OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
AI as a Medical Ally: Evaluating ChatGPT's Usage and Impact in Indian Healthcare
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the integration and impact of Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, in India's healthcare sector. Our research employs a dual approach, engaging both general users and medical professionals through surveys and interviews respectively. Our findings reveal that healthcare professionals value ChatGPT in medical education and preliminary clinical settings, but exercise caution due to concerns about reliability, privacy, and the need for cross-verification with medical references. General users show a preference for AI interactions in healthcare, but concerns regarding accuracy and trust persist. The study underscores the need for these technologies to complement, not replace, human medical expertise, highlighting the importance of developing LLMs in collaboration with healthcare providers. This paper enhances the understanding of LLMs in healthcare, detailing current usage, user trust, and improvement areas. Our insights inform future research and development, underscoring the need for ethically compliant, user-focused LLM advancements that address healthcare-specific challenges.
Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation from Multi-View Uncalibrated Depth Cameras
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We tackle the task of multi-view, multi-person 3D human pose estimation from a limited number of uncalibrated depth cameras. Recently, many approaches have been proposed for 3D human pose estimation from multi-view RGB cameras. However, these works (1) assume the number of RGB camera views is large enough for 3D reconstruction, (2) the cameras are calibrated, and (3) rely on ground truth 3D poses for training their regression model. In this work, we propose to leverage sparse, uncalibrated depth cameras providing RGBD video streams for 3D human pose estimation. We present a simple pipeline for Multi-View Depth Human Pose Estimation (MVD-HPE) for jointly predicting the camera poses and 3D human poses without training a deep 3D human pose regression model. This framework utilizes 3D Re-ID appearance features from RGBD images to formulate more accurate correspondences (for deriving camera positions) compared to using RGB-only features. We further propose (1) depth-guided camera-pose estimation by leveraging 3D rigid transformations as guidance and (2) depth-constrained 3D human pose estimation by utilizing depth-projected 3D points as an alternative objective for optimization. In order to evaluate our proposed pipeline, we collect three video sets of RGBD videos recorded from multiple sparse-view depth cameras and ground truth 3D poses are manually annotated. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms the current 3D human pose regression-free pipelines in terms of both camera pose estimation and 3D human pose estimation.
TA&AT: Enhancing Task-Oriented Dialog with Turn-Level Auxiliary Tasks and Action-Tree Based Scheduled Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Task-oriented dialog systems have witnessed substantial progress due to conversational pre-training techniques. Yet, two significant challenges persist. First, most systems primarily utilize the latest turn's state label for the generator. This practice overlooks the comprehensive value of state labels in boosting the model's understanding for future generations. Second, an overreliance on generated policy often leads to error accumulation, resulting in suboptimal responses when adhering to incorrect actions. To combat these challenges, we propose turn-level multi-task objectives for the encoder. With the guidance of essential information from labeled intermediate states, we establish a more robust representation for both understanding and generation. For the decoder, we introduce an action tree-based scheduled sampling technique. Specifically, we model the hierarchical policy as trees and utilize the similarity between trees to sample negative policy based on scheduled sampling, hoping the model to generate invariant responses under perturbations. This method simulates potential pitfalls by sampling similar negative policy, bridging the gap between task-oriented dialog training and inference. Among methods without continual pre-training, our approach achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the MultiWOZ dataset series and was also competitive with pre-trained SOTA methods.
Improving Data Augmentation for Robust Visual Question Answering with Effective Curriculum Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Being widely used in learning unbiased visual question answering (VQA) models, Data Augmentation (DA) helps mitigate language biases by generating extra training samples beyond the original samples. While today's DA methods can generate robust samples, the augmented training set, significantly larger than the original dataset, often exhibits redundancy in terms of difficulty or content repetition, leading to inefficient model training and even compromising the model performance. To this end, we design an Effective Curriculum Learning strategy ECL to enhance DA-based VQA methods. Intuitively, ECL trains VQA models on relatively ``easy'' samples first, and then gradually changes to ``harder'' samples, and less-valuable samples are dynamically removed. Compared to training on the entire augmented dataset, our ECL strategy can further enhance VQA models' performance with fewer training samples. Extensive ablations have demonstrated the effectiveness of ECL on various methods.
