OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
RMap: Millimeter-Wave Radar Mapping Through Volumetric Upsampling
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Millimeter Wave Radar is being adopted as a viable alternative to lidar and radar in adverse visually degraded conditions, such as the presence of fog and dust. However, this sensor modality suffers from severe sparsity and noise under nominal conditions, which makes it difficult to use in precise applications such as mapping. This work presents a novel solution to generate accurate 3D maps from sparse radar point clouds. RMap uses a custom generative transformer architecture, UpPoinTr, which upsamples, denoises, and fills the incomplete radar maps to resemble lidar maps. We test this method on the ColoRadar dataset to demonstrate its efficacy.
Identification of Abnormality in Maize Plants From UAV Images Using Deep Learning Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Early identification of abnormalities in plants is an important task for ensuring proper growth and achieving high yields from crops. Precision agriculture can significantly benefit from modern computer vision tools to make farming strategies addressing these issues efficient and effective. As farming lands are typically quite large, farmers have to manually check vast areas to determine the status of the plants and apply proper treatments. In this work, we consider the problem of automatically identifying abnormal regions in maize plants from images captured by a UAV. Using deep learning techniques, we have developed a methodology which can detect different levels of abnormality (i.e., low, medium, high or no abnormality) in maize plants independently of their growth stage. The primary goal is to identify anomalies at the earliest possible stage in order to maximize the effectiveness of potential treatments. At the same time, the proposed system can provide valuable information to human annotators for ground truth data collection by helping them to focus their attention on a much smaller set of images only. We have experimented with two different but complimentary approaches, the first considering abnormality detection as a classification problem and the second considering it as a regression problem. Both approaches can be generalized to different types of abnormalities and do not make any assumption about the abnormality occurring at an early plant growth stage which might be easier to detect due to the plants being smaller and easier to separate. As a case study, we have considered a publicly available data set which exhibits mostly Nitrogen deficiency in maize plants of various growth stages. We are reporting promising preliminary results with an 88.89\% detection accuracy of low abnormality and 100\% detection accuracy of no abnormality.
A Study of Fitness Gains in Evolving Finite State Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Among the wide variety of evolutionary computing models, Finite State Machines (FSMs) have several attractions for fundamental research. They are easy to understand in concept and can be visualised clearly in simple cases. They have a ready fitness criterion through their relationship with Regular Languages. They have also been shown to be tractably evolvable, even up to exhibiting evidence of open-ended evolution in specific scenarios. In addition to theoretical attraction, they also have industrial applications, as a paradigm of both automated and user-initiated control. Improving the understanding of the factors affecting FSM evolution has relevance to both computer science and practical optimisation of control. We investigate an evolutionary scenario of FSMs adapting to recognise one of a family of Regular Languages by categorising positive and negative samples, while also being under a counteracting selection pressure that favours fewer states. The results appear to indicate that longer strings provided as samples reduce the speed of fitness gain, when fitness is measured against a fixed number of sample strings. We draw the inference that additional information from longer strings is not sufficient to compensate for sparser coverage of the combinatorial space of positive and negative sample strings.
Auxiliary Features-Guided Super Resolution for Monte Carlo Rendering
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper investigates super resolution to reduce the number of pixels to render and thus speed up Monte Carlo rendering algorithms. While great progress has been made to super resolution technologies, it is essentially an ill-posed problem and cannot recover high-frequency details in renderings. To address this problem, we exploit high-resolution auxiliary features to guide super resolution of low-resolution renderings. These high-resolution auxiliary features can be quickly rendered by a rendering engine and at the same time provide valuable high-frequency details to assist super resolution. To this end, we develop a cross-modality Transformer network that consists of an auxiliary feature branch and a low-resolution rendering branch. These two branches are designed to fuse high-resolution auxiliary features with the corresponding low-resolution rendering. Furthermore, we design residual densely-connected Swin Transformer groups to learn to extract representative features to enable high-quality super-resolution. Our experiments show that our auxiliary features-guided super-resolution method outperforms both super-resolution methods and Monte Carlo denoising methods in producing high-quality renderings.
