OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
From Charts to Atlas: Merging Latent Spaces into One
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Models trained on semantically related datasets and tasks exhibit comparable inter-sample relations within their latent spaces. We investigate in this study the aggregation of such latent spaces to create a unified space encompassing the combined information. To this end, we introduce Relative Latent Space Aggregation, a two-step approach that first renders the spaces comparable using relative representations, and then aggregates them via a simple mean. We carefully divide a classification problem into a series of learning tasks under three different settings: sharing samples, classes, or neither. We then train a model on each task and aggregate the resulting latent spaces. We compare the aggregated space with that derived from an end-to-end model trained over all tasks and show that the two spaces are similar. We then observe that the aggregated space is better suited for classification, and empirically demonstrate that it is due to the unique imprints left by task-specific embedders within the representations. We finally test our framework in scenarios where no shared region exists and show that it can still be used to merge the spaces, albeit with diminished benefits over naive merging.
All instances of MONOTONE 3-SAT-(3,1) are satisfiable
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

The satisfiability problem is NP-complete but there are subclasses where all the instances are satisfiable. For this, restrictions on the shape of the formula are made. Darman and Döcker show that the subclass MONOTONE $3$-SAT-($k$,1) with $k \geq 5$ proves to be NP-complete and pose the open question whether instances of MONOTONE $3$-SAT-(3,1) are satisfiable. This paper shows that all instances of MONOTONE $3$-SAT-(3,1) are satisfiable using the new concept of a color-structures.
Electromagnetic Signal and Information Theory -- Electromagnetically Consistent Communication Models for the Transmission and Processing of Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present electromagnetic signal and information theory (ESIT). ESIT is an interdisciplinary scientific discipline, which amalgamates electromagnetic theory, signal processing theory, and information theory. ESIT is aimed at studying and designing physically consistent communication schemes for the transmission and processing of information in communication networks. In simple terms, ESIT can be defined as physics-aware information theory and signal processing for communications. We consider three relevant problems in contemporary communication theory, and we show how they can be tackled under the lenses of ESIT. Specifically, we focus on (i) the theoretical and practical motivations behind antenna designs based on subwavelength radiating elements and interdistances; (ii) the modeling and role played by the electromagnetic mutual coupling, and the appropriateness of multiport network theory for modeling it; and (iii) the analytical tools for unveiling the performance limits and realizing spatial multiplexing in near field, line-of-sight, channels. To exemplify the role played by ESIT and the need for electromagnetic consistency, we consider case studies related to reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and holographic surfaces, and we highlight the inconsistencies of widely utilized communication models, as opposed to communication models that originate from first electromagnetic principles.
Metric Optimization and Mainstream Bias Mitigation in Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

The first part of this thesis focuses on maximizing the overall recommendation accuracy. This accuracy is usually evaluated with some user-oriented metric tailored to the recommendation scenario, but because recommendation is usually treated as a machine learning problem, recommendation models are trained to maximize some other generic criteria that does not necessarily align with the criteria ultimately captured by the user-oriented evaluation metric. Recent research aims at bridging this gap between training and evaluation via direct ranking optimization, but still assumes that the metric used for evaluation should also be the metric used for training. We challenge this assumption, mainly because some metrics are more informative than others. Indeed, we show that models trained via the optimization of a loss inspired by Rank-Biased Precision (RBP) tend to yield higher accuracy, even when accuracy is measured with metrics other than RBP. However, the superiority of this RBP-inspired loss stems from further benefiting users who are already well-served, rather than helping those who are not. This observation inspires the second part of this thesis, where our focus turns to helping non-mainstream users. These are users who are difficult to recommend to either because there is not enough data to model them, or because they have niche taste and thus few similar users to look at when recommending in a collaborative way. These differences in mainstreamness introduce a bias reflected in an accuracy gap between users or user groups, which we try to narrow.
Conversational Data Exploration: A Game-Changer for Designing Data Science Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a conversational approach implemented by the system Chatin for driving an intuitive data exploration experience. Our work aims to unlock the full potential of data analytics and artificial intelligence with a new generation of data science solutions. Chatin is a cutting-edge tool that democratises access to AI-driven solutions, empowering non-technical users from various disciplines to explore data and extract knowledge from it.
