OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fairness measures for biometric quality assessment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Quality assessment algorithms measure the quality of a captured biometric sample. Since the sample quality strongly affects the recognition performance of a biometric system, it is essential to only process samples of sufficient quality and discard samples of low-quality. Even though quality assessment algorithms are not intended to yield very different quality scores across demographic groups, quality score discrepancies are possible, resulting in different discard ratios. To ensure that quality assessment algorithms do not take demographic characteristics into account when assessing sample quality and consequently to ensure that the quality algorithms perform equally for all individuals, it is crucial to develop a fairness measure. In this work we propose and compare multiple fairness measures for evaluating quality components across demographic groups. Proposed measures, could be used as potential candidates for an upcoming standard in this important field.
Lookism: The overlooked bias in computer vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, there have been significant advancements in computer vision which have led to the widespread deployment of image recognition and generation systems in socially relevant applications, from hiring to security screening. However, the prevalence of biases within these systems has raised significant ethical and social concerns. The most extensively studied biases in this context are related to gender, race and age. Yet, other biases are equally pervasive and harmful, such as lookism, i.e., the preferential treatment of individuals based on their physical appearance. Lookism remains under-explored in computer vision but can have profound implications not only by perpetuating harmful societal stereotypes but also by undermining the fairness and inclusivity of AI technologies. Thus, this paper advocates for the systematic study of lookism as a critical bias in computer vision models. Through a comprehensive review of existing literature, we identify three areas of intersection between lookism and computer vision. We illustrate them by means of examples and a user study. We call for an interdisciplinary approach to address lookism, urging researchers, developers, and policymakers to prioritize the development of equitable computer vision systems that respect and reflect the diversity of human appearances.
SIGMA: Selective Gated Mamba for Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

In various domains, Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) have become essential due to their superior capability to discern intricate user preferences. Typically, SRS utilize transformer-based architectures to forecast the subsequent item within a sequence. Nevertheless, the quadratic computational complexity inherent in these models often leads to inefficiencies, hindering the achievement of real-time recommendations. Mamba, a recent advancement, has exhibited exceptional performance in time series prediction, significantly enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. However, integrating Mamba directly into SRS poses several challenges. Its inherently unidirectional nature may constrain the model's capacity to capture the full context of user-item interactions, while its instability in state estimation can compromise its ability to detect short-term patterns within interaction sequences. To overcome these issues, we introduce a new framework named Selective Gated Mamba (SIGMA) for Sequential Recommendation. This framework leverages a Partially Flipped Mamba (PF-Mamba) to construct a bidirectional architecture specifically tailored to improve contextual modeling. Additionally, an input-sensitive Dense Selective Gate (DS Gate) is employed to optimize directional weights and enhance the processing of sequential information in PF-Mamba. For short sequence modeling, we have also developed a Feature Extract GRU (FE-GRU) to efficiently capture short-term dependencies. Empirical results indicate that SIGMA outperforms current models on five real-world datasets. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/ziwliu-cityu/SIMGA to ease reproducibility.
Individually Stable Dynamics in Coalition Formation over Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

Coalition formation over graphs is a well studied class of games whose players are vertices and feasible coalitions must be connected subgraphs. In this setting, the existence and computation of equilibria, under various notions of stability, has attracted a lot of attention. However, the natural process by which players, starting from any feasible state, strive to reach an equilibrium after a series of unilateral improving deviations, has been less studied. We investigate the convergence of dynamics towards individually stable outcomes under the following perspective: what are the most general classes of preferences and graph topologies guaranteeing convergence? To this aim, on the one hand, we cover a hierarchy of preferences, ranging from the most general to a subcase of additively separable preferences, including individually rational and monotone cases. On the other hand, given that convergence may fail in graphs admitting a cycle even in our most restrictive preference class, we analyze acyclic graph topologies such as trees, paths, and stars.
Scalable Knowledge Refactoring using Constrained Optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