Open-source Large Language Models are Strong Zero-shot Query Likelihood Models for Document Ranking
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

In the field of information retrieval, Query Likelihood Models (QLMs) rank documents based on the probability of generating the query given the content of a document. Recently, advanced large language models (LLMs) have emerged as effective QLMs, showcasing promising ranking capabilities. This paper focuses on investigating the genuine zero-shot ranking effectiveness of recent LLMs, which are solely pre-trained on unstructured text data without supervised instruction fine-tuning. Our findings reveal the robust zero-shot ranking ability of such LLMs, highlighting that additional instruction fine-tuning may hinder effectiveness unless a question generation task is present in the fine-tuning dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a novel state-of-the-art ranking system that integrates LLM-based QLMs with a hybrid zero-shot retriever, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. We make our codebase publicly available at https://github.com/ielab/llm-qlm.
MoqaGPT : Zero-Shot Multi-modal Open-domain Question Answering with Large Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-modal open-domain question answering typically requires evidence retrieval from databases across diverse modalities, such as images, tables, passages, etc. Even Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 fall short in this task. To enable LLMs to tackle the task in a zero-shot manner, we introduce MoqaGPT, a straightforward and flexible framework. Using a divide-and-conquer strategy that bypasses intricate multi-modality ranking, our framework can accommodate new modalities and seamlessly transition to new models for the task. Built upon LLMs, MoqaGPT retrieves and extracts answers from each modality separately, then fuses this multi-modal information using LLMs to produce a final answer. Our methodology boosts performance on the MMCoQA dataset, improving F1 by +37.91 points and EM by +34.07 points over the supervised baseline. On the MultiModalQA dataset, MoqaGPT surpasses the zero-shot baseline, improving F1 by 9.5 points and EM by 10.1 points, and significantly closes the gap with supervised methods. Our codebase is available at https://github.com/lezhang7/MOQAGPT.
On the Language Encoder of Contrastive Cross-modal Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Contrastive cross-modal models such as CLIP and CLAP aid various vision-language (VL) and audio-language (AL) tasks. However, there has been limited investigation of and improvement in their language encoder, which is the central component of encoding natural language descriptions of image/audio into vector representations. We extensively evaluate how unsupervised and supervised sentence embedding training affect language encoder quality and cross-modal task performance. In VL pretraining, we found that sentence embedding training language encoder quality and aids in cross-modal tasks, improving contrastive VL models such as CyCLIP. In contrast, AL pretraining benefits less from sentence embedding training, which may result from the limited amount of pretraining data. We analyze the representation spaces to understand the strengths of sentence embedding training, and find that it improves text-space uniformity, at the cost of decreased cross-modal alignment.
InvGC: Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval by Inverse Graph Convolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Over recent decades, significant advancements in cross-modal retrieval are mainly driven by breakthroughs in visual and linguistic modeling. However, a recent study shows that multi-modal data representations tend to cluster within a limited convex cone (as representation degeneration problem), which hinders retrieval performance due to the inseparability of these representations. In our study, we first empirically validate the presence of the representation degeneration problem across multiple cross-modal benchmarks and methods. Next, to address it, we introduce a novel method, called InvGC, a post-processing technique inspired by graph convolution and average pooling. Specifically, InvGC defines the graph topology within the datasets and then applies graph convolution in a subtractive manner. This method effectively separates representations by increasing the distances between data points. To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of InvGC, we propose an advanced graph topology, LocalAdj, which only aims to increase the distances between each data point and its nearest neighbors. To understand why InvGC works, we present a detailed theoretical analysis, proving that the lower bound of recall will be improved after deploying InvGC. Extensive empirical results show that InvGC and InvGC w/LocalAdj significantly mitigate the representation degeneration problem, thereby enhancing retrieval performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/Better_Cross_Modal_Retrieval
CXR-CLIP: Toward Large Scale Chest X-ray Language-Image Pre-training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

A large-scale image-text pair dataset has greatly contributed to the development of vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, which enable zero-shot or few-shot classification without costly annotation. However, in the medical domain, the scarcity of data remains a significant challenge for developing a powerful VLP model. In this paper, we tackle the lack of image-text data in chest X-ray by expanding image-label pair as image-text pair via general prompt and utilizing multiple images and multiple sections in a radiologic report. We also design two contrastive losses, named ICL and TCL, for learning study-level characteristics of medical images and reports, respectively. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models trained under the same conditions. Also, enlarged dataset improve the discriminative power of our pre-trained model for classification, while sacrificing marginal retrieval performance. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/cxr-clip.
