OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
OV-VG: A Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Open-vocabulary learning has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, particularly in light of the widespread adoption of vision-based foundational models. Its primary objective is to comprehend novel concepts that are not encompassed within a predefined vocabulary. One key facet of this endeavor is Visual Grounding, which entails locating a specific region within an image based on a corresponding language description. While current foundational models excel at various visual language tasks, there's a noticeable absence of models specifically tailored for open-vocabulary visual grounding. This research endeavor introduces novel and challenging OV tasks, namely Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding and Open-Vocabulary Phrase Localization. The overarching aim is to establish connections between language descriptions and the localization of novel objects. To facilitate this, we have curated a comprehensive annotated benchmark, encompassing 7,272 OV-VG images and 1,000 OV-PL images. In our pursuit of addressing these challenges, we delved into various baseline methodologies rooted in existing open-vocabulary object detection, VG, and phrase localization frameworks. Surprisingly, we discovered that state-of-the-art methods often falter in diverse scenarios. Consequently, we developed a novel framework that integrates two critical components: Text-Image Query Selection and Language-Guided Feature Attention. These modules are designed to bolster the recognition of novel categories and enhance the alignment between visual and linguistic information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework, which consistently attains SOTA performance across the OV-VG task. Additionally, ablation studies provide further evidence of the effectiveness of our innovative models. Codes and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cv516Buaa/OV-VG.
Cross-Domain HAR: Few Shot Transfer Learning for Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The ubiquitous availability of smartphones and smartwatches with integrated inertial measurement units (IMUs) enables straightforward capturing of human activities. For specific applications of sensor based human activity recognition (HAR), however, logistical challenges and burgeoning costs render especially the ground truth annotation of such data a difficult endeavor, resulting in limited scale and diversity of datasets. Transfer learning, i.e., leveraging publicly available labeled datasets to first learn useful representations that can then be fine-tuned using limited amounts of labeled data from a target domain, can alleviate some of the performance issues of contemporary HAR systems. Yet they can fail when the differences between source and target conditions are too large and/ or only few samples from a target application domain are available, each of which are typical challenges in real-world human activity recognition scenarios. In this paper, we present an approach for economic use of publicly available labeled HAR datasets for effective transfer learning. We introduce a novel transfer learning framework, Cross-Domain HAR, which follows the teacher-student self-training paradigm to more effectively recognize activities with very limited label information. It bridges conceptual gaps between source and target domains, including sensor locations and type of activities. Through our extensive experimental evaluation on a range of benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for practically relevant few shot activity recognition scenarios. We also present a detailed analysis into how the individual components of our framework affect downstream performance.
ConViViT -- A Deep Neural Network Combining Convolutions and Factorized Self-Attention for Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The Transformer architecture has gained significant popularity in computer vision tasks due to its capacity to generalize and capture long-range dependencies. This characteristic makes it well-suited for generating spatiotemporal tokens from videos. On the other hand, convolutions serve as the fundamental backbone for processing images and videos, as they efficiently aggregate information within small local neighborhoods to create spatial tokens that describe the spatial dimension of a video. While both CNN-based architectures and pure transformer architectures are extensively studied and utilized by researchers, the effective combination of these two backbones has not received comparable attention in the field of activity recognition. In this research, we propose a novel approach that leverages the strengths of both CNNs and Transformers in an hybrid architecture for performing activity recognition using RGB videos. Specifically, we suggest employing a CNN network to enhance the video representation by generating a 128-channel video that effectively separates the human performing the activity from the background. Subsequently, the output of the CNN module is fed into a transformer to extract spatiotemporal tokens, which are then used for classification purposes. Our architecture has achieved new SOTA results with 90.05 \%, 99.6\%, and 95.09\% on HMDB51, UCF101, and ETRI-Activity3D respectively.
Text generation for dataset augmentation in security classification tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Security classifiers, designed to detect malicious content in computer systems and communications, can underperform when provided with insufficient training data. In the security domain, it is often easy to find samples of the negative (benign) class, and challenging to find enough samples of the positive (malicious) class to train an effective classifier. This study evaluates the application of natural language text generators to fill this data gap in multiple security-related text classification tasks. We describe a variety of previously-unexamined language-model fine-tuning approaches for this purpose and consider in particular the impact of disproportionate class-imbalances in the training set. Across our evaluation using three state-of-the-art classifiers designed for offensive language detection, review fraud detection, and SMS spam detection, we find that models trained with GPT-3 data augmentation strategies outperform both models trained without augmentation and models trained using basic data augmentation strategies already in common usage. In particular, we find substantial benefits for GPT-3 data augmentation strategies in situations with severe limitations on known positive-class samples.
