Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Studying the impacts of pre-training using ChatGPT-generated text on downstream tasks

In recent times, significant advancements have been witnessed in the field of language models, particularly with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) that are trained on vast amounts of data extracted from internet archives. These LLMs, such as ChatGPT, have become widely accessible, allowing users to generate text for various purposes including articles, essays, jokes, and poetry. Given that LLMs are trained on a diverse range of text sources, encompassing platforms like Reddit and Twitter, it is foreseeable that future training datasets will also incorporate text generated by previous iterations of the models themselves. In light of this development, our research aims to investigate the influence of artificial text in the pre-training phase of language models. Specifically, we conducted a comparative analysis between a language model, RoBERTa, pre-trained using CNN/DailyMail news articles, and ChatGPT, which employed the same articles for its training and evaluated their performance on three downstream tasks as well as their potential gender bias, using sentiment analysis as a metric. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that the utilization of artificial text during pre-training does not have a significant impact on either the performance of the models in downstream tasks or their gender bias. In conclusion, our findings suggest that the inclusion of text generated by LLMs in their own pre-training process does not yield substantial effects on the subsequent performance of the models in downstream tasks or their potential gender bias.
Statistical Aspects of X-ray Spectral Analysis

This handbook chapter gives a modern introduction to spectral analysis of celestial X-ray sources. Concepts presented include the instrumentation response, the linear modelling approximation, Poisson count statistics and the Gaussian approximation, data re-binning, visualisation techniques, handling backgrounds, Bayesian and frequentist viewpoints, uncertainty quantification of model parameters, model checking, model comparison, and inferring population distributions. Realistic hands-on example exercises with accompanying data files and code are included to apply the theoretical concepts in practice.
Evaluating the Reliability of CNN Models on Classifying Traffic and Road Signs using LIME

The objective of this investigation is to evaluate and contrast the effectiveness of four state-of-the-art pre-trained models, ResNet-34, VGG-19, DenseNet-121, and Inception V3, in classifying traffic and road signs with the utilization of the GTSRB public dataset. The study focuses on evaluating the accuracy of these models' predictions as well as their ability to employ appropriate features for image categorization. To gain insights into the strengths and limitations of the model's predictions, the study employs the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) framework. The findings of this experiment indicate that LIME is a crucial tool for improving the interpretability and dependability of machine learning models for image identification, regardless of the models achieving an f1 score of 0.99 on classifying traffic and road signs. The conclusion of this study has important ramifications for how these models are used in practice, as it is crucial to ensure that model predictions are founded on the pertinent image features.
On the Fine-Grained Hardness of Inverting Generative Models

The objective of generative model inversion is to identify a size-$n$ latent vector that produces a generative model output that closely matches a given target. This operation is a core computational primitive in numerous modern applications involving computer vision and NLP. However, the problem is known to be computationally challenging and NP-hard in the worst case. This paper aims to provide a fine-grained view of the landscape of computational hardness for this problem. We establish several new hardness lower bounds for both exact and approximate model inversion. In exact inversion, the goal is to determine whether a target is contained within the range of a given generative model. Under the strong exponential time hypothesis (SETH), we demonstrate that the computational complexity of exact inversion is lower bounded by $\Omega(2^n)$ via a reduction from $k$-SAT; this is a strengthening of known results. For the more practically relevant problem of approximate inversion, the goal is to determine whether a point in the model range is close to a given target with respect to the $\ell_p$-norm. When $p$ is a positive odd integer, under SETH, we provide an $\Omega(2^n)$ complexity lower bound via a reduction from the closest vectors problem (CVP). Finally, when $p$ is even, under the exponential time hypothesis (ETH), we provide a lower bound of $2^{\Omega (n)}$ via a reduction from Half-Clique and Vertex-Cover.
Self-Correlation and Cross-Correlation Learning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing image semantic segmentation is an important problem for remote sensing image interpretation. Although remarkable progress has been achieved, existing deep neural network methods suffer from the reliance on massive training data. Few-shot remote sensing semantic segmentation aims at learning to segment target objects from a query image using only a few annotated support images of the target class. Most existing few-shot learning methods stem primarily from their sole focus on extracting information from support images, thereby failing to effectively address the large variance in appearance and scales of geographic objects. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Self-Correlation and Cross-Correlation Learning Network for the few-shot remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Our model enhances the generalization by considering both self-correlation and cross-correlation between support and query images to make segmentation predictions. To further explore the self-correlation with the query image, we propose to adopt a classical spectral method to produce a class-agnostic segmentation mask based on the basic visual information of the image. Extensive experiments on two remote sensing image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model in few-shot remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Code and models will be accessed at https://github.com/linhanwang/SCCNet.
Mobile Vision Transformer-based Visual Object Tracking