Knowledge refactoring compresses a logic program by introducing new rules. Current approaches struggle to scale to large programs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a constrained optimisation refactoring approach. Our first key idea is to encode the problem with decision variables based on literals rather than rules. Our second key idea is to focus on linear invented rules. Our empirical results on multiple domains show that our approach can refactor programs quicker and with more compression than the previous state-of-the-art approach, sometimes by 60%.
Research on the Application of Large Language Models in Automatic Question Generation: A Case Study of ChatGLM in the Context of High School Information Technology Curriculum
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the application effectiveness of the Large Language Model (LLMs) ChatGLM in the automated generation of high school information technology exam questions. Through meticulously designed prompt engineering strategies, the model is guided to generate diverse questions, which are then comprehensively evaluated by domain experts. The evaluation dimensions include the Hitting(the degree of alignment with teaching content), Fitting (the degree of embodiment of core competencies), Clarity (the explicitness of question descriptions), and Willing to use (the teacher's willingness to use the question in teaching). The results indicate that ChatGLM outperforms human-generated questions in terms of clarity and teachers' willingness to use, although there is no significant difference in hit rate and fit. This finding suggests that ChatGLM has the potential to enhance the efficiency of question generation and alleviate the burden on teachers, providing a new perspective for the future development of educational assessment systems. Future research could explore further optimizations to the ChatGLM model to maintain high fit and hit rates while improving the clarity of questions and teachers' willingness to use them.
Understanding Data Movement in Tightly Coupled Heterogeneous Systems: A Case Study with the Grace Hopper Superchip
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Heterogeneous supercomputers have become the standard in HPC. GPUs in particular have dominated the accelerator landscape, offering unprecedented performance in parallel workloads and unlocking new possibilities in fields like AI and climate modeling. With many workloads becoming memory-bound, improving the communication latency and bandwidth within the system has become a main driver in the development of new architectures. The Grace Hopper Superchip (GH200) is a significant step in the direction of tightly coupled heterogeneous systems, in which all CPUs and GPUs share a unified address space and support transparent fine grained access to all main memory on the system. We characterize both intra- and inter-node memory operations on the Quad GH200 nodes of the new Swiss National Supercomputing Centre Alps supercomputer, and show the importance of careful memory placement on example workloads, highlighting tradeoffs and opportunities.
AutoDirector: Online Auto-scheduling Agents for Multi-sensory Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

With the advancement of generative models, the synthesis of different sensory elements such as music, visuals, and speech has achieved significant realism. However, the approach to generate multi-sensory outputs has not been fully explored, limiting the application on high-value scenarios such as of directing a film. Developing a movie director agent faces two major challenges: (1) Lack of parallelism and online scheduling with production steps: In the production of multi-sensory films, there are complex dependencies between different sensory elements, and the production time for each element varies. (2) Diverse needs and clear communication demands with users: Users often cannot clearly express their needs until they see a draft, which requires human-computer interaction and iteration to continually adjust and optimize the film content based on user feedback. To address these issues, we introduce AutoDirector, an interactive multi-sensory composition framework that supports long shots, special effects, music scoring, dubbing, and lip-syncing. This framework improves the efficiency of multi-sensory film production through automatic scheduling and supports the modification and improvement of interactive tasks to meet user needs. AutoDirector not only expands the application scope of human-machine collaboration but also demonstrates the potential of AI in collaborating with humans in the role of a film director to complete multi-sensory films.
Toward Enhancing Vehicle Color Recognition in Adverse Conditions: A Dataset and Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vehicle information recognition is crucial in various practical domains, particularly in criminal investigations. Vehicle Color Recognition (VCR) has garnered significant research interest because color is a visually distinguishable attribute of vehicles and is less affected by partial occlusion and changes in viewpoint. Despite the success of existing methods for this task, the relatively low complexity of the datasets used in the literature has been largely overlooked. This research addresses this gap by compiling a new dataset representing a more challenging VCR scenario. The images - sourced from six license plate recognition datasets - are categorized into eleven colors, and their annotations were validated using official vehicle registration information. We evaluate the performance of four deep learning models on a widely adopted dataset and our proposed dataset to establish a benchmark. The results demonstrate that our dataset poses greater difficulty for the tested models and highlights scenarios that require further exploration in VCR. Remarkably, nighttime scenes account for a significant portion of the errors made by the best-performing model. This research provides a foundation for future studies on VCR, while also offering valuable insights for the field of fine-grained vehicle classification.
Cost-Effective Big Data Orchestration Using Dagster: A Multi-Platform Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

