OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
WildVis: Open Source Visualizer for Million-Scale Chat Logs in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing availability of real-world conversation data offers exciting opportunities for researchers to study user-chatbot interactions. However, the sheer volume of this data makes manually examining individual conversations impractical. To overcome this challenge, we introduce WildVis, an interactive tool that enables fast, versatile, and large-scale conversation analysis. WildVis provides search and visualization capabilities in the text and embedding spaces based on a list of criteria. To manage million-scale datasets, we implemented optimizations including search index construction, embedding precomputation and compression, and caching to ensure responsive user interactions within seconds. We demonstrate WildVis' utility through three case studies: facilitating chatbot misuse research, visualizing and comparing topic distributions across datasets, and characterizing user-specific conversation patterns. WildVis is open-source and designed to be extendable, supporting additional datasets and customized search and visualization functionalities.
Foundation Model or Finetune? Evaluation of few-shot semantic segmentation for river pollution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Foundation models (FMs) are a popular topic of research in AI. Their ability to generalize to new tasks and datasets without retraining or needing an abundance of data makes them an appealing candidate for applications on specialist datasets. In this work, we compare the performance of FMs to finetuned pre-trained supervised models in the task of semantic segmentation on an entirely new dataset. We see that finetuned models consistently outperform the FMs tested, even in cases were data is scarce. We release the code and dataset for this work on GitHub.
VERA: Validation and Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The increasing use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems in various applications necessitates stringent protocols to ensure RAG systems accuracy, safety, and alignment with user intentions. In this paper, we introduce VERA (Validation and Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Systems), a framework designed to enhance the transparency and reliability of outputs from large language models (LLMs) that utilize retrieved information. VERA improves the way we evaluate RAG systems in two important ways: (1) it introduces a cross-encoder based mechanism that encompasses a set of multidimensional metrics into a single comprehensive ranking score, addressing the challenge of prioritizing individual metrics, and (2) it employs Bootstrap statistics on LLM-based metrics across the document repository to establish confidence bounds, ensuring the repositorys topical coverage and improving the overall reliability of retrieval systems. Through several use cases, we demonstrate how VERA can strengthen decision-making processes and trust in AI applications. Our findings not only contribute to the theoretical understanding of LLM-based RAG evaluation metric but also promote the practical implementation of responsible AI systems, marking a significant advancement in the development of reliable and transparent generative AI technologies.
Representation Learning of Complex Assemblies, An Effort to Improve Corporate Scope 3 Emissions Calculation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Climate change is a pressing global concern for governments, corporations, and citizens alike. This concern underscores the necessity for these entities to accurately assess the climate impact of manufacturing goods and providing services. Tools like process life cycle analysis (pLCA) are used to evaluate the climate impact of production, use, and disposal, from raw material mining through end-of-life. pLCA further enables practitioners to look deeply into material choices or manufacturing processes for individual parts, sub-assemblies, assemblies, and the final product. Reliable and detailed data on the life cycle stages and processes of the product or service under study are not always available or accessible, resulting in inaccurate assessment of climate impact. To overcome the data limitation and enhance the effectiveness of pLCA to generate an improved environmental impact profile, we are adopting an innovative strategy to identify alternative parts, products, and components that share similarities in terms of their form, function, and performance to serve as qualified substitutes. Focusing on enterprise electronics hardware, we propose a semi-supervised learning-based framework to identify substitute parts that leverages product bill of material (BOM) data and a small amount of component-level qualified substitute data (positive samples) to generate machine knowledge graph (MKG) and learn effective embeddings of the components that constitute electronic hardware. Our methodology is grounded in attributed graph embeddings and introduces a strategy to generate biased negative samples to significantly enhance the training process. We demonstrate improved performance and generalization over existing published models.
