OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Quantitative Analysis of Forecasting Models:In the Aspect of Online Political Bias
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding and mitigating political bias in online social media platforms are crucial tasks to combat misinformation and echo chamber effects. However, characterizing political bias temporally using computational methods presents challenges due to the high frequency of noise in social media datasets. While existing research has explored various approaches to political bias characterization, the ability to forecast political bias and anticipate how political conversations might evolve in the near future has not been extensively studied. In this paper, we propose a heuristic approach to classify social media posts into five distinct political leaning categories. Since there is a lack of prior work on forecasting political bias, we conduct an in-depth analysis of existing baseline models to identify which model best fits to forecast political leaning time series. Our approach involves utilizing existing time series forecasting models on two social media datasets with different political ideologies, specifically Twitter and Gab. Through our experiments and analyses, we seek to shed light on the challenges and opportunities in forecasting political bias in social media platforms. Ultimately, our work aims to pave the way for developing more effective strategies to mitigate the negative impact of political bias in the digital realm.
Learning the Geodesic Embedding with Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present GeGnn, a learning-based method for computing the approximate geodesic distance between two arbitrary points on discrete polyhedra surfaces with constant time complexity after fast precomputation. Previous relevant methods either focus on computing the geodesic distance between a single source and all destinations, which has linear complexity at least or require a long precomputation time. Our key idea is to train a graph neural network to embed an input mesh into a high-dimensional embedding space and compute the geodesic distance between a pair of points using the corresponding embedding vectors and a lightweight decoding function. To facilitate the learning of the embedding, we propose novel graph convolution and graph pooling modules that incorporate local geodesic information and are verified to be much more effective than previous designs. After training, our method requires only one forward pass of the network per mesh as precomputation. Then, we can compute the geodesic distance between a pair of points using our decoding function, which requires only several matrix multiplications and can be massively parallelized on GPUs. We verify the efficiency and effectiveness of our method on ShapeNet and demonstrate that our method is faster than existing methods by orders of magnitude while achieving comparable or better accuracy. Additionally, our method exhibits robustness on noisy and incomplete meshes and strong generalization ability on out-of-distribution meshes. The code and pretrained model can be found on https://github.com/IntelligentGeometry/GeGnn.
Latte: Lightweight Aliasing Tracking for Java
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Many existing systems track aliasing and uniqueness, each with their own trade-off between expressiveness and developer effort. We propose Latte, a new approach that aims to minimize both the amount of annotations and the complexity of invariants necessary for reasoning about aliasing in an object-oriented language with mutation. Our approach only requires annotations for parameters and fields, while annotations for local variables are inferred. Furthermore, it relaxes uniqueness to allow aliasing among local variables, as long as this aliasing can be precisely determined. This enables support for destructive reads without changes to the language or its run-time semantics. Despite this simplicity, we show how this design can still be used for tracking uniqueness and aliasing in a local sequential setting, with practical applications, such as modeling a stack.
Dynamic Handover: Throw and Catch with Bimanual Hands
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Humans throw and catch objects all the time. However, such a seemingly common skill introduces a lot of challenges for robots to achieve: The robots need to operate such dynamic actions at high-speed, collaborate precisely, and interact with diverse objects. In this paper, we design a system with two multi-finger hands attached to robot arms to solve this problem. We train our system using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in simulation and perform Sim2Real transfer to deploy on the real robots. To overcome the Sim2Real gap, we provide multiple novel algorithm designs including learning a trajectory prediction model for the object. Such a model can help the robot catcher has a real-time estimation of where the object will be heading, and then react accordingly. We conduct our experiments with multiple objects in the real-world system, and show significant improvements over multiple baselines. Our project page is available at \url{https://binghao-huang.github.io/dynamic_handover/}.
