OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CageViT: Convolutional Activation Guided Efficient Vision Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, Transformers have emerged as the go-to architecture for both vision and language modeling tasks, but their computational efficiency is limited by the length of the input sequence. To address this, several efficient variants of Transformers have been proposed to accelerate computation or reduce memory consumption while preserving performance. This paper presents an efficient vision Transformer, called CageViT, that is guided by convolutional activation to reduce computation. Our CageViT, unlike current Transformers, utilizes a new encoder to handle the rearranged tokens, bringing several technical contributions: 1) Convolutional activation is used to pre-process the token after patchifying the image to select and rearrange the major tokens and minor tokens, which substantially reduces the computation cost through an additional fusion layer. 2) Instead of using the class activation map of the convolutional model directly, we design a new weighted class activation to lower the model requirements. 3) To facilitate communication between major tokens and fusion tokens, Gated Linear SRA is proposed to further integrate fusion tokens into the attention mechanism. We perform a comprehensive validation of CageViT on the image classification challenge. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CageViT outperforms the most recent state-of-the-art backbones by a large margin in terms of efficiency, while maintaining a comparable level of accuracy (e.g. a moderate-sized 43.35M model trained solely on 224 x 224 ImageNet-1K can achieve Top-1 accuracy of 83.4% accuracy).
Restoring Images Captured in Arbitrary Hybrid Adverse Weather Conditions in One Go
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Adverse conditions typically suffer from stochastic hybrid weather degradations (e.g., rainy and hazy night), while existing image restoration algorithms envisage that weather degradations occur independently, thus may fail to handle real-world complicated scenarios. Besides, supervised training is not feasible due to the lack of a comprehensive paired dataset to characterize hybrid conditions. To this end, we have advanced the aforementioned limitations with two tactics: framework and data. First, we present a novel unified framework, dubbed RAHC, to Restore Arbitrary Hybrid adverse weather Conditions in one go. Specifically, our RAHC leverages a multi-head aggregation architecture to learn multiple degradation representation subspaces and then constrains the network to flexibly handle multiple hybrid adverse weather in a unified paradigm through a discrimination mechanism in the output space. Furthermore, we devise a reconstruction vectors aided scheme to provide auxiliary visual content cues for reconstruction, thus can comfortably cope with hybrid scenarios with insufficient remaining image constituents. Second, we construct a new dataset, termed HAC, for learning and benchmarking arbitrary Hybrid Adverse Conditions restoration. HAC contains 31 scenarios composed of an arbitrary combination of five common weather, with a total of ~316K adverse-weather/clean pairs. Extensive experiments yield superior results and establish new state-of-the-art results on both HAC and conventional datasets.
Improved Bounds for Single-Nomination Impartial Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We give new bounds for the single-nomination model of impartial selection, a problem proposed by Holzman and Moulin (Econometrica, 2013). A selection mechanism, which may be randomized, selects one individual from a group of $n$ based on nominations among members of the group; a mechanism is impartial if the selection of an individual is independent of nominations cast by that individual, and $α$-optimal if under any circumstance the expected number of nominations received by the selected individual is at least $α$ times that received by any individual. In a many-nominations model, where individuals may cast an arbitrary number of nominations, the so-called permutation mechanism is $1/2$-optimal, and this is best possible. In the single-nomination model, where each individual casts exactly one nomination, the permutation mechanism does better and prior to this work was known to be $67/108$-optimal but no better than $2/3$-optimal. We show that it is in fact $2/3$-optimal for all $n$. This result is obtained via tight bounds on the performance of the mechanism for graphs with maximum degree $Δ$, for any $Δ$, which we prove using an adversarial argument. We then show that the permutation mechanism is not best possible; indeed, by combining the permutation mechanism, another mechanism called plurality with runner-up, and some new ideas, $2105/3147$-optimality can be achieved for all $n$. We finally give new upper bounds on $α$ for any $α$-optimal impartial mechanism. They improve on the existing upper bounds for all $n\geq 7$ and imply that no impartial mechanism can be better than $76/105$-optimal for all $n$; they do not preclude the existence of a $(3/4-\varepsilon)$-optimal impartial mechanism for arbitrary $\varepsilon>0$ if $n$ is large.