The rapid advancement of big data technologies has underscored the need for robust and efficient data processing solutions. Traditional Spark-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions, such as Databricks and Amazon Web Services Elastic MapReduce, provide powerful analytics capabilities but often result in high operational costs and vendor lock-in issues. These platforms, while user-friendly, can lead to significant inefficiencies due to their cost structures and lack of transparent pricing. This paper introduces a cost-effective and flexible orchestration framework using Dagster. Our solution aims to reduce dependency on any single PaaS provider by integrating various Spark execution environments. We demonstrate how Dagster's orchestration capabilities can enhance data processing efficiency, enforce best coding practices, and significantly reduce operational costs. In our implementation, we achieved a 12% performance improvement over EMR and a 40% cost reduction compared to DBR, translating to over 300 euros saved per pipeline run. Our goal is to provide a flexible, developer-controlled computing environment that maintains or improves performance and scalability while mitigating the risks associated with vendor lock-in. The proposed framework supports rapid prototyping and testing, which is essential for continuous development and operational efficiency, contributing to a more sustainable model of large data processing.
Video-to-Text Pedestrian Monitoring (VTPM): Leveraging Computer Vision and Large Language Models for Privacy-Preserve Pedestrian Activity Monitoring at Intersections
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Computer vision has advanced research methodologies, enhancing system services across various fields. It is a core component in traffic monitoring systems for improving road safety; however, these monitoring systems don't preserve the privacy of pedestrians who appear in the videos, potentially revealing their identities. Addressing this issue, our paper introduces Video-to-Text Pedestrian Monitoring (VTPM), which monitors pedestrian movements at intersections and generates real-time textual reports, including traffic signal and weather information. VTPM uses computer vision models for pedestrian detection and tracking, achieving a latency of 0.05 seconds per video frame. Additionally, it detects crossing violations with 90.2% accuracy by incorporating traffic signal data. The proposed framework is equipped with Phi-3 mini-4k to generate real-time textual reports of pedestrian activity while stating safety concerns like crossing violations, conflicts, and the impact of weather on their behavior with latency of 0.33 seconds. To enhance comprehensive analysis of the generated textual reports, Phi-3 medium is fine-tuned for historical analysis of these generated textual reports. This fine-tuning enables more reliable analysis about the pedestrian safety at intersections, effectively detecting patterns and safety critical events. The proposed VTPM offers a more efficient alternative to video footage by using textual reports reducing memory usage, saving up to 253 million percent, eliminating privacy issues, and enabling comprehensive interactive historical analysis.
Online state vector reduction during model predictive control with gradient-based trajectory optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Non-prehensile manipulation in high-dimensional systems is challenging for a variety of reasons. One of the main reasons is the computationally long planning times that come with a large state space. Trajectory optimisation algorithms have proved their utility in a wide variety of tasks, but, like most methods struggle scaling to the high dimensional systems ubiquitous to non-prehensile manipulation in clutter as well as deformable object manipulation. We reason that, during manipulation, different degrees of freedom will become more or less important to the task over time as the system evolves. We leverage this idea to reduce the number of degrees of freedom considered in a trajectory optimisation problem, to reduce planning times. This idea is particularly relevant in the context of model predictive control (MPC) where the cost landscape of the optimisation problem is constantly evolving. We provide simulation results under asynchronous MPC and show our methods are capable of achieving better overall performance due to the decreased policy lag whilst still being able to optimise trajectories effectively.
Improved Visual Saliency of Graph Clusters with Orderable Node-Link Layouts
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Graphs are often used to model relationships between entities. The identification and visualization of clusters in graphs enable insight discovery in many application areas, such as life sciences and social sciences. Force-directed graph layouts promote the visual saliency of clusters, as they bring adjacent nodes closer together, and push non-adjacent nodes apart. At the same time, matrices can effectively show clusters when a suitable row/column ordering is applied, but are less appealing to untrained users not providing an intuitive node-link metaphor. It is thus worth exploring layouts combining the strengths of the node-link metaphor and node ordering. In this work, we study the impact of node ordering on the visual saliency of clusters in orderable node-link diagrams, namely radial diagrams, arc diagrams and symmetric arc diagrams. Through a crowdsourced controlled experiment, we show that users can count clusters consistently more accurately, and to a large extent faster, with orderable node-link diagrams than with three state-of-the art force-directed layout algorithms, i.e., `Linlog', `Backbone' and `sfdp'. The measured advantage is greater in case of low cluster separability and/or low compactness. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/kc3dg/.
On Learnable Parameters of Optimal and Suboptimal Deep Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We scrutinize the structural and operational aspects of deep learning models, particularly focusing on the nuances of learnable parameters (weight) statistics, distribution, node interaction, and visualization. By establishing correlations between variance in weight patterns and overall network performance, we investigate the varying (optimal and suboptimal) performances of various deep-learning models. Our empirical analysis extends across widely recognized datasets such as MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10, and various deep learning models such as deep neural networks (DNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and vision transformer (ViT), enabling us to pinpoint characteristics of learnable parameters that correlate with successful networks. Through extensive experiments on the diverse architectures of deep learning models, we shed light on the critical factors that influence the functionality and efficiency of DNNs. Our findings reveal that successful networks, irrespective of datasets or models, are invariably similar to other successful networks in their converged weights statistics and distribution, while poor-performing networks vary in their weights. In addition, our research shows that the learnable parameters of widely varied deep learning models such as DNN, CNN, and ViT exhibit similar learning characteristics.
On the Distortion of Committee Election with 1-Euclidean Preferences and Few Distance Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

