OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Rapid Adapting and Continual Learning Spiking Neural Network Path Planning Algorithm for Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Mapping traversal costs in an environment and planning paths based on this map are important for autonomous navigation. We present a neurobotic navigation system that utilizes a Spiking Neural Network Wavefront Planner and E-prop learning to concurrently map and plan paths in a large and complex environment. We incorporate a novel method for mapping which, when combined with the Spiking Wavefront Planner, allows for adaptive planning by selectively considering any combination of costs. The system is tested on a mobile robot platform in an outdoor environment with obstacles and varying terrain. Results indicate that the system is capable of discerning features in the environment using three measures of cost, (1) energy expenditure by the wheels, (2) time spent in the presence of obstacles, and (3) terrain slope. In just twelve hours of online training, E-prop learns and incorporates traversal costs into the path planning maps by updating the delays in the Spiking Wavefront Planner. On simulated paths, the Spiking Wavefront Planner plans significantly shorter and lower cost paths than A* and RRT*. The spiking wavefront planner is compatible with neuromorphic hardware and could be used for applications requiring low size, weight, and power.
DreamCraft: Text-Guided Generation of Functional 3D Environments in Minecraft
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2024
Year: 2024

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) algorithms enable the automatic generation of complex and diverse artifacts. However, they don't provide high-level control over the generated content and typically require domain expertise. In contrast, text-to-3D methods allow users to specify desired characteristics in natural language, offering a high amount of flexibility and expressivity. But unlike PCG, such approaches cannot guarantee functionality, which is crucial for certain applications like game design. In this paper, we present a method for generating functional 3D artifacts from free-form text prompts in the open-world game Minecraft. Our method, DreamCraft, trains quantized Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) to represent artifacts that, when viewed in-game, match given text descriptions. We find that DreamCraft produces more aligned in-game artifacts than a baseline that post-processes the output of an unconstrained NeRF. Thanks to the quantized representation of the environment, functional constraints can be integrated using specialized loss terms. We show how this can be leveraged to generate 3D structures that match a target distribution or obey certain adjacency rules over the block types. DreamCraft inherits a high degree of expressivity and controllability from the NeRF, while still being able to incorporate functional constraints through domain-specific objectives.
Low-Bandwidth Matrix Multiplication: Faster Algorithms and More General Forms of Sparsity
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

In prior work, Gupta et al. (SPAA 2022) presented a distributed algorithm for multiplying sparse $n \times n$ matrices, using $n$ computers. They assumed that the input matrices are uniformly sparse--there are at most $d$ non-zeros in each row and column--and the task is to compute a uniformly sparse part of the product matrix. The sparsity structure is globally known in advance (this is the supported setting). As input, each computer receives one row of each input matrix, and each computer needs to output one row of the product matrix. In each communication round each computer can send and receive one $O(\log n)$-bit message. Their algorithm solves this task in $O(d^{1.907})$ rounds, while the trivial bound is $O(d^2)$. We improve on the prior work in two dimensions: First, we show that we can solve the same task faster, in only $O(d^{1.832})$ rounds. Second, we explore what happens when matrices are not uniformly sparse. We consider the following alternative notions of sparsity: row-sparse matrices (at most $d$ non-zeros per row), column-sparse matrices, matrices with bounded degeneracy (we can recursively delete a row or column with at most $d$ non-zeros), average-sparse matrices (at most $dn$ non-zeros in total), and general matrices.
CASPR: Automated Evaluation Metric for Contrastive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Summarizing comparative opinions about entities (e.g., hotels, phones) from a set of source reviews, often referred to as contrastive summarization, can considerably aid users in decision making. However, reliably measuring the contrastiveness of the output summaries without relying on human evaluations remains an open problem. Prior work has proposed token-overlap based metrics, Distinctiveness Score, to measure contrast which does not take into account the sensitivity to meaning-preserving lexical variations. In this work, we propose an automated evaluation metric CASPR to better measure contrast between a pair of summaries. Our metric is based on a simple and light-weight method that leverages natural language inference (NLI) task to measure contrast by segmenting reviews into single-claim sentences and carefully aggregating NLI scores between them to come up with a summary-level score. We compare CASPR with Distinctiveness Score and a simple yet powerful baseline based on BERTScore. Our results on a prior dataset CoCoTRIP demonstrate that CASPR can more reliably capture the contrastiveness of the summary pairs compared to the baselines.