Cold PAWS: Unsupervised class discovery and addressing the cold-start problem for semi-supervised learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In many machine learning applications, labeling datasets can be an arduous and time-consuming task. Although research has shown that semi-supervised learning techniques can achieve high accuracy with very few labels within the field of computer vision, little attention has been given to how images within a dataset should be selected for labeling. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on well-established self-supervised learning, clustering, and manifold learning techniques that address this challenge of selecting an informative image subset to label in the first instance, which is known as the cold-start or unsupervised selective labelling problem. We test our approach using several publicly available datasets, namely CIFAR10, Imagenette, DeepWeeds, and EuroSAT, and observe improved performance with both supervised and semi-supervised learning strategies when our label selection strategy is used, in comparison to random sampling. We also obtain superior performance for the datasets considered with a much simpler approach compared to other methods in the literature.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Methods, Applications, Visionary Prospects, and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a widely used Artificial Intelligence (AI) technique. However, current studies and applications need to address its scalability, non-stationarity, and trustworthiness. This paper aims to review methods and applications and point out research trends and visionary prospects for the next decade. First, this paper summarizes the basic methods and application scenarios of MARL. Second, this paper outlines the corresponding research methods and their limitations on safety, robustness, generalization, and ethical constraints that need to be addressed in the practical applications of MARL. In particular, we believe that trustworthy MARL will become a hot research topic in the next decade. In addition, we suggest that considering human interaction is essential for the practical application of MARL in various societies. Therefore, this paper also analyzes the challenges while MARL is applied to human-machine interaction.
Automatic 3D Registration of Dental CBCT and Face Scan Data using 2D Projection Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a fully automatic registration method of dental cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) and face scan data. It can be used for a digital platform of 3D jaw-teeth-face models in a variety of applications, including 3D digital treatment planning and orthognathic surgery. Difficulties in accurately merging facial scans and CBCT images are due to the different image acquisition methods and limited area of correspondence between the two facial surfaces. In addition, it is difficult to use machine learning techniques because they use face-related 3D medical data with radiation exposure, which are difficult to obtain for training. The proposed method addresses these problems by reusing an existing machine-learning-based 2D landmark detection algorithm in an open-source library and developing a novel mathematical algorithm that identifies paired 3D landmarks from knowledge of the corresponding 2D landmarks. A main contribution of this study is that the proposed method does not require annotated training data of facial landmarks because it uses a pre-trained facial landmark detection algorithm that is known to be robust and generalized to various 2D face image models. Note that this reduces a 3D landmark detection problem to a 2D problem of identifying the corresponding landmarks on two 2D projection images generated from two different projection angles. Here, the 3D landmarks for registration were selected from the sub-surfaces with the least geometric change under the CBCT and face scan environments. For the final fine-tuning of the registration, the Iterative Closest Point method was applied, which utilizes geometrical information around the 3D landmarks. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved an averaged surface distance error of 0.74 mm for three pairs of CBCT and face scan datasets.
Pragmatic Reasoning in Structured Signaling Games
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

In this work we introduce a structured signaling game, an extension of the classical signaling game with a similarity structure between meanings in the context, along with a variant of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework which we call structured-RSA (sRSA) for pragmatic reasoning in structured domains. We explore the behavior of the sRSA in the domain of color and show that pragmatic agents using sRSA on top of semantic representations, derived from the World Color Survey, attain efficiency very close to the information theoretic limit after only 1 or 2 levels of recursion. We also explore the interaction between pragmatic reasoning and learning in multi-agent reinforcement learning framework. Our results illustrate that artificial agents using sRSA develop communication closer to the information theoretic frontier compared to agents using RSA and just reinforcement learning. We also find that the ambiguity of the semantic representation increases as the pragmatic agents are allowed to perform deeper reasoning about each other during learning.
Few-shot Joint Multimodal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis Based on Generative Multimodal Prompt
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

We have witnessed the rapid proliferation of multimodal data on numerous social media platforms. Conventional studies typically require massive labeled data to train models for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA). However, collecting and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for MABSA is tough. To alleviate the above issue, we perform three MABSA-related tasks with quite a small number of labeled multimodal samples. We first build diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets according to the data distribution. To capture the specific prompt for each aspect term in a few-shot scenario, we propose a novel Generative Multimodal Prompt (GMP) model for MABSA, which includes the Multimodal Encoder module and the N-Stream Decoders module. We further introduce a subtask to predict the number of aspect terms in each instance to construct the multimodal prompt. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baselines on two MABSA-related tasks in the few-shot setting.