A Cost-effective Edge Computing Gateway for Smart Buildings
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

The retrofitting of existing buildings with building management systems presents significant challenges, primarily due to the need for labor and cost efficiency. Wireless technology offers a promising solution to these challenges by minimizing the need for extensive wiring and structural alterations. However, achieving retrofitting in a cost-effective manner necessitates the use of low-cost wireless technologies. This paper introduces a framework for constructing a Zigbee gateway using open-source tools combined with low-cost hardware. The proposed architecture addresses large-scale IoT deployments within the Zigbee ecosystem. By leveraging edge computing with the robustness and scalability offered by Zigbee technology, this architecture significantly reduces the economic barriers to retrofit buildings with building management systems. The results underscore the potential of open-source Zigbee technology in aligning with sustainability goals, providing a cost-effective pathway for retrofitting buildings into smart, energy-efficient living environments.
ChatGPT and Its Educational Impact: Insights from a Software Development Competition
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

This study explores the integration and impact of ChatGPT, a generative AI that utilizes natural language processing, in an educational environment. The main goal is to evaluate how ChatGPT affects project performance. To this end, we organize a software development competition utilizing ChatGPT, lasting for four weeks and involving 36 students. The competition is structured in two rounds: in the first round, all 36 students participate and are evaluated based on specific performance metrics such as code quality, innovation, and adherence to project requirements. The top 15 performers from the first round are then selected to advance to the second round, where they compete for the final rankings and the overall winner is determined. The competition shows that students who use ChatGPT extensively in various stages of development, including ideation, documentation, software development, and quality assurance, have higher project completion rates and better scores. A detailed comparative analysis between first-round and second-round winners reveals significant differences in their experience with generative AI for software development, experience learning large-scale language models, and interest in their respective fields of study. These findings suggest that ChatGPT enhances individual learning and project performance. A post-survey of participants also reveals high levels of satisfaction, further emphasizing the benefits of integrating generative AI like ChatGPT in academic settings. This study highlights the transformative potential of ChatGPT in project-based learning environments and supports further research into its long-term impact and broader application in a variety of educational contexts.
Accelerate Neural Subspace-Based Reduced-Order Solver of Deformable Simulation by Lipschitz Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Reduced-order simulation is an emerging method for accelerating physical simulations with high DOFs, and recently developed neural-network-based methods with nonlinear subspaces have been proven effective in diverse applications as more concise subspaces can be detected. However, the complexity and landscape of simulation objectives within the subspace have not been optimized, which leaves room for enhancement of the convergence speed. This work focuses on this point by proposing a general method for finding optimized subspace mappings, enabling further acceleration of neural reduced-order simulations while capturing comprehensive representations of the configuration manifolds. We achieve this by optimizing the Lipschitz energy of the elasticity term in the simulation objective, and incorporating the cubature approximation into the training process to manage the high memory and time demands associated with optimizing the newly introduced energy. Our method is versatile and applicable to both supervised and unsupervised settings for optimizing the parameterizations of the configuration manifolds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through general cases in both quasi-static and dynamics simulations. Our method achieves acceleration factors of up to 6.83 while consistently preserving comparable simulation accuracy in various cases, including large twisting, bending, and rotational deformations with collision handling. This novel approach offers significant potential for accelerating physical simulations, and can be a good add-on to existing neural-network-based solutions in modeling complex deformable objects.
MetaBGM: Dynamic Soundtrack Transformation For Continuous Multi-Scene Experiences With Ambient Awareness And Personalization
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces MetaBGM, a groundbreaking framework for generating background music that adapts to dynamic scenes and real-time user interactions. We define multi-scene as variations in environmental contexts, such as transitions in game settings or movie scenes. To tackle the challenge of converting backend data into music description texts for audio generation models, MetaBGM employs a novel two-stage generation approach that transforms continuous scene and user state data into these texts, which are then fed into an audio generation model for real-time soundtrack creation. Experimental results demonstrate that MetaBGM effectively generates contextually relevant and dynamic background music for interactive applications.
