embeddings across diverse tasks. Our framework systematically generates highly discriminative, low cognitive load yes/no questions through the \algo{CQG} method and answers them efficiently with the \algo{MBQA} model, resulting in interpretable embeddings in a cost-effective manner. We validate the effectiveness and interpretability of \algo{CQG-MBQA} through extensive experiments and ablation studies, demonstrating that it delivers embedding quality comparable to many advanced black-box models while maintaining inherently interpretability. Additionally, \algo{CQG-MBQA} outperforms other interpretable text embedding methods across various downstream tasks.
Generative Semantic Communication for Text-to-Speech Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Semantic communication is a promising technology to improve communication efficiency by transmitting only the semantic information of the source data. However, traditional semantic communication methods primarily focus on data reconstruction tasks, which may not be efficient for emerging generative tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. To address this limitation, this paper develops a novel generative semantic communication framework for TTS synthesis, leveraging generative artificial intelligence technologies. Firstly, we utilize a pre-trained large speech model called WavLM and the residual vector quantization method to construct two semantic knowledge bases (KBs) at the transmitter and receiver, respectively. The KB at the transmitter enables effective semantic extraction, while the KB at the receiver facilitates lifelike speech synthesis. Then, we employ a transformer encoder and a diffusion model to achieve efficient semantic coding without introducing significant communication overhead. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that our framework achieves much higher fidelity for the generated speech than four baselines, in both cases with additive white Gaussian noise channel and Rayleigh fading channel.
Vulnerability Detection via Topological Analysis of Attention Maps
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, deep learning (DL) approaches to vulnerability detection have gained significant traction. These methods demonstrate promising results, often surpassing traditional static code analysis tools in effectiveness. In this study, we explore a novel approach to vulnerability detection utilizing the tools from topological data analysis (TDA) on the attention matrices of the BERT model. Our findings reveal that traditional machine learning (ML) techniques, when trained on the topological features extracted from these attention matrices, can perform competitively with pre-trained language models (LLMs) such as CodeBERTa. This suggests that TDA tools, including persistent homology, are capable of effectively capturing semantic information critical for identifying vulnerabilities.
On the Hardness of Learning One Hidden Layer Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this work, we consider the problem of learning one hidden layer ReLU neural networks with inputs from $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that this learning problem is hard under standard cryptographic assumptions even when: (1) the size of the neural network is polynomial in $d$, (2) its input distribution is a standard Gaussian, and (3) the noise is Gaussian and polynomially small in $d$. Our hardness result is based on the hardness of the Continuous Learning with Errors (CLWE) problem, and in particular, is based on the largely believed worst-case hardness of approximately solving the shortest vector problem up to a multiplicative polynomial factor.
CSI Acquisition in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Surveillance Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

We consider a cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) surveillance system, in which multiple multi-antenna monitoring nodes (MNs) are deployed in either observing or jamming mode to disrupt the communication between a multi-antenna untrusted pair. We propose a simple and effective channel state information (CSI) acquisition scheme at the MNs. Specifically, our approach leverages pilot signals in both the uplink and downlink phases of the untrusted link, coupled with minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimation. This enables the MNs to accurately estimate the effective channels to both the untrusted transmitter (UT) and untrusted receiver (UR), thereby yielding robust monitoring performance. We analyze the spectral efficiency (SE) performance of the untrusted links and of the monitoring system, taking into account the proposed CSI acquisition and successive MMSE cancellation schemes. The monitoring success probability (MSP) is then derived. Simulation results show that the CF-mMIMO surveillance system, relying on the proposed CSI acquisition scheme, can achieve monitoring performance close to that achieved by having perfect CSI knowledge of the untrusted link (theoretical upper bound), especially when the number of MNs is large.