Learning Human-like Locomotion Based on Biological Actuation and Rewards
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a method of learning a policy for human-like locomotion via deep reinforcement learning based on a human anatomical model, muscle actuation, and biologically inspired rewards, without any inherent control rules or reference motions. Our main ideas involve providing a dense reward using metabolic energy consumption at every step during the initial stages of learning and then transitioning to a sparse reward as learning progresses, and adjusting the initial posture of the human model to facilitate the exploration of locomotion. Additionally, we compared and analyzed differences in learning outcomes across various settings other than the proposed method.
Cooperative Receding Horizon 3D Coverage Control with a Team of Networked Aerial Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This work proposes a receding horizon coverage control approach which allows multiple autonomous aerial agents to work cooperatively in order cover the total surface area of a 3D object of interest. The cooperative coverage problem which is posed in this work as an optimal control problem, jointly optimizes the agents' kinematic and camera control inputs, while considering coupling constraints amongst the team of agents which aim at minimizing the duplication of work. To generate look-ahead coverage trajectories over a finite planning horizon, the proposed approach integrates visibility constraints into the proposed coverage controller in order to determine the visible part of the object with respect to the agents' future states. In particular, we show how non-linear and non-convex visibility determination constraints can be transformed into logical constraints which can easily be embedded into a mixed integer optimization program.
Media2Face: Co-speech Facial Animation Generation With Multi-Modality Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The synthesis of 3D facial animations from speech has garnered considerable attention. Due to the scarcity of high-quality 4D facial data and well-annotated abundant multi-modality labels, previous methods often suffer from limited realism and a lack of lexible conditioning. We address this challenge through a trilogy. We first introduce Generalized Neural Parametric Facial Asset (GNPFA), an efficient variational auto-encoder mapping facial geometry and images to a highly generalized expression latent space, decoupling expressions and identities. Then, we utilize GNPFA to extract high-quality expressions and accurate head poses from a large array of videos. This presents the M2F-D dataset, a large, diverse, and scan-level co-speech 3D facial animation dataset with well-annotated emotional and style labels. Finally, we propose Media2Face, a diffusion model in GNPFA latent space for co-speech facial animation generation, accepting rich multi-modality guidances from audio, text, and image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model not only achieves high fidelity in facial animation synthesis but also broadens the scope of expressiveness and style adaptability in 3D facial animation.
A Study of Acquisition Functions for Medical Imaging Deep Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The Deep Learning revolution has enabled groundbreaking achievements in recent years. From breast cancer detection to protein folding, deep learning algorithms have been at the core of very important advancements. However, these modern advancements are becoming more and more data-hungry, especially on labeled data whose availability is scarce: this is even more prevalent in the medical context. In this work, we show how active learning could be very effective in data scarcity situations, where obtaining labeled data (or annotation budget is very limited). We compare several selection criteria (BALD, MeanSTD, and MaxEntropy) on the ISIC 2016 dataset. We also explored the effect of acquired pool size on the model's performance. Our results suggest that uncertainty is useful to the Melanoma detection task, and confirms the hypotheses of the author of the paper of interest, that \textit{bald} performs on average better than other acquisition functions. Our extended analyses however revealed that all acquisition functions perform badly on the positive (cancerous) samples, suggesting exploitation of class unbalance, which could be crucial in real-world settings. We finish by suggesting future work directions that would be useful to improve this current work. The code of our implementation is open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/ece526_course_project}
cantnlp@LT-EDI-2024: Automatic Detection of Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Speech in Under-resourced Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper describes our homophobia/transphobia in social media comments detection system developed as part of the shared task at LT-EDI-2024. We took a transformer-based approach to develop our multiclass classification model for ten language conditions (English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Tulu, and Telugu). We introduced synthetic and organic instances of script-switched language data during domain adaptation to mirror the linguistic realities of social media language as seen in the labelled training data. Our system ranked second for Gujarati and Telugu with varying levels of performance for other language conditions. The results suggest incorporating elements of paralinguistic behaviour such as script-switching may improve the performance of language detection systems especially in the cases of under-resourced languages conditions.
