OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fluid Antenna Grouping Index Modulation Design for MIMO Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Index modulation (IM) significantly enhances the spectral efficiency of fluid antennas (FAs) enabled multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, which is named FA-IM. However, due to the dense distribution of ports on the FA, the wireless channel exhibits a high spatial correlation, leading to severe performance degradation in the existing FA-IM-assisted MIMO systems. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel fluid antenna grouping index modulation (FA-GIM) scheme to mitigate the high correlation between the activated ports. Specifically, considering the characteristics of the FA two-dimensional (2D) surface structure and the spatially correlated channel model in FA-assisted MIMO systems, a block grouping method is adopted, where adjacent ports are assigned to the same group. Consequently, different groups independently perform port index selection and constellation symbol mapping, with only one port being activated within each group during each transmission interval. Then, a closed-form average bit error probability (ABEP) upper bound for the proposed scheme is derived. Numerical results show that, compared to state-of-the-art schemes, the proposed FA-GIM scheme consistently achieves significant bit error rate (BER) performance gains under various conditions. The proposed scheme is both efficient and robust, enhancing the performance of FA-assisted MIMO systems.
Why long model-based rollouts are no reason for bad Q-value estimates
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper explores the use of model-based offline reinforcement learning with long model rollouts. While some literature criticizes this approach due to compounding errors, many practitioners have found success in real-world applications. The paper aims to demonstrate that long rollouts do not necessarily result in exponentially growing errors and can actually produce better Q-value estimates than model-free methods. These findings can potentially enhance reinforcement learning techniques.
A Channel Attention-Driven Hybrid CNN Framework for Paddy Leaf Disease Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Farmers face various challenges when it comes to identifying diseases in rice leaves during their early stages of growth, which is a major reason for poor produce. Therefore, early and accurate disease identification is important in agriculture to avoid crop loss and improve cultivation. In this research, we propose a novel hybrid deep learning (DL) classifier designed by extending the Squeeze-and-Excitation network architecture with a channel attention mechanism and the Swish ReLU activation function. The channel attention mechanism in our proposed model identifies the most important feature channels required for classification during feature extraction and selection. The dying ReLU problem is mitigated by utilizing the Swish ReLU activation function, and the Squeeze-andExcitation blocks improve information propagation and cross-channel interaction. Upon evaluation, our model achieved a high F1-score of 99.76% and an accuracy of 99.74%, surpassing the performance of existing models. These outcomes demonstrate the potential of state-of-the-art DL techniques in agriculture, contributing to the advancement of more efficient and reliable disease detection systems.
Enhancing Split Computing and Early Exit Applications through Predefined Sparsity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In the past decade, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) achieved state-of-the-art performance in a broad range of problems, spanning from object classification and action recognition to smart building and healthcare. The flexibility that makes DNNs such a pervasive technology comes at a price: the computational requirements preclude their deployment on most of the resource-constrained edge devices available today to solve real-time and real-world tasks. This paper introduces a novel approach to address this challenge by combining the concept of predefined sparsity with Split Computing (SC) and Early Exit (EE). In particular, SC aims at splitting a DNN with a part of it deployed on an edge device and the rest on a remote server. Instead, EE allows the system to stop using the remote server and rely solely on the edge device's computation if the answer is already good enough. Specifically, how to apply such a predefined sparsity to a SC and EE paradigm has never been studied. This paper studies this problem and shows how predefined sparsity significantly reduces the computational, storage, and energy burdens during the training and inference phases, regardless of the hardware platform. This makes it a valuable approach for enhancing the performance of SC and EE applications. Experimental results showcase reductions exceeding 4x in storage and computational complexity without compromising performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/intelligolabs/sparsity_sc_ee.
Vectoring Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLM) have stirred up global attention, and the research has been accelerating non-stop since then. Philosophers and psychologists have also been researching the structure of language for decades, but they are having a hard time finding a theory that directly benefits from the breakthroughs of LLMs. In this article, we propose a novel structure of language that reflects well on the mechanisms behind language models and go on to show that this structure is also better at capturing the diverse nature of language compared to previous methods. An analogy of linear algebra is adapted to strengthen the basis of this perspective. We further argue about the difference between this perspective and the design philosophy for current language models. Lastly, we discuss how this perspective can lead us to research directions that may accelerate the improvements of science fastest.