Enhancement and Evaluation of MOXcatter
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Backscatter WiFi provides a novel solution to IoT device's energy consumption. Different from other backscatter WiFi solutions, MOXcatter works with multiple spatial streams, making it appliable in 802.11n and beyond. In this paper, we present a method to solve the problem of phase ambiguity in MOXcatter due to the deviation of packet offset measurement. The experiments show that by changing the modulation method from BPSK to DBPSK, MOXcatter achieves up to 10 dB gain in BER. We evaluate its performance and discuss possible enhancements and applications.
IDO-VFI: Identifying Dynamics via Optical Flow Guidance for Video Frame Interpolation with Events
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Video frame interpolation aims to generate high-quality intermediate frames from boundary frames and increase frame rate. While existing linear, symmetric and nonlinear models are used to bridge the gap from the lack of inter-frame motion, they cannot reconstruct real motions. Event cameras, however, are ideal for capturing inter-frame dynamics with their extremely high temporal resolution. In this paper, we propose an event-and-frame-based video frame interpolation method named IDO-VFI that assigns varying amounts of computation for different sub-regions via optical flow guidance. The proposed method first estimates the optical flow based on frames and events, and then decides whether to further calculate the residual optical flow in those sub-regions via a Gumbel gating module according to the optical flow amplitude. Intermediate frames are eventually generated through a concise Transformer-based fusion network. Our proposed method maintains high-quality performance while reducing computation time and computational effort by 10% and 17% respectively on Vimeo90K datasets, compared with a unified process on the whole region. Moreover, our method outperforms state-of-the-art frame-only and frames-plus-events methods on multiple video frame interpolation benchmarks. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/shicy17/IDO-VFI.
A Novel Stochastic LSTM Model Inspired by Quantum Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Works in quantum machine learning (QML) over the past few years indicate that QML algorithms can function just as well as their classical counterparts, and even outperform them in some cases. Among the corpus of recent work, many current QML models take advantage of variational quantum algorithm (VQA) circuits, given that their scale is typically small enough to be compatible with NISQ devices and the method of automatic differentiation for optimizing circuit parameters is familiar to machine learning (ML). While the results bear interesting promise for an era when quantum machines are more readily accessible, if one can achieve similar results through non-quantum methods then there may be a more near-term advantage available to practitioners. To this end, the nature of this work is to investigate the utilization of stochastic methods inspired by a variational quantum version of the long short-term memory (LSTM) model in an attempt to approach the reported successes in performance and rapid convergence. By analyzing the performance of classical, stochastic, and quantum methods, this work aims to elucidate if it is possible to achieve some of QML's major reported benefits on classical machines by incorporating aspects of its stochasticity.
Error-Correcting Codes for Nanopore Sequencing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Nanopore sequencing, superior to other sequencing technologies for DNA storage in multiple aspects, has recently attracted considerable attention. Its high error rates, however, demand thorough research on practical and efficient coding schemes to enable accurate recovery of stored data. To this end, we consider a simplified model of a nanopore sequencer inspired by Mao \emph{et al.}, incorporating intersymbol interference and measurement noise. Essentially, our channel model passes a sliding window of length \(\ell\) over a \(q\)-ary input sequence that outputs the \textit{composition} of the enclosed \(\ell\) bits and shifts by \(δ\) positions with each time step. In this context, the composition of a \(q\)-ary vector $\bfx$ specifies the number of occurrences in \(\bfx\) of each symbol in \(\lbrace 0,1,\ldots, q-1\rbrace\). The resulting compositions vector, termed the \emph{read vector}, may also be corrupted by \(t\) substitution errors. By employing graph-theoretic techniques, we deduce that for \(δ=1\), at least \(\log \log n\) symbols of redundancy are required to correct a single (\(t=1\)) substitution. Finally, for \(\ell \geq 3\), we exploit some inherent characteristics of read vectors to arrive at an error-correcting code that is of optimal redundancy up to a (small) additive constant for this setting. This construction is also found to be optimal for the case of reconstruction from two noisy read vectors.