Classification-Denoising Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Image classification and denoising suffer from complementary issues of lack of robustness or partially ignoring conditioning information. We argue that they can be alleviated by unifying both tasks through a model of the joint probability of (noisy) images and class labels. Classification is performed with a forward pass followed by conditioning. Using the Tweedie-Miyasawa formula, we evaluate the denoising function with the score, which can be computed by marginalization and back-propagation. The training objective is then a combination of cross-entropy loss and denoising score matching loss integrated over noise levels. Numerical experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet show competitive classification and denoising performance compared to reference deep convolutional classifiers/denoisers, and significantly improves efficiency compared to previous joint approaches. Our model shows an increased robustness to adversarial perturbations compared to a standard discriminative classifier, and allows for a novel interpretation of adversarial gradients as a difference of denoisers.
GAP-RL: Grasps As Points for RL Towards Dynamic Object Grasping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Dynamic grasping of moving objects in complex, continuous motion scenarios remains challenging. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied in various robotic manipulation tasks, benefiting from its closed-loop property. However, existing RL-based methods do not fully explore the potential for enhancing visual representations. In this letter, we propose a novel framework called Grasps As Points for RL (GAP-RL) to effectively and reliably grasp moving objects. By implementing a fast region-based grasp detector, we build a Grasp Encoder by transforming 6D grasp poses into Gaussian points and extracting grasp features as a higher-level abstraction than the original object point features. Additionally, we develop a Graspable Region Explorer for real-world deployment, which searches for consistent graspable regions, enabling smoother grasp generation and stable policy execution. To assess the performance fairly, we construct a simulated dynamic grasping benchmark involving objects with various complex motions. Experiment results demonstrate that our method effectively generalizes to novel objects and unseen dynamic motions compared to other baselines. Real-world experiments further validate the framework's sim-to-real transferability.
Fine-Grained Expressive Power of Weisfeiler-Leman: A Homomorphism Counting Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The ability of graph neural networks (GNNs) to count homomorphisms has recently been proposed as a practical and fine-grained measure of their expressive power. Although several existing works have investigated the homomorphism counting power of certain GNN families, a simple and unified framework for analyzing the problem is absent. In this paper, we first propose \emph{generalized folklore Weisfeiler-Leman (GFWL)} algorithms as a flexible design basis for expressive GNNs, and then provide a theoretical framework to algorithmically determine the homomorphism counting power of an arbitrary class of GNN within the GFWL design space. As the considered design space is large enough to accommodate almost all known powerful GNNs, our result greatly extends all existing works, and may find its application in the automation of GNN model design.
PRF: Parallel Resonate and Fire Neuron for Long Sequence Learning in Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, there is growing demand for effective and efficient long sequence modeling, with State Space Models (SSMs) proving to be effective for long sequence tasks. To further reduce energy consumption, SSMs can be adapted to Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) using spiking functions. However, current spiking-formalized SSMs approaches still rely on float-point matrix-vector multiplication during inference, undermining SNNs' energy advantage. In this work, we address the efficiency and performance challenges of long sequence learning in SNNs simultaneously. First, we propose a decoupled reset method for parallel spiking neuron training, reducing the typical Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) model's training time from $O(L^2)$ to $O(L\log L)$, effectively speeding up the training by $6.57 \times$ to $16.50 \times$ on sequence lengths $1,024$ to $32,768$. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that parallel computation with a reset mechanism is implemented achieving equivalence to its sequential counterpart. Secondly, to capture long-range dependencies, we propose a Parallel Resonate and Fire (PRF) neuron, which leverages an oscillating membrane potential driven by a resonate mechanism from a differentiable reset function in the complex domain. The PRF enables efficient long sequence learning while maintaining parallel training. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed spike-driven architecture using PRF achieves performance comparable to Structured SSMs (S4), with two orders of magnitude reduction in energy consumption, outperforming Transformer on Long Range Arena tasks.
Generative AI in the Software Engineering Domain: Tensions of Occupational Identity and Patterns of Identity Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

The adoption of generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in organizational settings calls into question workers' roles, and relatedly, the implications for their long-term skill development and domain expertise. In our qualitative study in the software engineering domain, we build on the theoretical lenses of occupational identity and self-determination theory to understand how and why software engineers make sense of GAI for their work. We find that engineers' sense-making is contingent on domain expertise, as juniors and seniors felt their needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness to be differently impacted by GAI. We shed light on the importance of the individual's role in preserving tacit domain knowledge as engineers engaged in sense-making that protected their occupational identity. We illustrate how organizations play an active role in shaping workers' sense-making process and propose design guidelines on how organizations and system designers can facilitate the impact of technological change on workers' occupational identity.