Independent Set Reconfiguration Under Bounded-Hop Token
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

The independent set reconfiguration problem (ISReconf) is the problem of determining, for given independent sets I_s and I_t of a graph G, whether I_s can be transformed into I_t by repeatedly applying a prescribed reconfiguration rule that transforms an independent set to another. As reconfiguration rules for the ISReconf, the Token Sliding (TS) model and the Token Jumping (TJ) model are commonly considered. While the TJ model admits the addition of any vertex (as far as the addition yields an independent set), the TS model admits the addition of only a neighbor of the removed vertex. It is known that the complexity status of the ISReconf differs between the TS and TJ models for some graph classes. In this paper, we analyze how changes in reconfiguration rules affect the computational complexity of reconfiguration problems. To this end, we generalize the TS and TJ models to a unified reconfiguration rule, called the k-Jump model, which admits the addition of a vertex within distance k from the removed vertex. Then, the TS and TJ models are the 1-Jump and D(G)-Jump models, respectively, where D(G) denotes the diameter of a connected graph G. We give the following three results: First, we show that the computational complexity of the ISReconf under the k-Jump model for general graphs is equivalent for all k >= 3. Second, we present a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the ISReconf under the 2-Jump model for split graphs. We note that the ISReconf under the 1-Jump (i.e., TS) model is PSPACE-complete for split graphs, and hence the complexity status of the ISReconf differs between k = 1 and k = 2. Third, we consider the optimization variant of the ISReconf, which computes the minimum number of steps of any transformation between Is and It. We prove that this optimization variant under the k-Jump model is NP-complete for chordal graphs of diameter at most 2k + 1, for any k >=3.
SwitchCIT: Switching for Continual Instruction Tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models (MMs) have exhibited impressive capabilities in various domains, particularly in general language understanding and visual reasoning. However, these models, trained on massive data, may not be finely optimized for specific tasks triggered by instructions. Continual instruction tuning is crucial to adapt a large model to evolving tasks and domains, ensuring their effectiveness and relevance across a wide range of applications. In the context of continual instruction tuning, where models are sequentially trained on different tasks, catastrophic forgetting can occur, leading to performance degradation on previously learned tasks. This work addresses the catastrophic forgetting in continual instruction learning through a switching mechanism for routing computations to parameter-efficient tuned models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through experiments on continual instruction tuning of different natural language generation tasks and vision-language tasks. We also showcase the advantages of our proposed method in terms of efficiency, scalability, portability, and privacy preservation.
What's in a Niche? Migration Patterns in Online Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Broad topics in online platforms represent a type of meso-scale between individual user-defined communities and the whole platform; they typically consist of related communities that address different facets of a shared topic. Users often engage with the topic by moving among the communities within a single category. We find that there are strong regularities in the aggregate pattern of user migration, in that the communities comprising a topic can be ordered in a partial order such that there is more migration in the direction defined by the partial order than against it. Ordered along this overall direction, we find that communities in aggregate become smaller, less toxic, and more linguistically distinctive, suggesting a picture consistent with specialization. We study directions defined not just in the movement of users but also by the movement of URLs and by the direction of mentions from one community to another; each of these produces a consistent direction, but the directions all differ from each other. We show how, collectively, these distinct trends help organize the structure of large online topics and compare our findings across both Reddit and Wikipedia and in simulations.
Text Indexing for Long Patterns using Locally Consistent Anchors
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

In many real-world database systems, a large fraction of the data is represented by strings: sequences of letters over some alphabet. This is because strings can easily encode data arising from different sources. It is often crucial to represent such string datasets in a compact form but also to simultaneously enable fast pattern matching queries. This is the classic text indexing problem. The four absolute measures anyone should pay attention to when designing or implementing a text index are: (i) index space; (ii) query time; (iii) construction space; and (iv) construction time. Unfortunately, however, most (if not all) widely-used indexes (e.g., suffix tree, suffix array, or their compressed counterparts) are not optimized for all four measures simultaneously, as it is difficult to have the best of all four worlds. Here, we take an important step in this direction by showing that text indexing with sampling based on locally consistent anchors (lc-anchors) offers remarkably good performance in all four measures, when we have at hand a lower bound $\ell$ on the length of the queried patterns -- which is arguably a quite reasonable assumption in practical applications. Our index offers average-case guarantees. In our experiments using real benchmark datasets, we show that it compares favorably based on the four measures to all classic indexes: (compressed) suffix tree; (compressed) suffix array; and the FM-index. Notably, we also present a counterpart of our index with worst-case guarantees based on the lc-anchors notion of partitioning sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first index achieving the best of all worlds in the regime where we have at hand a lower bound $\ell$ on the length of the queried patterns.