Enabling Human-Centered AI: A Methodological Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Human-centered AI (HCAI) is a design philosophy that advocates prioritizing humans in designing, developing, and deploying intelligent systems, aiming to maximize the benefits of AI to humans and avoid potential adverse impacts. While HCAI continues to influence, the lack of guidance on methodology in practice makes its adoption challenging. This paper proposes a comprehensive HCAI framework based on our previous work with integrated components, including design goals, design principles, implementation approaches, interdisciplinary teams, HCAI methods, and HCAI processes. This paper also presents a "three-layer" approach to facilitate the implementation of the framework. We believe this systematic and executable framework can overcome the weaknesses in current HCAI frameworks and the challenges currently faced in practice, putting it into action to enable HCAI further.
BeautifulPrompt: Towards Automatic Prompt Engineering for Text-to-Image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, diffusion-based deep generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) have shown impressive results in text-to-image synthesis. However, current text-to-image models often require multiple passes of prompt engineering by humans in order to produce satisfactory results for real-world applications. We propose BeautifulPrompt, a deep generative model to produce high-quality prompts from very simple raw descriptions, which enables diffusion-based models to generate more beautiful images. In our work, we first fine-tuned the BeautifulPrompt model over low-quality and high-quality collecting prompt pairs. Then, to ensure that our generated prompts can generate more beautiful images, we further propose a Reinforcement Learning with Visual AI Feedback technique to fine-tune our model to maximize the reward values of the generated prompts, where the reward values are calculated based on the PickScore and the Aesthetic Scores. Our results demonstrate that learning from visual AI feedback promises the potential to improve the quality of generated prompts and images significantly. We further showcase the integration of BeautifulPrompt to a cloud-native AI platform to provide better text-to-image generation service in the cloud.
Learning Globally Optimized Language Structure via Adversarial Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent work has explored integrating autoregressive language models with energy-based models (EBMs) to enhance text generation capabilities. However, learning effective EBMs for text is challenged by the discrete nature of language. This work proposes an adversarial training strategy to address limitations in prior efforts. Specifically, an iterative adversarial attack algorithm is presented to generate negative samples for training the EBM by perturbing text from the autoregressive model. This aims to enable the EBM to suppress spurious modes outside the support of the data distribution. Experiments on an arithmetic sequence generation task demonstrate that the proposed adversarial training approach can substantially enhance the quality of generated sequences compared to prior methods. The results highlight the promise of adversarial techniques to improve discrete EBM training. Key contributions include: (1) an adversarial attack strategy tailored to text to generate negative samples, circumventing MCMC limitations; (2) an adversarial training algorithm for EBMs leveraging these attacks; (3) empirical validation of performance improvements on a sequence generation task.
Depth and Breadth of Research Area Coverage and Its Impact on Publication Citation: An Analysis of Bibliometric Papers
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

Many other factors affecting citation of publications, except for research area coverage, have been studied. This study aims to investigate impact of research area coverage. Bibliometric papers and their related papers (referred papers, citing papers and first author's papers) were screened and matched by Python program. Papers' research areas were classified according to Web of Science. Bibliometric parameters of the most cited 5% and the least cited 5% papers were compared. Firstly, coverage of related papers' research areas impacts the citation of their original papers. The impact of references and citing papers are positive and negative, separately, while the first author's papers have no influence. Secondly, high-influence papers tend to cite references from a wider area and are cited by followers from a wider area. Additionally, the pattern of knowledge flow differs significantly between high- and low-influence papers. Low-influence papers narrow knowledge flow, whereas high-influence papers broaden it. This study has shown that both depth and breadth of research area coverage can influence citations. It is recommended that authors should extensively cite high-influence publications, both within and beyond their own area.
Explainability of Vision Transformers: A Comprehensive Review and New Perspectives
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Transformers have had a significant impact on natural language processing and have recently demonstrated their potential in computer vision. They have shown promising results over convolution neural networks in fundamental computer vision tasks. However, the scientific community has not fully grasped the inner workings of vision transformers, nor the basis for their decision-making, which underscores the importance of explainability methods. Understanding how these models arrive at their decisions not only improves their performance but also builds trust in AI systems. This study explores different explainability methods proposed for visual transformers and presents a taxonomy for organizing them according to their motivations, structures, and application scenarios. In addition, it provides a comprehensive review of evaluation criteria that can be used for comparing explanation results, as well as explainability tools and frameworks. Finally, the paper highlights essential but unexplored aspects that can enhance the explainability of visual transformers, and promising research directions are suggested for future investment.