Circles: Inter-Model Comparison of Multi-Classification Problems with High Number of Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

The recent advancements in machine learning have motivated researchers to generate classification models dealing with hundreds of classes such as in the case of image datasets. However, visualization of classification models with high number of classes and inter-model comparison in such classification problems are two areas that have not received much attention in the literature, despite the ever-increasing use of classification models to address problems with very large class categories. In this paper, we present our interactive visual analytics tool, called Circles, that allows a visual inter-model comparison of numerous classification models with 1K classes in one view. To mitigate the tricky issue of visual clutter, we chose concentric a radial line layout for our inter-model comparison task. Our prototype shows the results of 9 models with 1K classes
MultiCaM-Vis: Visual Exploration of Multi-Classification Model with High Number of Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Visual exploration of multi-classification models with large number of classes would help machine learning experts in identifying the root cause of a problem that occurs during learning phase such as miss-classification of instances. Most of the previous visual analytics solutions targeted only a few classes. In this paper, we present our interactive visual analytics tool, called MultiCaM-Vis, that provides \Emph{overview+detail} style parallel coordinate views and a Chord diagram for exploration and inspection of class-level miss-classification of instances. We also present results of a preliminary user study with 12 participants.
A compendium of data sources for data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recent advances in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, such as the emergence of large language models, are leading to an increasing demand for data that can be processed by such models. While data sources are application-specific, and it is impossible to produce an exhaustive list of such data sources, it seems that a comprehensive, rather than complete, list would still benefit data scientists and machine learning experts of all levels of seniority. The goal of this publication is to provide just such an (inevitably incomplete) list -- or compendium -- of data sources across multiple areas of applications, including finance and economics, legal (laws and regulations), life sciences (medicine and drug discovery), news sentiment and social media, retail and ecommerce, satellite imagery, and shipping and logistics, and sports.
Evaluating the Reliability of CNN Models on Classifying Traffic and Road Signs using LIME
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The objective of this investigation is to evaluate and contrast the effectiveness of four state-of-the-art pre-trained models, ResNet-34, VGG-19, DenseNet-121, and Inception V3, in classifying traffic and road signs with the utilization of the GTSRB public dataset. The study focuses on evaluating the accuracy of these models' predictions as well as their ability to employ appropriate features for image categorization. To gain insights into the strengths and limitations of the model's predictions, the study employs the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) framework. The findings of this experiment indicate that LIME is a crucial tool for improving the interpretability and dependability of machine learning models for image identification, regardless of the models achieving an f1 score of 0.99 on classifying traffic and road signs. The conclusion of this study has important ramifications for how these models are used in practice, as it is crucial to ensure that model predictions are founded on the pertinent image features.
Rice Plant Disease Detection and Diagnosis using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks and Multispectral Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Rice is considered a strategic crop in Egypt as it is regularly consumed in the Egyptian people's diet. Even though Egypt is the highest rice producer in Africa with a share of 6 million tons per year, it still imports rice to satisfy its local needs due to production loss, especially due to rice disease. Rice blast disease is responsible for 30% loss in rice production worldwide. Therefore, it is crucial to target limiting yield damage by detecting rice crops diseases in its early stages. This paper introduces a public multispectral and RGB images dataset and a deep learning pipeline for rice plant disease detection using multi-modal data. The collected multispectral images consist of Red, Green and Near-Infrared channels and we show that using multispectral along with RGB channels as input archives a higher F1 accuracy compared to using RGB input only.
Instance-Agnostic Geometry and Contact Dynamics Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This work presents an instance-agnostic learning framework that fuses vision with dynamics to simultaneously learn shape, pose trajectories, and physical properties via the use of geometry as a shared representation. Unlike many contact learning approaches that assume motion capture input and a known shape prior for the collision model, our proposed framework learns an object's geometric and dynamic properties from RGBD video, without requiring either category-level or instance-level shape priors. We integrate a vision system, BundleSDF, with a dynamics system, ContactNets, and propose a cyclic training pipeline to use the output from the dynamics module to refine the poses and the geometry from the vision module, using perspective reprojection. Experiments demonstrate our framework's ability to learn the geometry and dynamics of rigid and convex objects and improve upon the current tracking framework.