Retrieval-Augmented Chain-of-Thought in Semi-structured Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Applying existing question answering (QA) systems to specialized domains like law and finance presents challenges that necessitate domain expertise. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive language comprehension and in-context learning capabilities, their inability to handle very long inputs/contexts is well known. Tasks specific to these domains need significant background knowledge, leading to contexts that can often exceed the maximum length that existing LLMs can process. This study explores leveraging the semi-structured nature of legal and financial data to efficiently retrieve relevant context, enabling the use of LLMs for domain-specialized QA. The resulting system outperforms contemporary models and also provides useful explanations for the answers, encouraging the integration of LLMs into legal and financial NLP systems for future research.
Mobile AR Depth Estimation: Challenges & Prospects -- Extended Version
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Metric depth estimation plays an important role in mobile augmented reality (AR). With accurate metric depth, we can achieve more realistic user interactions such as object placement and occlusion detection. While specialized hardware like LiDAR demonstrates its promise, its restricted availability, i.e., only on selected high-end mobile devices, and performance limitations such as range and sensitivity to the environment, make it less ideal. Monocular depth estimation, on the other hand, relies solely on mobile cameras, which are ubiquitous, making it a promising alternative for mobile AR. In this paper, we investigate the challenges and opportunities of achieving accurate metric depth estimation in mobile AR. We tested four different state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models on a newly introduced dataset (ARKitScenes) and identified three types of challenges: hard-ware, data, and model related challenges. Furthermore, our research provides promising future directions to explore and solve those challenges. These directions include (i) using more hardware-related information from the mobile device's camera and other available sensors, (ii) capturing high-quality data to reflect real-world AR scenarios, and (iii) designing a model architecture to utilize the new information.
Diffusion-Model-Assisted Supervised Learning of Generative Models for Density Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present a supervised learning framework of training generative models for density estimation. Generative models, including generative adversarial networks, normalizing flows, variational auto-encoders, are usually considered as unsupervised learning models, because labeled data are usually unavailable for training. Despite the success of the generative models, there are several issues with the unsupervised training, e.g., requirement of reversible architectures, vanishing gradients, and training instability. To enable supervised learning in generative models, we utilize the score-based diffusion model to generate labeled data. Unlike existing diffusion models that train neural networks to learn the score function, we develop a training-free score estimation method. This approach uses mini-batch-based Monte Carlo estimators to directly approximate the score function at any spatial-temporal location in solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE), corresponding to the reverse-time stochastic differential equation (SDE). This approach can offer both high accuracy and substantial time savings in neural network training. Once the labeled data are generated, we can train a simple fully connected neural network to learn the generative model in the supervised manner. Compared with existing normalizing flow models, our method does not require to use reversible neural networks and avoids the computation of the Jacobian matrix. Compared with existing diffusion models, our method does not need to solve the reverse-time SDE to generate new samples. As a result, the sampling efficiency is significantly improved. We demonstrate the performance of our method by applying it to a set of 2D datasets as well as real data from the UCI repository.
Text Fact Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Text style transfer is a prominent task that aims to control the style of text without inherently changing its factual content. To cover more text modification applications, such as adapting past news for current events and repurposing educational materials, we propose the task of text fact transfer, which seeks to transfer the factual content of a source text between topics without modifying its style. We find that existing language models struggle with text fact transfer, due to their inability to preserve the specificity and phrasing of the source text, and tendency to hallucinate errors. To address these issues, we design ModQGA, a framework that minimally modifies a source text with a novel combination of end-to-end question generation and specificity-aware question answering. Through experiments on four existing datasets adapted for text fact transfer, we show that ModQGA can accurately transfer factual content without sacrificing the style of the source text.