How does Contrastive Learning Organize Images?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Contrastive learning, a dominant self-supervised technique, emphasizes similarity in representations between augmentations of the same input and dissimilarity for different ones. Although low contrastive loss often correlates with high classification accuracy, recent studies challenge this direct relationship, spotlighting the crucial role of inductive biases. We delve into these biases from a clustering viewpoint, noting that contrastive learning creates locally dense clusters, contrasting the globally dense clusters from supervised learning. To capture this discrepancy, we introduce the "RLD (Relative Local Density)" metric. While this cluster property can hinder linear classification accuracy, leveraging a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based classifier mitigates this, boosting accuracy and reducing parameter requirements. The code is available \href{https://github.com/xsgxlz/How-does-Contrastive-Learning-Organize-Images/tree/main}{here}.
Agent Heterogeneity Mediates Extremism in an Adaptive Social Network Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

An existing model of opinion dynamics on an adaptive social network is extended to introduce update policy heterogeneity, representing the fact that individual differences between social animals can affect their tendency to form, and be influenced by, their social bonds with other animals. As in the original model, the opinions and social connections of a population of model agents change due to three social processes: conformity, homophily and neophily. Here, however, we explore the case in which each node's susceptibility to these three processes is parameterised by node-specific values drawn independently at random from some distribution. This introduction of heterogeneity increases both the degree of extremism and connectedness in the final population (relative to comparable homogeneous networks) and leads to significant assortativity with respect to node update policy parameters as well as node opinions. Each node's update policy parameters also predict properties of the community that they will belong to in the final network configuration. These results suggest that update policy heterogeneity in social populations may have a significant impact on the formation of extremist communities in real-world populations.
M3KE: A Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models have recently made tremendous progress in a variety of aspects, e.g., cross-task generalization, instruction following. Comprehensively evaluating the capability of large language models in multiple tasks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose M3KE, a Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation benchmark, which is developed to measure knowledge acquired by Chinese large language models by testing their multitask accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings. We have collected 20,477 questions from 71 tasks. Our selection covers all major levels of Chinese education system, ranging from the primary school to college, as well as a wide variety of subjects, including humanities, history, politics, law, education, psychology, science, technology, art and religion. All questions are multiple-choice questions with four options, hence guaranteeing a standardized and unified assessment process. We've assessed a number of state-of-the-art open-source Chinese large language models on the proposed benchmark. The size of these models varies from 335M to 130B parameters. Experiment results demonstrate that they perform significantly worse than GPT-3.5 that reaches an accuracy of ~ 48% on M3KE. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/M3KE.
Rethinking Data Augmentation for Tabular Data in Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Tabular data is the most widely used data format in machine learning (ML). While tree-based methods outperform DL-based methods in supervised learning, recent literature reports that self-supervised learning with Transformer-based models outperforms tree-based methods. In the existing literature on self-supervised learning for tabular data, contrastive learning is the predominant method. In contrastive learning, data augmentation is important to generate different views. However, data augmentation for tabular data has been difficult due to the unique structure and high complexity of tabular data. In addition, three main components are proposed together in existing methods: model structure, self-supervised learning methods, and data augmentation. Therefore, previous works have compared the performance without comprehensively considering these components, and it is not clear how each component affects the actual performance. In this study, we focus on data augmentation to address these issues. We propose a novel data augmentation method, $\textbf{M}$ask $\textbf{T}$oken $\textbf{R}$eplacement ($\texttt{MTR}$), which replaces the mask token with a portion of each tokenized column; $\texttt{MTR}$ takes advantage of the properties of Transformer, which is becoming the predominant DL-based architecture for tabular data, to perform data augmentation for each column embedding. Through experiments with 13 diverse public datasets in both supervised and self-supervised learning scenarios, we show that $\texttt{MTR}$ achieves competitive performance against existing data augmentation methods and improves model performance. In addition, we discuss specific scenarios in which $\texttt{MTR}$ is most effective and identify the scope of its application. The code is available at https://github.com/somaonishi/MTR/.
Automatic Photo Orientation Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We apply convolutional neural networks (CNN) to the problem of image orientation detection in the context of determining the correct orientation (from 0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees) of a consumer photo. The problem is especially important for digitazing analog photographs. We substantially improve on the published state of the art in terms of the performance on one of the standard datasets, and test our system on a more difficult large dataset of consumer photos. We use Guided Backpropagation to obtain insights into how our CNN detects photo orientation, and to explain its mistakes.