230,439 Test Failures Later: An Empirical Evaluation of Flaky Failure Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Flaky tests are tests that can non-deterministically pass or fail, even in the absence of code changes.Despite being a source of false alarms, flaky tests often remain in test suites once they are detected, as they also may be relied upon to detect true failures. Hence, a key open problem in flaky test research is: How to quickly determine if a test failed due to flakiness, or if it detected a bug? The state-of-the-practice is for developers to re-run failing tests: if a test fails and then passes, it is flaky by definition; if the test persistently fails, it is likely a true failure. However, this approach can be both ineffective and inefficient. An alternate approach that developers may already use for triaging test failures is failure de-duplication, which matches newly discovered test failures to previously witnessed flaky and true failures. However, because flaky test failure symptoms might resemble those of true failures, there is a risk of missclassifying a true test failure as a flaky failure to be ignored. Using a dataset of 498 flaky tests from 22 open-source Java projects, we collect a large dataset of 230,439 failure messages (both flaky and not), allowing us to empirically investigate the efficacy of failure de-duplication. We find that for some projects, this approach is extremely effective (with 100\% specificity), while for other projects, the approach is entirely ineffective. By analyzing the characteristics of these flaky and non-flaky failures, we provide useful guidance on how developers should rely on this approach.
Regulation of Algorithmic Collusion
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Consider sellers in a competitive market that use algorithms to adapt their prices from data that they collect. In such a context it is plausible that algorithms could arrive at prices that are higher than the competitive prices and this may benefit sellers at the expense of consumers (i.e., the buyers in the market). This paper gives a definition of plausible algorithmic non-collusion for pricing algorithms. The definition allows a regulator to empirically audit algorithms by applying a statistical test to the data that they collect. Algorithms that are good, i.e., approximately optimize prices to market conditions, can be augmented to contain the data sufficient to pass the audit. Algorithms that have colluded on, e.g., supra-competitive prices cannot pass the audit. The definition allows sellers to possess useful side information that may be correlated with supply and demand and could affect the prices used by good algorithms. The paper provides an analysis of the statistical complexity of such an audit, i.e., how much data is sufficient for the test of non-collusion to be accurate.
UnMASKed: Quantifying Gender Biases in Masked Language Models through Linguistically Informed Job Market Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Language models (LMs) have become pivotal in the realm of technological advancements. While their capabilities are vast and transformative, they often include societal biases encoded in the human-produced datasets used for their training. This research delves into the inherent biases present in masked language models (MLMs), with a specific focus on gender biases. This study evaluated six prominent models: BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, BERT-multilingual, XLM-RoBERTa, and DistilBERT-multilingual. The methodology employed a novel dataset, bifurcated into two subsets: one containing prompts that encouraged models to generate subject pronouns in English, and the other requiring models to return the probabilities of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives linked to the prompts' gender pronouns. The analysis reveals stereotypical gender alignment of all models, with multilingual variants showing comparatively reduced biases.
OntoMedRec: Logically-Pretrained Model-Agnostic Ontology Encoders for Medication Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Most existing medication recommendation models learn representations for medical concepts based on electronic health records (EHRs) and make recommendations with learnt representations. However, most medications appear in the dataset for limited times, resulting in insufficient learning of their representations. Medical ontologies are the hierarchical classification systems for medical terms where similar terms are in the same class on a certain level. In this paper, we propose OntoMedRec, the logically-pretrained and model-agnostic medical Ontology Encoders for Medication Recommendation that addresses data sparsity problem with medical ontologies. We conduct comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of OntoMedRec, and the result shows the integration of OntoMedRec improves the performance of various models in both the entire EHR datasets and the admissions with few-shot medications. We provide the GitHub repository for the source code on https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OntoMedRec-D123
A Middle Way to Traffic Enlightenment
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces a novel approach that seeks a middle ground for traffic control in multi-lane congestion, where prevailing traffic speeds are too fast, and speed recommendations designed to dampen traffic waves are too slow. Advanced controllers that modify the speed of an automated car for wave-dampening, eco-driving, or other goals, typically are designed with forward collision safety in mind. Our approach goes further, by considering how dangerous it can be for a controller to drive so slowly relative to prevailing traffic that it creates a significant issue for safety and comfort. This paper explores open-road scenarios where large gaps between prevailing speeds and desired speeds can exist, specifically when infrastructure-based variable speed limit systems are not strictly followed at all times by other drivers. Our designed, implemented, and deployed algorithm is able to follow variable speed limits when others also follow it, avoid collisions with vehicles ahead, and adapt to prevailing traffic when other motorists are traveling well above the posted speeds. The key is to reject unsafe speed recommendations from infrastructure-based traffic smoothing systems, based on real-time local traffic conditions observed by the vehicle under control. This solution is implemented and deployed on two control vehicles in heavy multi-lane highway congestion. The results include analysis from system design, and field tests that validate the system's performance using an existing Variable Speed Limit system as the external source for speed recommendations, and the on-board sensors of a stock Toyota Rav4 for inputs that estimate the prevailing speed of traffic around the vehicle under control.
