OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Constructing Multimodal Datasets from Scratch for Rapid Development of a Japanese Visual Language Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

To develop high-performing Visual Language Models (VLMs), it is essential to prepare multimodal resources, such as image-text pairs, interleaved data, and instruction data. While multimodal resources for English are abundant, there is a significant lack of corresponding resources for non-English languages, such as Japanese. To address this problem, we take Japanese as a non-English language and propose a method for rapidly creating Japanese multimodal datasets from scratch. We collect Japanese image-text pairs and interleaved data from web archives and generate Japanese instruction data directly from images using an existing VLM. Our experimental results show that a VLM trained on these native datasets outperforms those relying on machine-translated content.
A Game-Theoretic Approach for Security Control Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Selecting the combination of security controls that will most effectively protect a system's assets is a difficult task. If the wrong controls are selected, the system may be left vulnerable to cyber-attacks that can impact the confidentiality, integrity and availability of critical data and services. In practical settings, it is not possible to select and implement every control possible. Instead considerations, such as budget, effectiveness, and dependencies among various controls, must be considered to choose a combination of security controls that best achieve a set of system security objectives. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic approach for selecting effective combinations of security controls based on expected attacker profiles and a set budget. The control selection problem is set up as a two-person zero-sum one-shot game. Valid control combinations for selection are generated using an algebraic formalism to account for dependencies among selected controls. We demonstrate the proposed approach on an illustrative financial system used in government departments under four different scenarios. The results illustrate how a security analyst can use the proposed approach to guide and support decision-making in the control selection activity when developing secure systems.
Bregman implementation of Meyer's $G-$norm for cartoon + textures decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we design a very simple algorithm based on Split Bregman iterations to numerically solve the cartoon + textures decomposition model of Meyer. This results in a significant gain in speed compared to Chambolle's nonlinear projectors.
Wavelet Burst Accumulation for turbulence mitigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we investigate the extension of the recently proposed weighted Fourier burst accumulation (FBA) method into the wavelet domain. The purpose of FBA is to reconstruct a clean and sharp image from a sequence of blurred frames. This concept lies in the construction of weights to amplify dominant frequencies in the Fourier spectrum of each frame. The reconstructed image is then obtained by taking the inverse Fourier transform of the average of all processed spectra. In this paper, we first suggest to replace the rigid registration step used in the original algorithm by a non-rigid registration in order to be able to process sequences acquired through atmospheric turbulence. Second, we propose to work in a wavelet domain instead of the Fourier one. This leads us to the construction of two types of algorithms. Finally, we propose an alternative approach to replace the weighting idea by an approach promoting the sparsity in the used space. Several experiments are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methods.
DOA-Aware Audio-Visual Self-Supervised Learning for Sound Event Localization and Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper describes sound event localization and detection (SELD) for spatial audio recordings captured by firstorder ambisonics (FOA) microphones. In this task, one may train a deep neural network (DNN) using FOA data annotated with the classes and directions of arrival (DOAs) of sound events. However, the performance of this approach is severely bounded by the amount of annotated data. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel method of pretraining the feature extraction part of the DNN in a self-supervised manner. We use spatial audio-visual recordings abundantly available as virtual reality contents. Assuming that sound objects are concurrently observed by the FOA microphones and the omni-directional camera, we jointly train audio and visual encoders with contrastive learning such that the audio and visual embeddings of the same recording and DOA are made close. A key feature of our method is that the DOA-wise audio embeddings are jointly extracted from the raw audio data, while the DOA-wise visual embeddings are separately extracted from the local visual crops centered on the corresponding DOA. This encourages the latent features of the audio encoder to represent both the classes and DOAs of sound events. The experiment using the DCASE2022 Task 3 dataset of 20 hours shows non-annotated audio-visual recordings of 100 hours reduced the error score of SELD from 36.4 pts to 34.9 pts.