The introduction of robust backbones, such as Vision Transformers, has improved the performance of object tracking algorithms in recent years. However, these state-of-the-art trackers are computationally expensive since they have a large number of model parameters and rely on specialized hardware (e.g., GPU) for faster inference. On the other hand, recent lightweight trackers are fast but are less accurate, especially on large-scale datasets. We propose a lightweight, accurate, and fast tracking algorithm using Mobile Vision Transformers (MobileViT) as the backbone for the first time. We also present a novel approach of fusing the template and search region representations in the MobileViT backbone, thereby generating superior feature encoding for target localization. The experimental results show that our MobileViT-based Tracker, MVT, surpasses the performance of recent lightweight trackers on the large-scale datasets GOT10k and TrackingNet, and with a high inference speed. In addition, our method outperforms the popular DiMP-50 tracker despite having 4.7 times fewer model parameters and running at 2.8 times its speed on a GPU. The tracker code and models are available at https://github.com/goutamyg/MVT
Studying Accuracy of Machine Learning Models Trained on Lab Lifting Data in Solving Real-World Problems Using Wearable Sensors for Workplace Safety

Porting ML models trained on lab data to real-world situations has long been a challenge. This paper discusses porting a lab-trained lifting identification model to the real-world. With performance much lower than on training data, we explored causes of the failure and proposed four potential solutions to increase model performance
Hierarchical Conditional Semi-Paired Image-to-Image Translation For Multi-Task Image Defect Correction On Shopping Websites

On shopping websites, product images of low quality negatively affect customer experience. Although there are plenty of work in detecting images with different defects, few efforts have been dedicated to correct those defects at scale. A major challenge is that there are thousands of product types and each has specific defects, therefore building defect specific models is unscalable. In this paper, we propose a unified Image-to-Image (I2I) translation model to correct multiple defects across different product types. Our model leverages an attention mechanism to hierarchically incorporate high-level defect groups and specific defect types to guide the network to focus on defect-related image regions. Evaluated on eight public datasets, our model reduces the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 24.6% in average compared with MoNCE, the state-of-the-art I2I method. Unlike public data, another practical challenge on shopping websites is that some paired images are of low quality. Therefore we design our model to be semi-paired by combining the L1 loss of paired data with the cycle loss of unpaired data. Tested on a shopping website dataset to correct three image defects, our model reduces (FID) by 63.2% in average compared with WS-I2I, the state-of-the art semi-paired I2I method.
Generalized Attacks on Face Verification Systems

Face verification (FV) using deep neural network models has made tremendous progress in recent years, surpassing human accuracy and seeing deployment in various applications such as border control and smartphone unlocking. However, FV systems are vulnerable to Adversarial Attacks, which manipulate input images to deceive these systems in ways usually unnoticeable to humans. This paper provides an in-depth study of attacks on FV systems. We introduce the DodgePersonation Attack that formulates the creation of face images that impersonate a set of given identities while avoiding being identified as any of the identities in a separate, disjoint set. A taxonomy is proposed to provide a unified view of different types of Adversarial Attacks against FV systems, including Dodging Attacks, Impersonation Attacks, and Master Face Attacks. Finally, we propose the ''One Face to Rule Them All'' Attack which implements the DodgePersonation Attack with state-of-the-art performance on a well-known scenario (Master Face Attack) and which can also be used for the new scenarios introduced in this paper. While the state-of-the-art Master Face Attack can produce a set of 9 images to cover 43.82% of the identities in their test database, with 9 images our attack can cover 57.27% to 58.5% of these identifies while giving the attacker the choice of the identity to use to create the impersonation. Moreover, the 9 generated attack images appear identical to a casual observer.
ACT: Empowering Decision Transformer with Dynamic Programming via Advantage Conditioning

Decision Transformer (DT), which employs expressive sequence modeling techniques to perform action generation, has emerged as a promising approach to offline policy optimization. However, DT generates actions conditioned on a desired future return, which is known to bear some weaknesses such as the susceptibility to environmental stochasticity. To overcome DT's weaknesses, we propose to empower DT with dynamic programming. Our method comprises three steps. First, we employ in-sample value iteration to obtain approximated value functions, which involves dynamic programming over the MDP structure. Second, we evaluate action quality in context with estimated advantages. We introduce two types of advantage estimators, IAE and GAE, which are suitable for different tasks. Third, we train an Advantage-Conditioned Transformer (ACT) to generate actions conditioned on the estimated advantages. Finally, during testing, ACT generates actions conditioned on a desired advantage. Our evaluation results validate that, by leveraging the power of dynamic programming, ACT demonstrates effective trajectory stitching and robust action generation in spite of the environmental stochasticity, outperforming baseline methods across various benchmarks. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of ACT's various design choices through ablation studies. Our code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/ACT.
Semantical cut-elimination for the provability logic of true arithmetic