Schema Matching with Large Language Models: an Experimental Study
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown useful applications in a variety of tasks, including data wrangling. In this paper, we investigate the use of an off-the-shelf LLM for schema matching. Our objective is to identify semantic correspondences between elements of two relational schemas using only names and descriptions. Using a newly created benchmark from the health domain, we propose different so-called task scopes. These are methods for prompting the LLM to do schema matching, which vary in the amount of context information contained in the prompt. Using these task scopes we compare LLM-based schema matching against a string similarity baseline, investigating matching quality, verification effort, decisiveness, and complementarity of the approaches. We find that matching quality suffers from a lack of context information, but also from providing too much context information. In general, using newer LLM versions increases decisiveness. We identify task scopes that have acceptable verification effort and succeed in identifying a significant number of true semantic matches. Our study shows that LLMs have potential in bootstrapping the schema matching process and are able to assist data engineers in speeding up this task solely based on schema element names and descriptions without the need for data instances.
Learning secondary tool affordances of human partners using iCub robot's egocentric data
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Objects, in particular tools, provide several action possibilities to the agents that can act on them, which are generally associated with the term of affordances. A tool is typically designed for a specific purpose, such as driving a nail in the case of a hammer, which we call as the primary affordance. A tool can also be used beyond its primary purpose, in which case we can associate this auxiliary use with the term secondary affordance. Previous work on affordance perception and learning has been mostly focused on primary affordances. Here, we address the less explored problem of learning the secondary tool affordances of human partners. To do this, we use the iCub robot to observe human partners with three cameras while they perform actions on twenty objects using four different tools. In our experiments, human partners utilize tools to perform actions that do not correspond to their primary affordances. For example, the iCub robot observes a human partner using a ruler for pushing, pulling, and moving objects instead of measuring their lengths. In this setting, we constructed a dataset by taking images of objects before and after each action is executed. We then model learning secondary affordances by training three neural networks (ResNet-18, ResNet-50, and ResNet-101) each on three tasks, using raw images showing the `initial' and `final' position of objects as input: (1) predicting the tool used to move an object, (2) predicting the tool used with an additional categorical input that encoded the action performed, and (3) joint prediction of both tool used and action performed. Our results indicate that deep learning architectures enable the iCub robot to predict secondary tool affordances, thereby paving the road for human-robot collaborative object manipulation involving complex affordances.
Rethinking Transformer-based Multi-document Summarization: An Empirical Investigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The utilization of Transformer-based models prospers the growth of multi-document summarization (MDS). Given the huge impact and widespread adoption of Transformer-based models in various natural language processing tasks, investigating their performance and behaviors in the context of MDS becomes crucial for advancing the field and enhancing the quality of summary. To thoroughly examine the behaviours of Transformer-based MDS models, this paper presents five empirical studies on (1) measuring the impact of document boundary separators quantitatively; (2) exploring the effectiveness of different mainstream Transformer structures; (3) examining the sensitivity of the encoder and decoder; (4) discussing different training strategies; and (5) discovering the repetition in a summary generation. The experimental results on prevalent MDS datasets and eleven evaluation metrics show the influence of document boundary separators, the granularity of different level features and different model training strategies. The results also reveal that the decoder exhibits greater sensitivity to noises compared to the encoder. This underscores the important role played by the decoder, suggesting a potential direction for future research in MDS. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that the repetition problem in the generated summaries has correlations with the high uncertainty scores.
Faster Algorithms for Schatten-p Low Rank Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

We study algorithms for the Schatten-$p$ Low Rank Approximation (LRA) problem. First, we show that by using fast rectangular matrix multiplication algorithms and different block sizes, we can improve the running time of the algorithms in the recent work of Bakshi, Clarkson and Woodruff (STOC 2022). We then show that by carefully combining our new algorithm with the algorithm of Li and Woodruff (ICML 2020), we can obtain even faster algorithms for Schatten-$p$ LRA. While the block-based algorithms are fast in the real number model, we do not have a stability analysis which shows that the algorithms work when implemented on a machine with polylogarithmic bits of precision. We show that the LazySVD algorithm of Allen-Zhu and Li (NeurIPS 2016) can be implemented on a floating point machine with only logarithmic, in the input parameters, bits of precision. As far as we are aware, this is the first stability analysis of any algorithm using $O((k/\sqrt{\varepsilon})\text{poly}(\log n))$ matrix-vector products with the matrix $A$ to output a $1+\varepsilon$ approximate solution for the rank-$k$ Schatten-$p$ LRA problem.