Causality-Enhanced Behavior Sequence Modeling in LLMs for Personalized Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advancements in recommender systems have focused on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve user preference modeling, yielding promising outcomes. However, current LLM-based approaches struggle to fully leverage user behavior sequences, resulting in suboptimal preference modeling for personalized recommendations. In this study, we propose a novel Counterfactual Fine-Tuning (CFT) method to address this issue by explicitly emphasizing the role of behavior sequences when generating recommendations. Specifically, we employ counterfactual reasoning to identify the causal effects of behavior sequences on model output and introduce a task that directly fits the ground-truth labels based on these effects, achieving the goal of explicit emphasis. Additionally, we develop a token-level weighting mechanism to adjust the emphasis strength for different item tokens, reflecting the diminishing influence of behavior sequences from earlier to later tokens during predicting an item. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CFT effectively improves behavior sequence modeling. Our codes are available at https://github.com/itsmeyjt/CFT.
How Well Do Large Language Models Disambiguate Swedish Words?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We evaluate a battery of recent large language models on two benchmarks for word sense disambiguation in Swedish. At present, all current models are less accurate than the best supervised disambiguators in cases where a training set is available, but most models outperform graph-based unsupervised systems. Different prompting approaches are compared, with a focus on how to express the set of possible senses in a given context. The best accuracies are achieved when human-written definitions of the senses are included in the prompts.
Centimeter-level Geometry Reconstruction and Material Identification in 300 GHz Monostatic Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Terahertz (THz) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology is envisioned to achieve high communication performance alongside advanced sensing abilities. For various applications of ISAC, accurate environment reconstruction including geometry reconstruction and material identification is critical. This paper presents a highly precise geometry reconstruction algorithm and material identification scheme for a monostatic sensing case in a typical indoor scenario. Experiments are conducted in the frequency range from 290 GHz to 310 GHz using a vector network analyzer (VNA)-based channel sounder by co-locating the transmitter and receiver. A joint delay and angle space-alternating generalized expectation-maximization (SAGE)-based algorithm is implemented to estimate multipath component (MPC) parameters and the indoor geometry is reconstructed based on the extracted parameters. Furthermore, a geometry-based method is employed to model and remove the spurious path of the corner, reaching an accuracy of 1.75 cm. Additionally, a material database using THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) is established, capturing reflection losses of over 200 common material samples. Applying this database to our monostatic sensing, the measured reflection losses of wall and window frame are accurately identified as cement and steel, respectively. Our results demonstrate the centimeter-level geometry reconstruction and accurate material identification for practical THz ISAC scenarios, which unleash unprecedented sensing potential compared to microwave and millimeter-wave bands.
Conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative surrogate for particle-calorimeter interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Particle collisions at accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, recorded and analyzed by experiments such as ATLAS and CMS, enable exquisite measurements of the Standard Model and searches for new phenomena. Simulations of collision events at these detectors have played a pivotal role in shaping the design of future experiments and analyzing ongoing ones. However, the quest for accuracy in Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collisions comes at an imposing computational cost, with projections estimating the need for millions of CPU-years annually during the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) run \cite{collaboration2022atlas}. Simulating a single LHC event with \textsc{Geant4} currently devours around 1000 CPU seconds, with simulations of the calorimeter subdetectors in particular imposing substantial computational demands \cite{rousseau2023experimental}. To address this challenge, we propose a conditioned quantum-assisted deep generative model. Our model integrates a conditioned variational autoencoder (VAE) on the exterior with a conditioned Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) in the latent space, providing enhanced expressiveness compared to conventional VAEs. The RBM nodes and connections are meticulously engineered to enable the use of qubits and couplers on D-Wave's Pegasus-structured \textit{Advantage} quantum annealer (QA) for sampling. We introduce a novel method for conditioning the quantum-assisted RBM using \textit{flux biases}. We further propose a novel adaptive mapping to estimate the effective inverse temperature in quantum annealers. The effectiveness of our framework is illustrated using Dataset 2 of the CaloChallenge \cite{calochallenge}.