CITB: A Benchmark for Continual Instruction Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Continual learning (CL) is a paradigm that aims to replicate the human ability to learn and accumulate knowledge continually without forgetting previous knowledge and transferring it to new tasks. Recent instruction tuning (IT) involves fine-tuning models to make them more adaptable to solving NLP tasks in general. However, it is still uncertain how instruction tuning works in the context of CL tasks. This challenging yet practical problem is formulated as Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT). In this work, we establish a CIT benchmark consisting of learning and evaluation protocols. We curate two long dialogue task streams of different types, InstrDialog and InstrDialog++, to study various CL methods systematically. Our experiments show that existing CL methods do not effectively leverage the rich natural language instructions, and fine-tuning an instruction-tuned model sequentially can yield similar or better results. We further explore different aspects that might affect the learning of CIT. We hope this benchmark will facilitate more research in this direction.
Marginal Nodes Matter: Towards Structure Fairness in Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In social network, a person located at the periphery region (marginal node) is likely to be treated unfairly when compared with the persons at the center. While existing fairness works on graphs mainly focus on protecting sensitive attributes (e.g., age and gender), the fairness incurred by the graph structure should also be given attention. On the other hand, the information aggregation mechanism of graph neural networks amplifies such structure unfairness, as marginal nodes are often far away from other nodes. In this paper, we focus on novel fairness incurred by the graph structure on graph neural networks, named \emph{structure fairness}. Specifically, we first analyzed multiple graphs and observed that marginal nodes in graphs have a worse performance of downstream tasks than others in graph neural networks. Motivated by the observation, we propose \textbf{S}tructural \textbf{Fair} \textbf{G}raph \textbf{N}eural \textbf{N}etwork (SFairGNN), which combines neighborhood expansion based structure debiasing with hop-aware attentive information aggregation to achieve structure fairness. Our experiments show \SFairGNN can significantly improve structure fairness while maintaining overall performance in the downstream tasks.
Practical Deep Dispersed Watermarking with Synchronization and Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning based blind watermarking works have gradually emerged and achieved impressive performance. However, previous deep watermarking studies mainly focus on fixed low-resolution images while paying less attention to arbitrary resolution images, especially widespread high-resolution images nowadays. Moreover, most works usually demonstrate robustness against typical non-geometric attacks (\textit{e.g.}, JPEG compression) but ignore common geometric attacks (\textit{e.g.}, Rotate) and more challenging combined attacks. To overcome the above limitations, we propose a practical deep \textbf{D}ispersed \textbf{W}atermarking with \textbf{S}ynchronization and \textbf{F}usion, called \textbf{\proposed}. Specifically, given an arbitrary-resolution cover image, we adopt a dispersed embedding scheme which sparsely and randomly selects several fixed small-size cover blocks to embed a consistent watermark message by a well-trained encoder. In the extraction stage, we first design a watermark synchronization module to locate and rectify the encoded blocks in the noised watermarked image. We then utilize a decoder to obtain messages embedded in these blocks, and propose a message fusion strategy based on similarity to make full use of the consistency among messages, thus determining a reliable message. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed {\proposed}. Compared with state-of-the-art approaches, our blind watermarking can achieve better performance: averagely improve the bit accuracy by 5.28\% and 5.93\% against single and combined attacks, respectively, and show less file size increment and better visual quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/DWSF.
FedSplitX: Federated Split Learning for Computationally-Constrained Heterogeneous Clients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Foundation models (FMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in machine learning but demand extensive training data and computational resources. Federated learning (FL) addresses the challenges posed by FMs, especially related to data privacy and computational burdens. However, FL on FMs faces challenges in situations with heterogeneous clients possessing varying computing capabilities, as clients with limited capabilities may struggle to train the computationally intensive FMs. To address these challenges, we propose FedSplitX, a novel FL framework that tackles system heterogeneity. FedSplitX splits a large model into client-side and server-side components at multiple partition points to accommodate diverse client capabilities. This approach enables clients to collaborate while leveraging the server's computational power, leading to improved model performance compared to baselines that limit model size to meet the requirement of the poorest client. Furthermore, FedSplitX incorporates auxiliary networks at each partition point to reduce communication costs and delays while enhancing model performance. Our experiments demonstrate that FedSplitX effectively utilizes server capabilities to train large models, outperforming baseline approaches.