Self-Correlation and Cross-Correlation Learning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Remote sensing image semantic segmentation is an important problem for remote sensing image interpretation. Although remarkable progress has been achieved, existing deep neural network methods suffer from the reliance on massive training data. Few-shot remote sensing semantic segmentation aims at learning to segment target objects from a query image using only a few annotated support images of the target class. Most existing few-shot learning methods stem primarily from their sole focus on extracting information from support images, thereby failing to effectively address the large variance in appearance and scales of geographic objects. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Self-Correlation and Cross-Correlation Learning Network for the few-shot remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Our model enhances the generalization by considering both self-correlation and cross-correlation between support and query images to make segmentation predictions. To further explore the self-correlation with the query image, we propose to adopt a classical spectral method to produce a class-agnostic segmentation mask based on the basic visual information of the image. Extensive experiments on two remote sensing image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model in few-shot remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Code and models will be accessed at https://github.com/linhanwang/SCCNet.
Public key cryptosystems based on Iterated Functions Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Let $f=(f_0,f_1,\dots, f_{ν-1})$ be a collection of one-to-one functions from some space~$X$ into itself such that the sets $f_j(X)$ are disjoint. If $w=w_1w_2\cdots w_k$ is a word on the alphabet $\{0,1,\dots,ν-1\}$, let $Φ_{f,w} = f_{w_1}\circ f_{w_2}\circ\cdots\circ f_{w_k}$. Given a function~$F$ of which we know that it can be written as $Φ_{f,w}$, it is easy to recover~$w$. We give some examples of this situation where everything can be scrambled up by using some private key to get a new system $g=(g_1,g_2,\dots,g_{ν-1})$ on another set~$Y$ in such a way that the images of the $g_j$ are no longer disjoint. We define a cryptosystem whose public key is~$g$. The message to be encrypted is a word~$w$ and the associated cryptogram is $Φ_{g,w}$. The private key allows to recover $Φ_{f,w}$ from $Φ_{g,w}$.
Beyond Generation: Harnessing Text to Image Models for Object Detection and Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a new paradigm to automatically generate training data with accurate labels at scale using the text-to-image synthesis frameworks (e.g., DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc.). The proposed approach1 decouples training data generation into foreground object generation, and contextually coherent background generation. To generate foreground objects, we employ a straightforward textual template, incorporating the object class name as input prompts. This is fed into a text-to-image synthesis framework, producing various foreground images set against isolated backgrounds. A foreground-background segmentation algorithm is then used to generate foreground object masks. To generate context images, we begin by creating language descriptions of the context. This is achieved by applying an image captioning method to a small set of images representing the desired context. These textual descriptions are then transformed into a diverse array of context images via a text-to-image synthesis framework. Subsequently, we composite these with the foreground object masks produced in the initial step, utilizing a cut-and-paste method, to formulate the training data. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach on five object detection and segmentation datasets, including Pascal VOC and COCO. We found that detectors trained solely on synthetic data produced by our method achieve performance comparable to those trained on real data (Fig. 1). Moreover, a combination of real and synthetic data yields even much better results. Further analysis indicates that the synthetic data distribution complements the real data distribution effectively. Additionally, we emphasize the compositional nature of our data generation approach in out-of-distribution and zero-shot data generation scenarios. We open-source our code at https://github.com/gyhandy/Text2Image-for-Detection
The Moral Machine Experiment on Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

As large language models (LLMs) become more deeply integrated into various sectors, understanding how they make moral judgments has become crucial, particularly in the realm of autonomous driving. This study utilized the Moral Machine framework to investigate the ethical decision-making tendencies of prominent LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM 2, and Llama 2, comparing their responses to human preferences. While LLMs' and humans' preferences such as prioritizing humans over pets and favoring saving more lives are broadly aligned, PaLM 2 and Llama 2, especially, evidence distinct deviations. Additionally, despite the qualitative similarities between the LLM and human preferences, there are significant quantitative disparities, suggesting that LLMs might lean toward more uncompromising decisions, compared to the milder inclinations of humans. These insights elucidate the ethical frameworks of LLMs and their potential implications for autonomous driving.