GenSim2: Scaling Robot Data Generation with Multi-modal and Reasoning LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Robotic simulation today remains challenging to scale up due to the human efforts required to create diverse simulation tasks and scenes. Simulation-trained policies also face scalability issues as many sim-to-real methods focus on a single task. To address these challenges, this work proposes GenSim2, a scalable framework that leverages coding LLMs with multi-modal and reasoning capabilities for complex and realistic simulation task creation, including long-horizon tasks with articulated objects. To automatically generate demonstration data for these tasks at scale, we propose planning and RL solvers that generalize within object categories. The pipeline can generate data for up to 100 articulated tasks with 200 objects and reduce the required human efforts. To utilize such data, we propose an effective multi-task language-conditioned policy architecture, dubbed proprioceptive point-cloud transformer (PPT), that learns from the generated demonstrations and exhibits strong sim-to-real zero-shot transfer. Combining the proposed pipeline and the policy architecture, we show a promising usage of GenSim2 that the generated data can be used for zero-shot transfer or co-train with real-world collected data, which enhances the policy performance by 20% compared with training exclusively on limited real data.
Learning Humanoid Locomotion over Challenging Terrain
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Humanoid robots can, in principle, use their legs to go almost anywhere. Developing controllers capable of traversing diverse terrains, however, remains a considerable challenge. Classical controllers are hard to generalize broadly while the learning-based methods have primarily focused on gentle terrains. Here, we present a learning-based approach for blind humanoid locomotion capable of traversing challenging natural and man-made terrain. Our method uses a transformer model to predict the next action based on the history of proprioceptive observations and actions. The model is first pre-trained on a dataset of flat-ground trajectories with sequence modeling, and then fine-tuned on uneven terrain using reinforcement learning. We evaluate our model on a real humanoid robot across a variety of terrains, including rough, deformable, and sloped surfaces. The model demonstrates robust performance, in-context adaptation, and emergent terrain representations. In real-world case studies, our humanoid robot successfully traversed over 4 miles of hiking trails in Berkeley and climbed some of the steepest streets in San Francisco.
Unraveling Cross-Modality Knowledge Conflicts in Large Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for capturing and reasoning over multimodal inputs. However, these models are prone to parametric knowledge conflicts, which arise from inconsistencies of represented knowledge between their vision and language components. In this paper, we formally define the problem of $\textbf{cross-modality parametric knowledge conflict}$ and present a systematic approach to detect, interpret, and mitigate them. We introduce a pipeline that identifies conflicts between visual and textual answers, showing a persistently high conflict rate across modalities in recent LVLMs regardless of the model size. We further investigate how these conflicts interfere with the inference process and propose a contrastive metric to discern the conflicting samples from the others. Building on these insights, we develop a novel dynamic contrastive decoding method that removes undesirable logits inferred from the less confident modality components based on answer confidence. For models that do not provide logits, we also introduce two prompt-based strategies to mitigate the conflicts. Our methods achieve promising improvements in accuracy on both the ViQuAE and InfoSeek datasets. Specifically, using LLaVA-34B, our proposed dynamic contrastive decoding improves an average accuracy of 2.24%.