SFA-UNet: More Attention to Multi-Scale Contrast and Contextual Information in Infrared Small Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Computer vision researchers have extensively worked on fundamental infrared visual recognition for the past few decades. Among various approaches, deep learning has emerged as the most promising candidate. However, Infrared Small Object Segmentation (ISOS) remains a major focus due to several challenges including: 1) the lack of effective utilization of local contrast and global contextual information; 2) the potential loss of small objects in deep models; and 3) the struggling to capture fine-grained details and ignore noise. To address these challenges, we propose a modified U-Net architecture, named SFA-UNet, by combining Scharr Convolution (SC) and Fast Fourier Convolution (FFC) in addition to vertical and horizontal Attention gates (AG) into UNet. SFA-UNet utilizes double convolution layers with the addition of SC and FFC in its encoder and decoder layers. SC helps to learn the foreground-to-background contrast information whereas FFC provide multi-scale contextual information while mitigating the small objects vanishing problem. Additionally, the introduction of vertical AGs in encoder layers enhances the model's focus on the targeted object by ignoring irrelevant regions. We evaluated the proposed approach on publicly available, SIRST and IRSTD datasets, and achieved superior performance by an average 0.75% with variance of 0.025 of all combined metrics in multiple runs as compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods
From Babble to Words: Pre-Training Language Models on Continuous Streams of Phonemes
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models are typically trained on large corpora of text in their default orthographic form. However, this is not the only option; representing data as streams of phonemes can offer unique advantages, from deeper insights into phonological language acquisition to improved performance on sound-based tasks. The challenge lies in evaluating the impact of phoneme-based training, as most benchmarks are also orthographic. To address this, we develop a pipeline to convert text datasets into a continuous stream of phonemes. We apply this pipeline to the 100-million-word pre-training dataset from the BabyLM challenge, as well as to standard language and grammatical benchmarks, enabling us to pre-train and evaluate a model using phonemic input representations. Our results show that while phoneme-based training slightly reduces performance on traditional language understanding tasks, it offers valuable analytical and practical benefits.
Explainable Behavior Cloning: Teaching Large Language Model Agents through Learning by Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Autonomous mobile app interaction has become increasingly important with growing complexity of mobile applications. Developing intelligent agents that can effectively navigate and interact with mobile apps remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose an Explainable Behavior Cloning LLM Agent (EBC-LLMAgent), a novel approach that combines large language models (LLMs) with behavior cloning by learning demonstrations to create intelligent and explainable agents for autonomous mobile app interaction. EBC-LLMAgent consists of three core modules: Demonstration Encoding, Code Generation, and UI Mapping, which work synergistically to capture user demonstrations, generate executable codes, and establish accurate correspondence between code and UI elements. We introduce the Behavior Cloning Chain Fusion technique to enhance the generalization capabilities of the agent. Extensive experiments on five popular mobile applications from diverse domains demonstrate the superior performance of EBC-LLMAgent, achieving high success rates in task completion, efficient generalization to unseen scenarios, and the generation of meaningful explanations.
Thoughtful Adoption of NLP for Civic Participation: Understanding Differences Among Policymakers
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Natural language processing (NLP) tools have the potential to boost civic participation and enhance democratic processes because they can significantly increase governments' capacity to gather and analyze citizen opinions. However, their adoption in government remains limited, and harnessing their benefits while preventing unintended consequences remains a challenge. While prior work has focused on improving NLP performance, this work examines how different internal government stakeholders influence NLP tools' thoughtful adoption. We interviewed seven politicians (politically appointed officials as heads of government institutions) and thirteen public servants (career government employees who design and administrate policy interventions), inquiring how they choose whether and how to use NLP tools to support civic participation processes. The interviews suggest that policymakers across both groups focused on their needs for career advancement and the need to showcase the legitimacy and fairness of their work when considering NLP tool adoption and use. Because these needs vary between politicians and public servants, their preferred NLP features and tool designs also differ. Interestingly, despite their differing needs and opinions, neither group clearly identifies who should advocate for NLP adoption to enhance civic participation or address the unintended consequences of a poorly considered adoption. This lack of clarity in responsibility might have caused the governments' low adoption of NLP tools. We discuss how these findings reveal new insights for future HCI research. They inform the design of NLP tools for increasing civic participation efficiency and capacity, the design of other tools and methods that ensure thoughtful adoption of AI tools in government, and the design of NLP tools for collaborative use among users with different incentives and needs.