Massive Access of Static and Mobile Users via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Protocol Design and Performance Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The envisioned wireless networks of the future entail the provisioning of massive numbers of connections, heterogeneous data traffic, ultra-high spectral efficiency, and low latency services. This vision is spurring research activities focused on defining a next generation multiple access (NGMA) protocol that can accommodate massive numbers of users in different resource blocks, thereby, achieving higher spectral efficiency and increased connectivity compared to conventional multiple access schemes. In this article, we present a multiple access scheme for NGMA in wireless communication systems assisted by multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). In this regard, considering the practical scenario of static users operating together with mobile ones, we first study the interplay of the design of NGMA schemes and RIS phase configuration in terms of efficiency and complexity. Based on this, we then propose a multiple access framework for RIS-assisted communication systems, and we also design a medium access control (MAC) protocol incorporating RISs. In addition, we give a detailed performance analysis of the designed RIS-assisted MAC protocol. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MAC design outperforms the benchmarks in terms of system throughput and access fairness, and also reveal a trade-off relationship between the system throughput and fairness.
Optimizing Reported Age of Information with Short Error Correction and Detection Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Timely sampling and fresh information delivery are important in 6G communications. This is achieved by encoding samples into short packets/codewords for transmission, with potential decoding errors. We consider a broadcasting base station (BS) that samples information from multiple sources and transmits to respective destinations/users, using short-blocklength cyclic and deep learning (DL) based codes for error correction, and cyclic-redundancy-check (CRC) codes for error detection. We use a metric called reported age of information (AoI), abbreviated as RAoI, to measure the freshness of information, which increases from an initial value if the CRC reports a failure, else is reset. We minimize long-term average expected RAoI, subject to constraints on transmission power and distortion, for which we obtain age-agnostic randomized and age-aware drift-plus-penalty policies that decide which user to transmit to, with what message-word length and transmit power, and derive bounds on their performance. Simulations show that longer CRC codes lead to higher RAoI, but the RAoI achieved is closer to the true, genie-aided AoI. DL-based codes achieve lower RAoI. Finally, we conclude that prior AoI optimization literature with finite blocklengths substantially underestimates AoI because they assume that all errors can be detected perfectly without using CRC.
Learning Unbiased News Article Representations: A Knowledge-Infused Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Quantification of the political leaning of online news articles can aid in understanding the dynamics of political ideology in social groups and measures to mitigating them. However, predicting the accurate political leaning of a news article with machine learning models is a challenging task. This is due to (i) the political ideology of a news article is defined by several factors, and (ii) the innate nature of existing learning models to be biased with the political bias of the news publisher during the model training. There is only a limited number of methods to study the political leaning of news articles which also do not consider the algorithmic political bias which lowers the generalization of machine learning models to predict the political leaning of news articles published by any new news publishers. In this work, we propose a knowledge-infused deep learning model that utilizes relatively reliable external data resources to learn unbiased representations of news articles using their global and local contexts. We evaluate the proposed model by setting the data in such a way that news domains or news publishers in the test set are completely unseen during the training phase. With this setup we show that the proposed model mitigates algorithmic political bias and outperforms baseline methods to predict the political leaning of news articles with up to 73% accuracy.
SoccerNet 2023 Challenges Results
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.
GVD-Exploration: An Efficient Autonomous Robot Exploration Framework Based on Fast Generalized Voronoi Diagram Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) are a popular technique for autonomous exploration of mobile robots. However, the random sampling used by RRTs can result in inefficient and inaccurate frontiers extraction, which affects the exploration performance. To address the issues of slow path planning and high path cost, we propose a framework that uses a generalized Voronoi diagram (GVD) based multi-choice strategy for robot exploration. Our framework consists of three components: a novel mapping model that uses an end-to-end neural network to construct GVDs of the environments in real time; a GVD-based heuristic scheme that accelerates frontiers extraction and reduces frontiers redundancy; and a multi-choice frontiers assignment scheme that considers different types of frontiers and enables the robot to make rational decisions during the exploration process. We evaluate our method on simulation and real-world experiments and show that it outperforms RRT-based exploration methods in terms of efficiency and robustness.