PathRL: An End-to-End Path Generation Method for Collision Avoidance via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Robot navigation using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown great potential in improving the performance of mobile robots. Nevertheless, most existing DRL-based navigation methods primarily focus on training a policy that directly commands the robot with low-level controls, like linear and angular velocities, which leads to unstable speeds and unsmooth trajectories of the robot during the long-term execution. An alternative method is to train a DRL policy that outputs the navigation path directly. However, two roadblocks arise for training a DRL policy that outputs paths: (1) The action space for potential paths often involves higher dimensions comparing to low-level commands, which increases the difficulties of training; (2) It takes multiple time steps to track a path instead of a single time step, which requires the path to predicate the interactions of the robot w.r.t. the dynamic environment in multiple time steps. This, in turn, amplifies the challenges associated with training. In response to these challenges, we propose PathRL, a novel DRL method that trains the policy to generate the navigation path for the robot. Specifically, we employ specific action space discretization techniques and tailored state space representation methods to address the associated challenges. In our experiments, PathRL achieves better success rates and reduces angular rotation variability compared to other DRL navigation methods, facilitating stable and smooth robot movement. We demonstrate the competitive edge of PathRL in both real-world scenarios and multiple challenging simulation environments.
Motif-Based Prompt Learning for Universal Cross-Domain Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) stands as a pivotal technology addressing issues of data sparsity and cold start by transferring general knowledge from the source to the target domain. However, existing CDR models suffer limitations in adaptability across various scenarios due to their inherent complexity. To tackle this challenge, recent advancements introduce universal CDR models that leverage shared embeddings to capture general knowledge across domains and transfer it through "Multi-task Learning" or "Pre-train, Fine-tune" paradigms. However, these models often overlook the broader structural topology that spans domains and fail to align training objectives, potentially leading to negative transfer. To address these issues, we propose a motif-based prompt learning framework, MOP, which introduces motif-based shared embeddings to encapsulate generalized domain knowledge, catering to both intra-domain and inter-domain CDR tasks. Specifically, we devise three typical motifs: butterfly, triangle, and random walk, and encode them through a Motif-based Encoder to obtain motif-based shared embeddings. Moreover, we train MOP under the "Pre-training \& Prompt Tuning" paradigm. By unifying pre-training and recommendation tasks as a common motif-based similarity learning task and integrating adaptable prompt parameters to guide the model in downstream recommendation tasks, MOP excels in transferring domain knowledge effectively. Experimental results on four distinct CDR tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of MOP than the state-of-the-art models.
One-Phase Batch Update on Sparse Merkle Trees for Rollups
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

A sparse Merkle tree is a Merkle tree with fixed height and indexed leaves given by a map from indices to leaf values. It allows for both efficient membership and non-membership proofs. It has been widely used as an authenticated data structure in various applications, such as layer-2 rollups for blockchains. zkSync Lite, a popular Ethereum layer-2 rollup solution, uses a sparse Merkle tree to represent the state of the layer-2 blockchain. The account information is recorded in the leaves of the tree. In this paper, we study the sparse Merkle tree algorithms presented in zkSync Lite, and propose an efficient batch update algorithm to calculate a new root hash given a list of account (leaf) operations. Using the construction in zkSync Lite as a benchmark, our algorithm 1) improves the account update time from $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ and 2) reduces the batch update cost by half using a one-pass traversal. Empirical analysis of real-world block data shows that our algorithm outperforms the benchmark by at most 14%.
APP: Adaptive Prototypical Pseudo-Labeling for Few-shot OOD Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents from user queries is essential for a task-oriented dialogue system. Previous OOD detection studies generally work on the assumption that plenty of labeled IND intents exist. In this paper, we focus on a more practical few-shot OOD setting where there are only a few labeled IND data and massive unlabeled mixed data that may belong to IND or OOD. The new scenario carries two key challenges: learning discriminative representations using limited IND data and leveraging unlabeled mixed data. Therefore, we propose an adaptive prototypical pseudo-labeling (APP) method for few-shot OOD detection, including a prototypical OOD detection framework (ProtoOOD) to facilitate low-resource OOD detection using limited IND data, and an adaptive pseudo-labeling method to produce high-quality pseudo OOD\&IND labels. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for few-shot OOD detection.