Few-shot Adaptation of Medical Vision-Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Integrating image and text data through multi-modal learning has emerged as a new approach in medical imaging research, following its successful deployment in computer vision. While considerable efforts have been dedicated to establishing medical foundation models and their zero-shot transfer to downstream tasks, the popular few-shot setting remains relatively unexplored. Following on from the currently strong emergence of this setting in computer vision, we introduce the first structured benchmark for adapting medical vision-language models (VLMs) in a strict few-shot regime and investigate various adaptation strategies commonly used in the context of natural images. Furthermore, we evaluate a simple generalization of the linear-probe adaptation baseline, which seeks an optimal blending of the visual prototypes and text embeddings via learnable class-wise multipliers. Surprisingly, such a text-informed linear probe yields competitive performances in comparison to convoluted prompt-learning and adapter-based strategies, while running considerably faster and accommodating the black-box setting. Our extensive experiments span three different medical modalities and specialized foundation models, nine downstream tasks, and several state-of-the-art few-shot adaptation methods. We made our benchmark and code publicly available to trigger further developments in this emergent subject: \url{https://github.com/FereshteShakeri/few-shot-MedVLMs}.
MVTN: A Multiscale Video Transformer Network for Hand Gesture Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce a novel Multiscale Video Transformer Network (MVTN) for dynamic hand gesture recognition, since multiscale features can extract features with variable size, pose, and shape of hand which is a challenge in hand gesture recognition. The proposed model incorporates a multiscale feature hierarchy to capture diverse levels of detail and context within hand gestures which enhances the model's ability. This multiscale hierarchy is obtained by extracting different dimensions of attention in different transformer stages with initial stages to model high-resolution features and later stages to model low-resolution features. Our approach also leverages multimodal data, utilizing depth maps, infrared data, and surface normals along with RGB images from NVGesture and Briareo datasets. Experiments show that the proposed MVTN achieves state-of-the-art results with less computational complexity and parameters. The source code is available at https://github.com/mallikagarg/MVTN.
Achieving the Safety and Security of the End-to-End AV Pipeline
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

In the current landscape of autonomous vehicle (AV) safety and security research, there are multiple isolated problems being tackled by the community at large. Due to the lack of common evaluation criteria, several important research questions are at odds with one another. For instance, while much research has been conducted on physical attacks deceiving AV perception systems, there is often inadequate investigations on working defenses and on the downstream effects of safe vehicle control. This paper provides a thorough description of the current state of AV safety and security research. We provide individual sections for the primary research questions that concern this research area, including AV surveillance, sensor system reliability, security of the AV stack, algorithmic robustness, and safe environment interaction. We wrap up the paper with a discussion of the issues that concern the interactions of these separate problems. At the conclusion of each section, we propose future research questions that still lack conclusive answers. This position article will serve as an entry point to novice and veteran researchers seeking to partake in this research domain.
Harnessing LLMs for Cross-City OD Flow Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding and predicting Origin-Destination (OD) flows is crucial for urban planning and transportation management. Traditional OD prediction models, while effective within single cities, often face limitations when applied across different cities due to varied traffic conditions, urban layouts, and socio-economic factors. In this paper, by employing Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a new method for cross-city OD flow prediction. Our approach leverages the advanced semantic understanding and contextual learning capabilities of LLMs to bridge the gap between cities with different characteristics, providing a robust and adaptable solution for accurate OD flow prediction that can be transferred from one city to another. Our novel framework involves four major components: collecting OD training datasets from a source city, instruction-tuning the LLMs, predicting destination POIs in a target city, and identifying the locations that best match the predicted destination POIs. We introduce a new loss function that integrates POI semantics and trip distance during training. By extracting high-quality semantic features from human mobility and POI data, the model understands spatial and functional relationships within urban spaces and captures interactions between individuals and various POIs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art learning-based methods in cross-city OD flow prediction.