Designing AI-Enabled Games to Support Social-Emotional Learning for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience challenges in grasping social-emotional cues, which can result in difficulties in recognizing emotions and understanding and responding to social interactions. Social-emotional intervention is an effective method to improve emotional understanding and facial expression recognition among individuals with ASD. Existing work emphasizes the importance of personalizing interventions to meet individual needs and motivate engagement for optimal outcomes in daily settings. We design a social-emotional game for ASD children, which generates personalized stories by leveraging the current advancement of artificial intelligence. Via a co-design process with five domain experts, this work offers several design insights into developing future AI-enabled gamified systems for families with autistic children. We also propose a fine-tuned AI model and a dataset of social stories for different basic emotions.
Brain Storm Optimization Based Swarm Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The application of deep learning techniques to medical problems has garnered widespread research interest in recent years, such as applying convolutional neural networks to medical image classification tasks. However, data in the medical field is often highly private, preventing different hospitals from sharing data to train an accurate model. Federated learning, as a privacy-preserving machine learning architecture, has shown promising performance in balancing data privacy and model utility by keeping private data on the client's side and using a central server to coordinate a set of clients for model training through aggregating their uploaded model parameters. Yet, this architecture heavily relies on a trusted third-party server, which is challenging to achieve in real life. Swarm learning, as a specialized decentralized federated learning architecture that does not require a central server, utilizes blockchain technology to enable direct parameter exchanges between clients. However, the mining of blocks requires significant computational resources, limiting its scalability. To address this issue, this paper integrates the brain storm optimization algorithm into the swarm learning framework, named BSO-SL. This approach clusters similar clients into different groups based on their model distributions. Additionally, leveraging the architecture of BSO, clients are given the probability to engage in collaborative learning both within their cluster and with clients outside their cluster, preventing the model from converging to local optima. The proposed method has been validated on a real-world diabetic retinopathy image classification dataset, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
GRSN: Gated Recurrent Spiking Neurons for POMDPs and MARL
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are widely applied in various fields due to their energy-efficient and fast-inference capabilities. Applying SNNs to reinforcement learning (RL) can significantly reduce the computational resource requirements for agents and improve the algorithm's performance under resource-constrained conditions. However, in current spiking reinforcement learning (SRL) algorithms, the simulation results of multiple time steps can only correspond to a single-step decision in RL. This is quite different from the real temporal dynamics in the brain and also fails to fully exploit the capacity of SNNs to process temporal data. In order to address this temporal mismatch issue and further take advantage of the inherent temporal dynamics of spiking neurons, we propose a novel temporal alignment paradigm (TAP) that leverages the single-step update of spiking neurons to accumulate historical state information in RL and introduces gated units to enhance the memory capacity of spiking neurons. Experimental results show that our method can solve partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and multi-agent cooperation problems with similar performance as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) but with about 50% power consumption.
Understanding and Improving CNNs with Complex Structure Tensor: A Biometrics Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Our study provides evidence that CNNs struggle to effectively extract orientation features. We show that the use of Complex Structure Tensor, which contains compact orientation features with certainties, as input to CNNs consistently improves identification accuracy compared to using grayscale inputs alone. Experiments also demonstrated that our inputs, which were provided by mini complex conv-nets, combined with reduced CNN sizes, outperformed full-fledged, prevailing CNN architectures. This suggests that the upfront use of orientation features in CNNs, a strategy seen in mammalian vision, not only mitigates their limitations but also enhances their explainability and relevance to thin-clients. Experiments were done on publicly available data sets comprising periocular images for biometric identification and verification (Close and Open World) using 6 State of the Art CNN architectures. We reduced SOA Equal Error Rate (EER) on the PolyU dataset by 5-26% depending on data and scenario.