A Comprehensive Survey On Client Selections in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated Learning (FL) is a rapidly growing field in machine learning that allows data to be trained across multiple decentralized devices. The selection of clients to participate in the training process is a critical factor for the performance of the overall system. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art client selection techniques in FL, including their strengths and limitations, as well as the challenges and open issues that need to be addressed. We cover conventional selection techniques such as random selection where all or partial random of clients is used for the trained. We also cover performance-aware selections and as well as resource-aware selections for resource-constrained networks and heterogeneous networks. We also discuss the usage of client selection in model security enhancement. Lastly, we discuss open issues and challenges related to clients selection in dynamic constrained, and heterogeneous networks.
Tunable Soft Prompts are Messengers in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple participants to collaboratively train machine learning models using decentralized data sources, alleviating privacy concerns that arise from directly sharing local data. However, the lack of model privacy protection in FL becomes an unneglectable challenge, especially when people want to federally finetune models based on a proprietary large language model. In this study, we propose a novel FL training approach that accomplishes information exchange among participants via tunable soft prompts. These soft prompts, updated and transmitted between the server and clients, assume the role of the global model parameters and serve as messengers to deliver useful knowledge from the local data and global model. As the global model itself is not required to be shared and the local training is conducted based on an auxiliary model with fewer parameters than the global model, the proposed approach provides protection for the global model while reducing communication and computation costs in FL. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to several baselines. We have released the source code at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/fedsp/federatedscope/nlp/fedsp}.
Review of PID Controller Applications for UAVs
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained widespread recognition for their diverse applications, ranging from surveillance to delivery services. Among the various control algorithms employed to stabilize and navigate UAVs, the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller stands out as a classical yet robust solution. This review provides a comprehensive examination of PID controller applications in the context of UAVs, addressing their fundamental principles, dynamics modeling, stability control, navigation tasks, parameter tuning methods, challenges, and future directions.
Towards Continual Reinforcement Learning for Quadruped Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Quadruped robots have emerged as an evolving technology that currently leverages simulators to develop a robust controller capable of functioning in the real-world without the need for further training. However, since it is impossible to predict all possible real-world situations, our research explores the possibility of enabling them to continue learning even after their deployment. To this end, we designed two continual learning scenarios, sequentially training the robot on different environments while simultaneously evaluating its performance across all of them. Our approach sheds light on the extent of both forward and backward skill transfer, as well as the degree to which the robot might forget previously acquired skills. By addressing these factors, we hope to enhance the adaptability and performance of quadruped robots in real-world scenarios.
Contrastive Learning of View-Invariant Representations for Facial Expressions Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Although there has been much progress in the area of facial expression recognition (FER), most existing methods suffer when presented with images that have been captured from viewing angles that are non-frontal and substantially different from those used in the training process. In this paper, we propose ViewFX, a novel view-invariant FER framework based on contrastive learning, capable of accurately classifying facial expressions regardless of the input viewing angles during inference. ViewFX learns view-invariant features of expression using a proposed self-supervised contrastive loss which brings together different views of the same subject with a particular expression in the embedding space. We also introduce a supervised contrastive loss to push the learnt view-invariant features of each expression away from other expressions. Since facial expressions are often distinguished with very subtle differences in the learned feature space, we incorporate the Barlow twins loss to reduce the redundancy and correlations of the representations in the learned representations. The proposed method is a substantial extension of our previously proposed CL-MEx, which only had a self-supervised loss. We test the proposed framework on two public multi-view facial expression recognition datasets, KDEF and DDCF. The experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous works in the area and sets a new state-of-the-art for both datasets while showing considerably less sensitivity to challenging angles and the number of output labels used for training. We also perform detailed sensitivity and ablation experiments to evaluate the impact of different components of our model as well as its sensitivity to different parameters.