DisenTS: Disentangled Channel Evolving Pattern Modeling for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multivariate time series forecasting plays a crucial role in various real-world applications. Significant efforts have been made to integrate advanced network architectures and training strategies that enhance the capture of temporal dependencies, thereby improving forecasting accuracy. On the other hand, mainstream approaches typically utilize a single unified model with simplistic channel-mixing embedding or cross-channel attention operations to account for the critical intricate inter-channel dependencies. Moreover, some methods even trade capacity for robust prediction based on the channel-independent assumption. Nonetheless, as time series data may display distinct evolving patterns due to the unique characteristics of each channel (including multiple strong seasonalities and trend changes), the unified modeling methods could yield suboptimal results. To this end, we propose DisenTS, a tailored framework for modeling disentangled channel evolving patterns in general multivariate time series forecasting. The central idea of DisenTS is to model the potential diverse patterns within the multivariate time series data in a decoupled manner. Technically, the framework employs multiple distinct forecasting models, each tasked with uncovering a unique evolving pattern. To guide the learning process without supervision of pattern partition, we introduce a novel Forecaster Aware Gate (FAG) module that generates the routing signals adaptively according to both the forecasters' states and input series' characteristics. The forecasters' states are derived from the Linear Weight Approximation (LWA) strategy, which quantizes the complex deep neural networks into compact matrices. Additionally, the Similarity Constraint (SC) is further proposed to guide each model to specialize in an underlying pattern by minimizing the mutual information between the representations.
A Comparison of Prompt Engineering Techniques for Task Planning and Execution in Service Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in LLM have been instrumental in autonomous robot control and human-robot interaction by leveraging their vast general knowledge and capabilities to understand and reason across a wide range of tasks and scenarios. Previous works have investigated various prompt engineering techniques for improving the performance of LLM to accomplish tasks, while others have proposed methods that utilize LLMs to plan and execute tasks based on the available functionalities of a given robot platform. In this work, we consider both lines of research by comparing prompt engineering techniques and combinations thereof within the application of high-level task planning and execution in service robotics. We define a diverse set of tasks and a simple set of functionalities in simulation, and measure task completion accuracy and execution time for several state-of-the-art models.
Scoring Rules and Calibration for Imprecise Probabilities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

What does it mean to say that, for example, the probability for rain tomorrow is between 20% and 30%? The theory for the evaluation of precise probabilistic forecasts is well-developed and is grounded in the key concepts of proper scoring rules and calibration. For the case of imprecise probabilistic forecasts (sets of probabilities), such theory is still lacking. In this work, we therefore generalize proper scoring rules and calibration to the imprecise case. We develop these concepts as relative to data models and decision problems. As a consequence, the imprecision is embedded in a clear context. We establish a close link to the paradigm of (group) distributional robustness and in doing so provide new insights for it. We argue that proper scoring rules and calibration serve two distinct goals, which are aligned in the precise case, but intriguingly are not necessarily aligned in the imprecise case. The concept of decision-theoretic entropy plays a key role for both goals. Finally, we demonstrate the theoretical insights in machine learning practice, in particular we illustrate subtle pitfalls relating to the choice of loss function in distributional robustness.
A Universal Sets-level Optimization Framework for Next Set Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Next Set Recommendation (NSRec), encompassing related tasks such as next basket recommendation and temporal sets prediction, stands as a trending research topic. Although numerous attempts have been made on this topic, there are certain drawbacks: (i) Existing studies are still confined to utilizing objective functions commonly found in Next Item Recommendation (NIRec), such as binary cross entropy and BPR, which are calculated based on individual item comparisons; (ii) They place emphasis on building sophisticated learning models to capture intricate dependency relationships across sequential sets, but frequently overlook pivotal dependency in their objective functions; (iii) Diversity factor within sequential sets is frequently overlooked. In this research, we endeavor to unveil a universal and S ets-level optimization framework for N ext Set Recommendation (SNSRec), offering a holistic fusion of diversity distribution and intricate dependency relationships within temporal sets. To realize this, the following contributions are made: (i) We directly model the temporal set in a sequence as a cohesive entity, leveraging the Structured Determinantal Point Process (SDPP), wherein the probabilistic DPP distribution prioritizes collections of structures (sequential sets) instead of individual items; (ii) We introduce a co-occurrence representation to discern and acknowledge the importance of different sets; (iii) We propose a sets-level optimization criterion, which integrates the diversity distribution and dependency relations across the entire sequence of sets, guiding the model to recommend relevant and diversified set. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach consistently outperforms previous methods on both relevance and diversity.