DyGCL: Dynamic Graph Contrastive Learning For Event Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Predicting events such as political protests, flu epidemics, and criminal activities is crucial to proactively taking necessary measures and implementing required responses to address emerging challenges. Capturing contextual information from textual data for event forecasting poses significant challenges due to the intricate structure of the documents and the evolving nature of events. Recently, dynamic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been introduced to capture the dynamic patterns of input text graphs. However, these models only utilize node-level representation, causing the loss of the global information from graph-level representation. On the other hand, both node-level and graph-level representations are essential for effective event prediction as node-level representation gives insight into the local structure, and the graph-level representation provides an understanding of the global structure of the temporal graph. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a Dynamic Graph Contrastive Learning (DyGCL) method for event prediction. Our model DyGCL employs a local view encoder to learn the evolving node representations, which effectively captures the local dynamic structure of input graphs. Additionally, it harnesses a global view encoder to perceive the hierarchical dynamic graph representation of the input graphs. Then we update the graph representations from both encoders using contrastive learning. In the final stage, DyGCL combines both representations using an attention mechanism and optimizes its capability to predict future events. Our extensive experiment demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms the baseline methods for event prediction on six real-world datasets.
FR-NAS: Forward-and-Reverse Graph Predictor for Efficient Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a key tool in identifying optimal configurations of deep neural networks tailored to specific tasks. However, training and assessing numerous architectures introduces considerable computational overhead. One method to mitigating this is through performance predictors, which offer a means to estimate the potential of an architecture without exhaustive training. Given that neural architectures fundamentally resemble Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) become an apparent choice for such predictive tasks. Nevertheless, the scarcity of training data can impact the precision of GNN-based predictors. To address this, we introduce a novel GNN predictor for NAS. This predictor renders neural architectures into vector representations by combining both the conventional and inverse graph views. Additionally, we incorporate a customized training loss within the GNN predictor to ensure efficient utilization of both types of representations. We subsequently assessed our method through experiments on benchmark datasets including NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, and the DARTS search space, with a training dataset ranging from 50 to 400 samples. Benchmarked against leading GNN predictors, the experimental results showcase a significant improvement in prediction accuracy, with a 3%--16% increase in Kendall-tau correlation. Source codes are available at https://github.com/EMI-Group/fr-nas.
Information Cocoons on Social Media: Why and How Should the Government Regulate Algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Information cocoons are frequently cited in the literature on whether and how social media might lead to ideological segregation and political polarization. From the behavioural and communication perspectives, this paper first examines why algorithm-based social media, as opposed to its traditional counterpart, is more likely to produce information cocoons. We then explore populism and short-termism in voting, bias and noise in decision-making, and prerequisite capital for innovation, demonstrating the importance of information diversity for a sustainable information environment. Finally, this study argues for libertarian paternalism by evaluating the criteria and trade-offs involved in regulating algorithms and proposes to employ nudges to address the core issues while preserving freedom of choice.
Reflections on the Usefulness and Limitations of Tools for Life-Centred Design
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Life-centred design decenters humans and considers all life and the far-reaching impacts of design decisions. However, little is known about the application of life-centred design tools in practice and their usefulness and limitations for con-sidering more-than-human perspectives. To address this gap, we carried out a se-ries of workshops, reporting on findings from a first-person study involving one design academic and three design practitioners. Using a popular flat-pack chair as a case study, we generatively identified and applied four tools: systems maps, actant maps, product lifecycle maps and behavioural impact canvas. We found that the tools provided a structured approach for practising systems thinking, identifying human and non-human actors, understanding their interconnected-ness, and surfacing gaps in the team's knowledge. Based on the findings, the pa-per proposes a process for implementing life-centred design tools in design pro-jects.
Dynamic Beam Coverage for Satellite Communications Aided by Movable-Antenna Array
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Due to the ultra-dense constellation, efficient beam coverage and interference mitigation are crucial to low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication systems, while the conventional directional antennas and fixed-position antenna (FPA) arrays both have limited degrees of freedom (DoFs) in beamforming to adapt to the time-varying coverage requirement of terrestrial users. To address this challenge, we propose in this paper utilizing movable antenna (MA) arrays to enhance the satellite beam coverage and interference mitigation. Specifically, given the satellite orbit and the coverage requirement within a specific time interval, the antenna position vector (APV) and antenna weight vector (AWV) of the satellite-mounted MA array are jointly optimized over time to minimize the average signal leakage power to the interference area of the satellite, subject to the constraints of the minimum beamforming gain over the coverage area, the continuous movement of MAs, and the constant modulus of AWV. The corresponding continuous-time decision process for the APV and AWV is first transformed into a more tractable discrete-time optimization problem. Then, an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is developed by iteratively optimizing the APV and AWV, where the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is utilized to obtain locally optimal solutions during the iterations. Moreover, to further reduce the antenna movement overhead, a low-complexity MA scheme is proposed by using an optimized common APV over all time slots. Simulation results validate that the proposed MA array-aided beam coverage schemes can significantly decrease the interference leakage of the satellite compared to conventional FPA-based schemes, while the low-complexity MA scheme can achieve a performance comparable to the continuous-movement scheme.