The quasi-normal modal logic GLS is a provability logic formalizing the arithmetical truth. Kushida (2020) gave a sequent calculus for GLS and proved the cut-elimination theorem. This paper introduces semantical characterizations of GLS and gives a semantical proof of the cut-elimination theorem. These characterizations can be generalized to other quasi-normal modal logics.
Balanced and Explainable Social Media Analysis for Public Health with Large Language Models

As social media becomes increasingly popular, more and more public health activities emerge, which is worth noting for pandemic monitoring and government decision-making. Current techniques for public health analysis involve popular models such as BERT and large language models (LLMs). Although recent progress in LLMs has shown a strong ability to comprehend knowledge by being fine-tuned on specific domain datasets, the costs of training an in-domain LLM for every specific public health task are especially expensive. Furthermore, such kinds of in-domain datasets from social media are generally highly imbalanced, which will hinder the efficiency of LLMs tuning. To tackle these challenges, the data imbalance issue can be overcome by sophisticated data augmentation methods for social media datasets. In addition, the ability of the LLMs can be effectively utilised by prompting the model properly. In light of the above discussion, in this paper, a novel ALEX framework is proposed for social media analysis on public health. Specifically, an augmentation pipeline is developed to resolve the data imbalance issue. Furthermore, an LLMs explanation mechanism is proposed by prompting an LLM with the predicted results from BERT models. Extensive experiments conducted on three tasks at the Social Media Mining for Health 2023 (SMM4H) competition with the first ranking in two tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed ALEX method. Our code has been released in https://github.com/YanJiangJerry/ALEX.
Random Segmentation: New Traffic Obfuscation against Packet-Size-Based Side-Channel Attacks

Despite encryption, the packet size is still visible, enabling observers to infer private information in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment (e.g., IoT device identification). Packet padding obfuscates packet-length characteristics with a high data overhead because it relies on adding noise to the data. This paper proposes a more data-efficient approach that randomizes packet sizes without adding noise. We achieve this by splitting large TCP segments into random-sized chunks; hence, the packet length distribution is obfuscated without adding noise data. Our client-server implementation using TCP sockets demonstrates the feasibility of our approach at the application level. We realize our packet size control by adjusting two local socket-programming parameters. First, we enable the TCP_NODELAY option to send out each packet with our specified length. Second, we downsize the sending buffer to prevent the sender from pushing out more data than can be received, which could disable our control of the packet sizes. We simulate our defense on a network trace of four IoT devices and show a reduction in device classification accuracy from 98% to 63%, close to random guessing. Meanwhile, the real-world data transmission experiments show that the added latency is reasonable, less than 21%, while the added packet header overhead is only about 5%.
Self-supervised Extraction of Human Motion Structures via Frame-wise Discrete Features

The present paper proposes an encoder-decoder model for extracting the structures of human motions represented by frame-wise discrete features in a self-supervised manner. In the proposed method, features are extracted as codes in a motion codebook without the use of human knowledge, and the relationship between these codes can be visualized on a graph. Since the codes are expected to be temporally sparse compared to the captured frame rate and can be shared by multiple sequences, the proposed network model also addresses the need for training constraints. Specifically, the model consists of self-attention layers and a vector clustering block. The attention layers contribute to finding sparse keyframes and discrete features as motion codes, which are then extracted by vector clustering. The constraints are realized as training losses so that the same motion codes can be as contiguous as possible and can be shared by multiple sequences. In addition, we propose the use of causal self-attention as a method by which to calculate attention for long sequences consisting of numerous frames. In our experiments, the sparse structures of motion codes were used to compile a graph that facilitates visualization of the relationship between the codes and the differences between sequences. We then evaluated the effectiveness of the extracted motion codes by applying them to multiple recognition tasks and found that performance levels comparable to task-optimized methods could be achieved by linear probing.
Learning Unbiased News Article Representations: A Knowledge-Infused Approach