BPDec: Unveiling the Potential of Masked Language Modeling Decoder in BERT pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing through its exceptional performance on numerous tasks. Yet, the majority of researchers have mainly concentrated on enhancements related to the model structure, such as relative position embedding and more efficient attention mechanisms. Others have delved into pretraining tricks associated with Masked Language Modeling, including whole word masking. DeBERTa introduced an enhanced decoder adapted for BERT's encoder model for pretraining, proving to be highly effective. We argue that the design and research around enhanced masked language modeling decoders have been underappreciated. In this paper, we propose several designs of enhanced decoders and introduce BPDec (BERT Pretraining Decoder), a novel method for modeling training. Typically, a pretrained BERT model is fine-tuned for specific Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. In our approach, we utilize the original BERT model as the encoder, making only changes to the decoder without altering the encoder. This approach does not necessitate extensive modifications to the encoder architecture and can be seamlessly integrated into existing fine-tuning pipelines and services, offering an efficient and effective enhancement strategy. Compared to other methods, while we also incur a moderate training cost for the decoder during the pretraining process, our approach does not introduce additional training costs during the fine-tuning phase. We test multiple enhanced decoder structures after pretraining and evaluate their performance on the GLUE tasks and SQuAD tasks. Our results demonstrate that BPDec, having only undergone subtle refinements to the model structure during pretraining, significantly enhances model performance without escalating the finetuning cost, inference time and serving budget.
CMA-ES with Learning Rate Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is one of the most successful methods for solving continuous black-box optimization problems. A practically useful aspect of the CMA-ES is that it can be used without hyperparameter tuning. However, the hyperparameter settings still have a considerable impact on performance, especially for difficult tasks, such as solving multimodal or noisy problems. This study comprehensively explores the impact of learning rate on the CMA-ES performance and demonstrates the necessity of a small learning rate by considering ordinary differential equations. Thereafter, it discusses the setting of an ideal learning rate. Based on these discussions, we develop a novel learning rate adaptation mechanism for the CMA-ES that maintains a constant signal-to-noise ratio. Additionally, we investigate the behavior of the CMA-ES with the proposed learning rate adaptation mechanism through numerical experiments, and compare the results with those obtained for the CMA-ES with a fixed learning rate and with population size adaptation. The results show that the CMA-ES with the proposed learning rate adaptation works well for multimodal and/or noisy problems without extremely expensive learning rate tuning.
TFDMNet: A Novel Network Structure Combines the Time Domain and Frequency Domain Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved impressive success in computer vision during the past few decades. The image convolution operation helps CNNs to get good performance on image-related tasks. However, it also has high computation complexity and hard to be parallelized. This paper proposes a novel Element-wise Multiplication Layer (EML) to replace convolution layers, which can be trained in the frequency domain. Theoretical analyses show that EMLs lower the computation complexity and easier to be parallelized. Moreover, we introduce a Weight Fixation mechanism to alleviate the problem of over-fitting, and analyze the working behavior of Batch Normalization and Dropout in the frequency domain. To get the balance between the computation complexity and memory usage, we propose a new network structure, namely Time-Frequency Domain Mixture Network (TFDMNet), which combines the advantages of both convolution layers and EMLs. Experimental results imply that TFDMNet achieves good performance on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet databases with less number of operations comparing with corresponding CNNs.
Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce Motion-I2V, a novel framework for consistent and controllable image-to-video generation (I2V). In contrast to previous methods that directly learn the complicated image-to-video mapping, Motion-I2V factorizes I2V into two stages with explicit motion modeling. For the first stage, we propose a diffusion-based motion field predictor, which focuses on deducing the trajectories of the reference image's pixels. For the second stage, we propose motion-augmented temporal attention to enhance the limited 1-D temporal attention in video latent diffusion models. This module can effectively propagate reference image's feature to synthesized frames with the guidance of predicted trajectories from the first stage. Compared with existing methods, Motion-I2V can generate more consistent videos even at the presence of large motion and viewpoint variation. By training a sparse trajectory ControlNet for the first stage, Motion-I2V can support users to precisely control motion trajectories and motion regions with sparse trajectory and region annotations. This offers more controllability of the I2V process than solely relying on textual instructions. Additionally, Motion-I2V's second stage naturally supports zero-shot video-to-video translation. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the advantages of Motion-I2V over prior approaches in consistent and controllable image-to-video generation. Please see our project page at https://xiaoyushi97.github.io/Motion-I2V/.