CatLIP: CLIP-level Visual Recognition Accuracy with 2.7x Faster Pre-training on Web-scale Image-Text Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Contrastive learning has emerged as a transformative method for learning effective visual representations through the alignment of image and text embeddings. However, pairwise similarity computation in contrastive loss between image and text pairs poses computational challenges. This paper presents a novel weakly supervised pre-training of vision models on web-scale image-text data. The proposed method reframes pre-training on image-text data as a classification task. Consequently, it eliminates the need for pairwise similarity computations in contrastive loss, achieving a remarkable $2.7\times$ acceleration in training speed compared to contrastive learning on web-scale data. Through extensive experiments spanning diverse vision tasks, including detection and segmentation, we demonstrate that the proposed method maintains high representation quality. Our source code along with pre-trained model weights and training recipes is available at \url{https://github.com/apple/corenet}.
KS-LLM: Knowledge Selection of Large Language Models with Evidence Document for Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from the hallucination problem and face significant challenges when applied to knowledge-intensive tasks. A promising approach is to leverage evidence documents as extra supporting knowledge, which can be obtained through retrieval or generation. However, existing methods directly leverage the entire contents of the evidence document, which may introduce noise information and impair the performance of large language models. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Knowledge Selection of Large Language Models (KS-LLM) method, aiming to identify valuable information from evidence documents. The KS-LLM approach utilizes triples to effectively select knowledge snippets from evidence documents that are beneficial to answering questions. Specifically, we first generate triples based on the input question, then select the evidence sentences most similar to triples from the evidence document, and finally combine the evidence sentences and triples to assist large language models in generating answers. Experimental comparisons on several question answering datasets, such as TriviaQA, WebQ, and NQ, demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses the baselines and achieves the best results.
Neural Proto-Language Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Proto-form reconstruction has been a painstaking process for linguists. Recently, computational models such as RNN and Transformers have been proposed to automate this process. We take three different approaches to improve upon previous methods, including data augmentation to recover missing reflexes, adding a VAE structure to the Transformer model for proto-to-language prediction, and using a neural machine translation model for the reconstruction task. We find that with the additional VAE structure, the Transformer model has a better performance on the WikiHan dataset, and the data augmentation step stabilizes the training.
No Train but Gain: Language Arithmetic for training-free Language Adapters enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Modular deep learning is the state-of-the-art solution for lifting the curse of multilinguality, preventing the impact of negative interference and enabling cross-lingual performance in Multilingual Pre-trained Language Models. However, a trade-off of this approach is the reduction in positive transfer learning from closely related languages. In response, we introduce a novel method called language arithmetic, which enables training-free post-processing to address this limitation. Extending the task arithmetic framework, we apply learning via addition to the language adapters, transitioning the framework from a multi-task to a multilingual setup. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated on three downstream tasks in a MAD-X-based set of cross-lingual schemes, acting as a post-processing procedure. Language arithmetic consistently improves the baselines with significant gains, especially in the most challenging case of zero-shot application. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mklimasz/language-arithmetic .
Exploring Machine Learning Algorithms for Infection Detection Using GC-IMS Data: A Preliminary Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The developing field of enhanced diagnostic techniques in the diagnosis of infectious diseases, constitutes a crucial domain in modern healthcare. By utilizing Gas Chromatography-Ion Mobility Spectrometry (GC-IMS) data and incorporating machine learning algorithms into one platform, our research aims to tackle the ongoing issue of precise infection identification. Inspired by these difficulties, our goals consist of creating a strong data analytics process, enhancing machine learning (ML) models, and performing thorough validation for clinical applications. Our research contributes to the emerging field of advanced diagnostic technologies by integrating Gas Chromatography-Ion Mobility Spectrometry (GC-IMS) data and machine learning algorithms within a unified Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) platform. Preliminary trials demonstrate encouraging levels of accuracy when employing various ML algorithms to differentiate between infected and non-infected samples. Continuing endeavors are currently concentrated on enhancing the effectiveness of the model, investigating techniques to clarify its functioning, and incorporating many types of data to further support the early detection of diseases.