POSQA: Probe the World Models of LLMs with Size Comparisons
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Embodied language comprehension emphasizes that language understanding is not solely a matter of mental processing in the brain but also involves interactions with the physical and social environment. With the explosive growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their already ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, it is becoming increasingly necessary to verify their real-world understanding. Inspired by cognitive theories, we propose POSQA: a Physical Object Size Question Answering dataset with simple size comparison questions to examine the extremity and analyze the potential mechanisms of the embodied comprehension of the latest LLMs. We show that even the largest LLMs today perform poorly under the zero-shot setting. We then push their limits with advanced prompting techniques and external knowledge augmentation. Furthermore, we investigate whether their real-world comprehension primarily derives from contextual information or internal weights and analyse the impact of prompt formats and report bias of different objects. Our results show that real-world understanding that LLMs shaped from textual data can be vulnerable to deception and confusion by the surface form of prompts, which makes it less aligned with human behaviours.
Cache me if you Can: an Online Cost-aware Teacher-Student framework to Reduce the Calls to Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) performs impressively in zero- and few-shot settings. Hence, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that cannot afford the cost of creating large task-specific training datasets, but also the cost of pretraining their own LLMs, are increasingly turning to third-party services that allow them to prompt LLMs. However, such services currently require a payment per call, which becomes a significant operating expense (OpEx). Furthermore, customer inputs are often very similar over time, hence SMEs end-up prompting LLMs with very similar instances. We propose a framework that allows reducing the calls to LLMs by caching previous LLM responses and using them to train a local inexpensive model on the SME side. The framework includes criteria for deciding when to trust the local model or call the LLM, and a methodology to tune the criteria and measure the tradeoff between performance and cost. For experimental purposes, we instantiate our framework with two LLMs, GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, and two inexpensive students, a k-NN classifier or a Multi-Layer Perceptron, using two common business tasks, intent recognition and sentiment analysis. Experimental results indicate that significant OpEx savings can be obtained with only slightly lower performance.
FLTracer: Accurate Poisoning Attack Provenance in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning approach that enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared global model. However, recent studies show that FL is vulnerable to various poisoning attacks, which can degrade the performance of global models or introduce backdoors into them. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive study on prior FL attacks and detection methods. The results show that all existing detection methods are only effective against limited and specific attacks. Most detection methods suffer from high false positives, which lead to significant performance degradation, especially in not independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings. To address these issues, we propose FLTracer, the first FL attack provenance framework to accurately detect various attacks and trace the attack time, objective, type, and poisoned location of updates. Different from existing methodologies that rely solely on cross-client anomaly detection, we propose a Kalman filter-based cross-round detection to identify adversaries by seeking the behavior changes before and after the attack. Thus, this makes it resilient to data heterogeneity and is effective even in non-IID settings. To further improve the accuracy of our detection method, we employ four novel features and capture their anomalies with the joint decisions. Extensive evaluations show that FLTracer achieves an average true positive rate of over $96.88\%$ at an average false positive rate of less than $2.67\%$, significantly outperforming SOTA detection methods. \footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/Eyr3/FLTracer}.}
Application of deep learning for livestock behaviour recognition: A systematic literature review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Livestock health and welfare monitoring has traditionally been a labor-intensive task performed manually. Recent advances have led to the adoption of AI and computer vision techniques, particularly deep learning models, as decision-making tools within the livestock industry. These models have been employed for tasks like animal identification, tracking, body part recognition, and species classification. In the past decade, there has been a growing interest in using these models to explore the connection between livestock behaviour and health issues. While previous review studies have been rather generic, there is currently no review study specifically focusing on DL for livestock behaviour recognition. Hence, this systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted. The SLR involved an initial search across electronic databases, resulting in 1101 publications. After applying defined selection criteria, 126 publications were shortlisted. These publications were further filtered based on quality criteria, resulting in the selection of 44 high-quality primary studies. These studies were analysed to address the research questions. The results showed that DL successfully addressed 13 behaviour recognition problems encompassing 44 different behaviour classes. A variety of DL models and networks were employed, with CNN, Faster R-CNN, YOLOv5, and YOLOv4 being among the most common models, and VGG16, CSPDarknet53, GoogLeNet, ResNet101, and ResNet50 being popular networks. Performance evaluation involved ten different matrices, with precision and accuracy being the most frequently used. Primary studies identified challenges, including occlusion, adhesion, data imbalance, and the complexities of the livestock environment. The SLR study also discussed potential solutions and research directions to facilitate the development of autonomous livestock behaviour recognition systems.