Explainable AI Enhances Glaucoma Referrals, Yet the Human-AI Team Still Falls Short of the AI Alone
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Primary care providers are vital for initial triage and referrals to specialty care. In glaucoma, asymptomatic and fast progression can lead to vision loss, necessitating timely referrals to specialists. However, primary eye care providers may not identify urgent cases, potentially delaying care. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offering explanations could enhance their referral decisions. We investigate how various AI explanations help providers distinguish between patients needing immediate or non-urgent specialist referrals. We built explainable AI algorithms to predict glaucoma surgery needs from routine eyecare data as a proxy for identifying high-risk patients. We incorporated intrinsic and post-hoc explainability and conducted an online study with optometrists to assess human-AI team performance, measuring referral accuracy and analyzing interactions with AI, including agreement rates, task time, and user experience perceptions. AI support enhanced referral accuracy among 87 participants (59.9%/50.8% with/without AI), though Human-AI teams underperformed compared to AI alone. Participants believed they included AI advice more when using the intrinsic model, and perceived it more useful and promising. Without explanations, deviations from AI recommendations increased. AI support did not increase workload, confidence, and trust, but reduced challenges. On a separate test set, our black-box and intrinsic models achieved an accuracy of 77% and 71%, respectively, in predicting surgical outcomes. We identify opportunities of human-AI teaming for glaucoma management in primary eye care, noting that while AI enhances referral accuracy, it also shows a performance gap compared to AI alone, even with explanations. Human involvement remains essential in medical decision making, underscoring the need for future research to optimize collaboration, ensuring positive experiences and safe AI use.
SERENE: The Semi-Automatic User Experience Detector
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

SERENE (uSer ExpeRiENce dEtector), also known as UX-SAD (User eXperience-Smells Automatic Detector), is a research project born in 2020, which comprises different components. As its name suggests, its primary goal is to provide a way to quickly and (semi-) automatically detect problems in the user experience of websites and web-based systems. Through a set of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, SERENE detects users' emotions in web pages while guaranteeing users' privacy. Its main strength over typical user experience and usability evaluation is in the generalizability of its detections. While traditional methods use samples (that may not be representative), SERENE allows to tap into data provided by the whole user population. The platform is available at https://serene.ddns.net.
Optimising GPGPU Execution Through Runtime Micro-Architecture Parameter Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

GPGPU execution analysis has always been tied to closed-source, proprietary benchmarking tools that provide high-level, non-exhaustive, and/or statistical information, preventing a thorough understanding of bottlenecks and optimization possibilities. Open-source hardware platforms offer opportunities to overcome such limits and co-optimize the full {hardware-mapping-algorithm} compute stack. Yet, so far, this has remained under-explored. In this work, we exploit micro-architecture parameter analysis to develop a hardware-aware, runtime mapping technique for OpenCL kernels on the open Vortex RISC-V GPGPU. Our method is based on trace observations and targets optimal hardware resource utilization to achieve superior performance and flexibility compared to hardware-agnostic mapping approaches. The technique was validated on different architectural GPU configurations across several OpenCL kernels. Overall, our approach significantly enhances the performance of the open-source Vortex GPGPU, contributing to unlocking its potential and usability.
Follow-Up Questions Improve Documents Generated by Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This study investigates the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) generating follow-up questions in response to user requests for short (1-page) text documents. Users interacted with a novel web-based AI system designed to ask follow-up questions. Users requested documents they would like the AI to produce. The AI then generated follow-up questions to clarify the user's needs or offer additional insights before generating the requested documents. After answering the questions, users were shown a document generated using both the initial request and the questions and answers, and a document generated using only the initial request. Users indicated which document they preferred and gave feedback about their experience with the question-answering process. The findings of this study show clear benefits to question-asking both in document preference and in the qualitative user experience. This study further shows that users found more value in questions which were thought-provoking, open-ended, or offered unique insights into the user's request as opposed to simple information-gathering questions.