Quantification of the political leaning of online news articles can aid in understanding the dynamics of political ideology in social groups and measures to mitigating them. However, predicting the accurate political leaning of a news article with machine learning models is a challenging task. This is due to (i) the political ideology of a news article is defined by several factors, and (ii) the innate nature of existing learning models to be biased with the political bias of the news publisher during the model training. There is only a limited number of methods to study the political leaning of news articles which also do not consider the algorithmic political bias which lowers the generalization of machine learning models to predict the political leaning of news articles published by any new news publishers. In this work, we propose a knowledge-infused deep learning model that utilizes relatively reliable external data resources to learn unbiased representations of news articles using their global and local contexts. We evaluate the proposed model by setting the data in such a way that news domains or news publishers in the test set are completely unseen during the training phase. With this setup we show that the proposed model mitigates algorithmic political bias and outperforms baseline methods to predict the political leaning of news articles with up to 73% accuracy.
Plasticity-Optimized Complementary Networks for Unsupervised Continual Learning

Continuous unsupervised representation learning (CURL) research has greatly benefited from improvements in self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques. As a result, existing CURL methods using SSL can learn high-quality representations without any labels, but with a notable performance drop when learning on a many-tasks data stream. We hypothesize that this is caused by the regularization losses that are imposed to prevent forgetting, leading to a suboptimal plasticity-stability trade-off: they either do not adapt fully to the incoming data (low plasticity), or incur significant forgetting when allowed to fully adapt to a new SSL pretext-task (low stability). In this work, we propose to train an expert network that is relieved of the duty of keeping the previous knowledge and can focus on performing optimally on the new tasks (optimizing plasticity). In the second phase, we combine this new knowledge with the previous network in an adaptation-retrospection phase to avoid forgetting and initialize a new expert with the knowledge of the old network. We perform several experiments showing that our proposed approach outperforms other CURL exemplar-free methods in few- and many-task split settings. Furthermore, we show how to adapt our approach to semi-supervised continual learning (Semi-SCL) and show that we surpass the accuracy of other exemplar-free Semi-SCL methods and reach the results of some others that use exemplars.
A General Verification Framework for Dynamical and Control Models via Certificate Synthesis

An emerging branch of control theory specialises in certificate learning, concerning the specification of a desired (possibly complex) system behaviour for an autonomous or control model, which is then analytically verified by means of a function-based proof. However, the synthesis of controllers abiding by these complex requirements is in general a non-trivial task and may elude the most expert control engineers. This results in a need for automatic techniques that are able to design controllers and to analyse a wide range of elaborate specifications. In this paper, we provide a general framework to encode system specifications and define corresponding certificates, and we present an automated approach to formally synthesise controllers and certificates. Our approach contributes to the broad field of safe learning for control, exploiting the flexibility of neural networks to provide candidate control and certificate functions, whilst using SMT-solvers to offer a formal guarantee of correctness. We test our framework by developing a prototype software tool, and assess its efficacy at verification via control and certificate synthesis over a large and varied suite of benchmarks.
Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Cross-Lingual Transfer Paradigms: Exploring Tuning Strategies

The cross-lingual transfer is a promising technique to solve tasks in less-resourced languages. In this empirical study, we compare two fine-tuning approaches combined with zero-shot and full-shot learning approaches for large language models in a cross-lingual setting. As fine-tuning strategies, we compare parameter-efficient adapter methods with fine-tuning of all parameters. As cross-lingual transfer strategies, we compare the intermediate-training (\textit{IT}) that uses each language sequentially and cross-lingual validation (\textit{CLV}) that uses a target language already in the validation phase of fine-tuning. We assess the success of transfer and the extent of catastrophic forgetting in a source language due to cross-lingual transfer, i.e., how much previously acquired knowledge is lost when we learn new information in a different language. The results on two different classification problems, hate speech detection and product reviews, each containing datasets in several languages, show that the \textit{IT} cross-lingual strategy outperforms \textit{CLV} for the target language. Our findings indicate that, in the majority of cases, the \textit{CLV} strategy demonstrates superior retention of knowledge in the base language (English) compared to the \textit{IT} strategy, when evaluating catastrophic forgetting in multiple cross-lingual transfers.
Overview of GUA-SPA at IberLEF 2023: Guarani-Spanish Code Switching Analysis

We present the first shared task for detecting and analyzing code-switching in Guarani and Spanish, GUA-SPA at IberLEF 2023. The challenge consisted of three tasks: identifying the language of a token, NER, and a novel task of classifying the way a Spanish span is used in the code-switched context. We annotated a corpus of 1500 texts extracted from news articles and tweets, around 25 thousand tokens, with the information for the tasks. Three teams took part in the evaluation phase, obtaining in general good results for Task 1, and more mixed results for Tasks 2 and 3.