Asymmetric Design of Control Barrier Function for Multiagent Autonomous Robotic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose a method to avoid "no-solution" situations of the control barrier function (CBF) for distributed collision avoidance in a multiagent autonomous robotic system (MARS). MARS, which is composed of distributed autonomous mobile robots, is expected to effectively perform cooperative tasks such as searching in a certain area. Therefore, collision avoidance must be considered when implementing MARS in the real world. The CBF is effective for solving collision-avoidance problems. However, in extreme conditions where many robots congregate at one location, the CBF constraints that ensure a safe distance between robots may be violated. We theoretically demonstrate that this problem can occur in certain situations, and introduce an asymmetric design for the inequality constraints of CBF. We asymmetrically decentralized inequality constraints with weight functions using the absolute speed of the robot so that other robots can take over the constraints of the robot in severe condition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in a two-dimensional situation wherein multiple robots congregate at one location. We implement the proposed method on real robots and the confirmed the effectiveness of this theory.
A GPU-Accelerated Moving-Horizon Algorithm for Training Deep Classification Trees on Large Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Decision trees are essential yet NP-complete to train, prompting the widespread use of heuristic methods such as CART, which suffers from sub-optimal performance due to its greedy nature. Recently, breakthroughs in finding optimal decision trees have emerged; however, these methods still face significant computational costs and struggle with continuous features in large-scale datasets and deep trees. To address these limitations, we introduce a moving-horizon differential evolution algorithm for classification trees with continuous features (MH-DEOCT). Our approach consists of a discrete tree decoding method that eliminates duplicated searches between adjacent samples, a GPU-accelerated implementation that significantly reduces running time, and a moving-horizon strategy that iteratively trains shallow subtrees at each node to balance the vision and optimizer capability. Comprehensive studies on 68 UCI datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the heuristic method CART on training and testing accuracy by an average of 3.44% and 1.71%, respectively. Moreover, these numerical studies empirically demonstrate that MH-DEOCT achieves near-optimal performance (only 0.38% and 0.06% worse than the global optimal method on training and testing, respectively), while it offers remarkable scalability for deep trees (e.g., depth=8) and large-scale datasets (e.g., ten million samples).
Atlas: Hybrid Cloud Migration Advisor for Interactive Microservices
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Hybrid cloud provides an attractive solution to microservices for better resource elasticity. A subset of application components can be offloaded from the on-premises cluster to the cloud, where they can readily access additional resources. However, the selection of this subset is challenging because of the large number of possible combinations. A poor choice degrades the application performance, disrupts the critical services, and increases the cost to the extent of making the use of hybrid cloud unviable. This paper presents Atlas, a hybrid cloud migration advisor. Atlas uses a data-driven approach to learn how each user-facing API utilizes different components and their network footprints to drive the migration decision. It learns to accelerate the discovery of high-quality migration plans from millions and offers recommendations with customizable trade-offs among three quality indicators: end-to-end latency of user-facing APIs representing application performance, service availability, and cloud hosting costs. Atlas continuously monitors the application even after the migration for proactive recommendations. Our evaluation shows that Atlas can achieve 21% better API performance (latency) and 11% cheaper cost with less service disruption than widely used solutions.
CD-COCO: A Versatile Complex Distorted COCO Database for Scene-Context-Aware Computer Vision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The recent development of deep learning methods applied to vision has enabled their increasing integration into real-world applications to perform complex Computer Vision (CV) tasks. However, image acquisition conditions have a major impact on the performance of high-level image processing. A possible solution to overcome these limitations is to artificially augment the training databases or to design deep learning models that are robust to signal distortions. We opt here for the first solution by enriching the database with complex and realistic distortions which were ignored until now in the existing databases. To this end, we built a new versatile database derived from the well-known MS-COCO database to which we applied local and global photo-realistic distortions. These new local distortions are generated by considering the scene context of the images that guarantees a high level of photo-realism. Distortions are generated by exploiting the depth information of the objects in the scene as well as their semantics. This guarantees a high level of photo-realism and allows to explore real scenarios ignored in conventional databases dedicated to various CV applications. Our versatile database offers an efficient solution to improve the robustness of various CV tasks such as Object Detection (OD), scene segmentation, and distortion-type classification methods. The image database, scene classification index, and distortion generation codes are publicly available \footnote{\url{https://github.com/Aymanbegh/CD-COCO}}