Algorithmic Collusion Without Threats
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2024
Year: 2024

There has been substantial recent concern that pricing algorithms might learn to ``collude.'' Supra-competitive prices can emerge as a Nash equilibrium of repeated pricing games, in which sellers play strategies which threaten to punish their competitors who refuse to support high prices, and these strategies can be automatically learned. In fact, a standard economic intuition is that supra-competitive prices emerge from either the use of threats, or a failure of one party to optimize their payoff. Is this intuition correct? Would preventing threats in algorithmic decision-making prevent supra-competitive prices when sellers are optimizing for their own revenue? No. We show that supra-competitive prices can emerge even when both players are using algorithms which do not encode threats, and which optimize for their own revenue. We study sequential pricing games in which a first mover deploys an algorithm and then a second mover optimizes within the resulting environment. We show that if the first mover deploys any algorithm with a no-regret guarantee, and then the second mover even approximately optimizes within this now static environment, monopoly-like prices arise. The result holds for any no-regret learning algorithm deployed by the first mover and for any pricing policy of the second mover that obtains them profit at least as high as a random pricing would -- and hence the result applies even when the second mover is optimizing only within a space of non-responsive pricing distributions which are incapable of encoding threats. In fact, there exists a set of strategies, neither of which explicitly encode threats that form a Nash equilibrium of the simultaneous pricing game in algorithm space, and lead to near monopoly prices. This suggests that the definition of ``algorithmic collusion'' may need to be expanded, to include strategies without explicitly encoded threats.
Boundary feature fusion network for tooth image segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Tooth segmentation is a critical technology in the field of medical image segmentation, with applications ranging from orthodontic treatment to human body identification and dental pathology assessment. Despite the development of numerous tooth image segmentation models by researchers, a common shortcoming is the failure to account for the challenges of blurred tooth boundaries. Dental diagnostics require precise delineation of tooth boundaries. This paper introduces an innovative tooth segmentation network that integrates boundary information to address the issue of indistinct boundaries between teeth and adjacent tissues. This network's core is its boundary feature extraction module, which is designed to extract detailed boundary information from high-level features. Concurrently, the feature cross-fusion module merges detailed boundary and global semantic information in a synergistic way, allowing for stepwise layer transfer of feature information. This method results in precise tooth segmentation. In the most recent STS Data Challenge, our methodology was rigorously tested and received a commendable overall score of 0.91. When compared to other existing approaches, this score demonstrates our method's significant superiority in segmenting tooth boundaries.
Understanding Online Discussion Across Difference: Insights from Gun Discourse on Reddit
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

When discussing difficult topics online, is it common to meaningfully engage with people from diverse perspectives? Why or why not? Could features of the online environment be redesigned to encourage civil conversation across difference? In this paper, we study discussions of gun policy on Reddit, with the overarching goal of developing insights into the potential of the internet to support understanding across difference. We use two methods: a clustering analysis of Reddit posts to contribute insights about what people discuss, and an interview study of twenty Reddit users to help us understand why certain kinds of conversation take place and others don't. We find that the discussion of gun politics falls into three groups: conservative pro-gun, liberal pro-gun, and liberal anti-gun. Each type of group has its own characteristic topics. While our subjects state that they would be willing to engage with others across the ideological divide, in practice they rarely do. Subjects are siloed into like-minded subreddits through a two-pronged effect, where they are simultaneously pushed away from opposing-view communities while actively seeking belonging in like-minded ones. Another contributing factor is Reddit's "karma" mechanism: fear of being downvoted and losing karma points and social approval of peers causes our subjects to hesitate to say anything in conflict with group norms. The pseudonymous nature of discussion on Reddit plays a complex role, with some subjects finding it freeing and others fearing reprisal from others not bound by face-to-face norms of politeness. Our subjects believe that content moderation can help ameliorate these issues; however, our findings suggest that moderators need different tools to do so effectively. We conclude by suggesting platform design changes that might increase discussion across difference.
Investigating Neural Audio Codecs for Speech Language Model-Based Speech Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

Neural audio codec tokens serve as the fundamental building blocks for speech language model (SLM)-based speech generation. However, there is no systematic understanding on how the codec system affects the speech generation performance of the SLM. In this work, we examine codec tokens within SLM framework for speech generation to provide insights for effective codec design. We retrain existing high-performing neural codec models on the same data set and loss functions to compare their performance in a uniform setting. We integrate codec tokens into two SLM systems: masked-based parallel speech generation system and an auto-regressive (AR) plus non-auto-regressive (NAR) model-based system. Our findings indicate that better speech reconstruction in codec systems does not guarantee improved speech generation in SLM. A high-quality codec decoder is crucial for natural speech production in SLM, while speech intelligibility depends more on quantization mechanism.