We consider committee election of $k \geq 2$ (out of $m \geq k+1$) candidates, where the voters and the candidates are associated with locations on the real line. Each voter's cardinal preferences over candidates correspond to her distance to the candidate locations, and each voter's cardinal preferences over committees is defined as her distance to the nearest candidate elected in the committee. We consider a setting where the true distances and the locations are unknown. We can nevertheless have access to degraded information which consists of an order of candidates for each voter. We investigate the best possible distortion (a worst-case performance criterion) wrt. the social cost achieved by deterministic committee election rules based on ordinal preferences submitted by $n$ voters and few additional distance queries. For $k = 2$, we achieve bounded distortion without any distance queries; we show that the distortion is $3$ for $m = 3$, and that the best possible distortion achieved by deterministic algorithms is at least $n-1$ and at most $n+1$, for any $m \geq 4$. For any $k \geq 3$, we show that the best possible distortion of any deterministic algorithm that uses at most $k-3$ distance queries cannot be bounded by any function of $n$, $m$ and $k$. We present deterministic algorithms for $k$-committee election with distortion of $O(n)$ with $O(k)$ distance queries and $O(1)$ with $O(k \log n)$ distance queries.
Practical token pruning for foundation models in few-shot conversational virtual assistant systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In an enterprise Virtual Assistant (VA) system, intent classification is the crucial component that determines how a user input is handled based on what the user wants. The VA system is expected to be a cost-efficient SaaS service with low training and inference time while achieving high accuracy even with a small number of training samples. We pretrain a transformer-based sentence embedding model with a contrastive learning objective and leverage the embedding of the model as features when training intent classification models. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results for few-shot scenarios and performs better than other commercial solutions on popular intent classification benchmarks. However, generating features via a transformer-based model increases the inference time, especially for longer user inputs, due to the quadratic runtime of the transformer's attention mechanism. On top of model distillation, we introduce a practical multi-task adaptation approach that configures dynamic token pruning without the need for task-specific training for intent classification. We demonstrate that this approach improves the inference speed of popular sentence transformer models without affecting model performance.
Scaling Cross-Embodied Learning: One Policy for Manipulation, Navigation, Locomotion and Aviation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Modern machine learning systems rely on large datasets to attain broad generalization, and this often poses a challenge in robot learning, where each robotic platform and task might have only a small dataset. By training a single policy across many different kinds of robots, a robot learning method can leverage much broader and more diverse datasets, which in turn can lead to better generalization and robustness. However, training a single policy on multi-robot data is challenging because robots can have widely varying sensors, actuators, and control frequencies. We propose CrossFormer, a scalable and flexible transformer-based policy that can consume data from any embodiment. We train CrossFormer on the largest and most diverse dataset to date, 900K trajectories across 20 different robot embodiments. We demonstrate that the same network weights can control vastly different robots, including single and dual arm manipulation systems, wheeled robots, quadcopters, and quadrupeds. Unlike prior work, our model does not require manual alignment of the observation or action spaces. Extensive experiments in the real world show that our method matches the performance of specialist policies tailored for each embodiment, while also significantly outperforming the prior state of the art in cross-embodiment learning.
Enhancing Otological Surgery: Co-Designing a Parallel Robot with Surgeon Input
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

This work presents the development of a parallel manipulator used for otological surgery from the perspective of co-design. Co-design refers to the simultaneous involvement of the end-users (surgeons), stakeholders (designers, ergonomic experts, manufacturers), and experts from the fields of optimization and mechanisms. The role of each member is discussed in detail and the interactions between the stakeholders are presented. Co-design facilitates a reduction in the parameter space considered during mechanism optimization, leading to a more efficient design process. Additionally, the co-design principles help avoid unforeseen errors and help in quicker adaptation of the proposed solution.