Online Auditing of Information Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Modern social media platforms play an important role in facilitating rapid dissemination of information through their massive user networks. Fake news, misinformation, and unverifiable facts on social media platforms propagate disharmony and affect society. In this paper, we consider the problem of online auditing of information flow/propagation with the goal of classifying news items as fake or genuine. Specifically, driven by experiential studies on real-world social media platforms, we propose a probabilistic Markovian information spread model over networks modeled by graphs. We then formulate our inference task as a certain sequential detection problem with the goal of minimizing the combination of the error probability and the time it takes to achieve correct decision. For this model, we find the optimal detection algorithm minimizing the aforementioned risk and prove several statistical guarantees. We then test our algorithm over real-world datasets. To that end, we first construct an offline algorithm for learning the probabilistic information spreading model, and then apply our optimal detection algorithm. Experimental study show that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art misinformation detection algorithms in terms of accuracy and detection time.
Learning to Correct Noisy Labels for Fine-Grained Entity Typing via Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Fine-grained entity typing (FET) is an essential task in natural language processing that aims to assign semantic types to entities in text. However, FET poses a major challenge known as the noise labeling problem, whereby current methods rely on estimating noise distribution to identify noisy labels but are confused by diverse noise distribution deviation. To address this limitation, we introduce Co-Prediction Prompt Tuning for noise correction in FET, which leverages multiple prediction results to identify and correct noisy labels. Specifically, we integrate prediction results to recall labeled labels and utilize a differentiated margin to identify inaccurate labels. Moreover, we design an optimization objective concerning divergent co-predictions during fine-tuning, ensuring that the model captures sufficient information and maintains robustness in noise identification. Experimental results on three widely-used FET datasets demonstrate that our noise correction approach significantly enhances the quality of various types of training samples, including those annotated using distant supervision, ChatGPT, and crowdsourcing.
Optimal Edge Caching For Individualized Demand Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

The ever-growing end user data demands, and the simultaneous reductions in memory costs are fueling edge-caching deployments. Caching at the edge is substantially different from that at the core and needs to take into account the nature of individual data demands. For example, an individual user may not be interested in requesting the same data item again, if it has recently requested it. Such individual dynamics are not apparent in the aggregated data requests at the core and have not been considered in popularity-driven caching designs for the core. Hence, these traditional caching policies could induce significant inefficiencies when applied at the edges. To address this issue, we develop new edge caching policies optimized for the individual demands that also leverage overhearing opportunities at the wireless edge. With the objective of maximizing the hit ratio, the proposed policies will actively evict the data items that are not likely to be requested in the near future, and strategically bring them back into the cache through overhearing when they are likely to be popular again. Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed edge caching policies could outperform the popularity-driven policies that are optimal at the core.
SPRING-INX: A Multilingual Indian Language Speech Corpus by SPRING Lab, IIT Madras
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

India is home to a multitude of languages of which 22 languages are recognised by the Indian Constitution as official. Building speech based applications for the Indian population is a difficult problem owing to limited data and the number of languages and accents to accommodate. To encourage the language technology community to build speech based applications in Indian languages, we are open sourcing SPRING-INX data which has about 2000 hours of legally sourced and manually transcribed speech data for ASR system building in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Tamil. This endeavor is by SPRING Lab , Indian Institute of Technology Madras and is a part of National Language Translation Mission (NLTM), funded by the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), Government of India. We describe the data collection and data cleaning process along with the data statistics in this paper.
Non-contact Cold Thermal Display by Controlling Low-temperature Air Flow Generated with Vortex Tube
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, thermal display has been studied intensively in order to represent a more realistic tactile quality of the object. Since human feels the temperature of the air without touching other objects, it is necessary to present thermal sensation in a non-contact manner. Studies on non-contact heat display have been explored; however, few studies have reported on a device that can display cold in a non-contact manner. In this study, we propose a non-contact cold thermal display using a low-temperature heat source-vortex tube, which can generate ultra-low air temperature when supplied with compressed air. We developed a cooling model that relates the flow velocity of cold air with the absorbed heat from skin; we implemented a prototype system that can control the flow velocity of the generated air; and we conducted an experiment to examine the cold sensation that the system can present. Our results revealed that various cold sensations can be generated so that the faster the flow velocity, the colder a user would feel.