Controllable Shape Modeling with Neural Generalized Cylinder
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Neural shape representation, such as neural signed distance field (NSDF), becomes more and more popular in shape modeling as its ability to deal with complex topology and arbitrary resolution. Due to the implicit manner to use features for shape representation, manipulating the shapes faces inherent challenge of inconvenience, since the feature cannot be intuitively edited. In this work, we propose neural generalized cylinder (NGC) for explicit manipulation of NSDF, which is an extension of traditional generalized cylinder (GC). Specifically, we define a central curve first and assign neural features along the curve to represent the profiles. Then NSDF is defined on the relative coordinates of a specialized GC with oval-shaped profiles. By using the relative coordinates, NSDF can be explicitly controlled via manipulation of the GC. To this end, we apply NGC to many non-rigid deformation tasks like complex curved deformation, local scaling and twisting for shapes. The comparison on shape deformation with other methods proves the effectiveness and efficiency of NGC. Furthermore, NGC could utilize the neural feature for shape blending by a simple neural feature interpolation.
A quest through interconnected datasets: lessons from highly-cited ICASSP papers
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

As audio machine learning outcomes are deployed in societally impactful applications, it is important to have a sense of the quality and origins of the data used. Noticing that being explicit about this sense is not trivially rewarded in academic publishing in applied machine learning domains, and neither is included in typical applied machine learning curricula, we present a study into dataset usage connected to the top-5 cited papers at the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP). In this, we conduct thorough depth-first analyses towards origins of used datasets, often leading to searches that had to go beyond what was reported in official papers, and ending into unclear or entangled origins. Especially in the current pull towards larger, and possibly generative AI models, awareness of the need for accountability on data provenance is increasing. With this, we call on the community to not only focus on engineering larger models, but create more room and reward for explicitizing the foundations on which such models should be built.
Conversational Swarms of Humans and AI Agents enable Hybrid Collaborative Decision-making
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Conversational Swarm Intelligence (CSI) is an AI-powered communication and collaboration technology that allows large, networked groups (of potentially unlimited size) to hold thoughtful conversational deliberations in real-time. Inspired by the efficient decision-making dynamics of fish schools, CSI divides a human population into a set of small subgroups connected by AI agents. This enables the full group to hold a unified conversation. In this study, groups of 25 participants were tasked with selecting a roster of players in a real Fantasy Baseball contest. A total of 10 trials were run using CSI. In half the trials, each subgroup was augmented with a fact-providing AI agent referred to herein as an Infobot. The Infobot was loaded with a wide range of MLB statistics. The human participants could query the Infobot the same way they would query other persons in their subgroup. Results show that when using CSI, the 25-person groups outperformed 72% of individually surveyed participants and showed significant intelligence amplification versus the mean score (p=0.016). The CSI-enabled groups also significantly outperformed the most popular picks across the collected surveys for each daily contest (p<0.001). The CSI sessions that used Infobots scored slightly higher than those that did not, but it was not statistically significant in this study. That said, 85% of participants agreed with the statement 'Our decisions were stronger because of information provided by the Infobot' and only 4% disagreed. In addition, deliberations that used Infobots showed significantly less variance (p=0.039) in conversational content across members. This suggests that Infobots promoted more balanced discussions in which fewer members dominated the dialog. This may be because the infobot enabled participants to confidently express opinions with the support of factual data
Open AI-Romance with ChatGPT, Ready for Your Cyborg Lover?
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Since late March 2024, a Chinese college student has shared her AI Romance with ChatGPT on Red, a popular Chinese social media platform, attracting millions of followers and sparking numerous imitations. This phenomenon has created an iconic figure among Chinese youth, particularly females. This study employs a case study and digital ethnography approach seeking to understand how technology (social media, generative AI) shapes Chinese female students' engagement with AI Romance and how AI Romance impacts the reshaping of gender power relations of Chinese female college students. There are three main findings. First, Open AI Romance is performative, mutually shaping, and creates flexible gender power dynamics and potential new configurations. Second, the cyborg lover identity is fluid, shared, and partially private due to technology and social platforms. Third, the rise of ChatGPT's DAN mode on Red introduces a simulated "male" app into a "female" platform, pushing the limits of policy guidelines, and social norms, making the platform even "wilder." This research provides a deeper understanding of the intersection between technology and social behavior, highlighting the role of AI and social media in evolving gender dynamics among Chinese youth. It sheds light on the performative nature of digital interactions and the potential for technology to redefine traditional gender power structures.