Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
PersianLLaMA: Towards Building First Persian Large Language Model

Despite the widespread use of the Persian language by millions globally, limited efforts have been made in natural language processing for this language. The use of large language models as effective tools in various natural language processing tasks typically requires extensive textual data and robust hardware resources. Consequently, the scarcity of Persian textual data and the unavailability of powerful hardware resources have hindered the development of large language models for Persian. This paper introduces the first large Persian language model, named PersianLLaMA, trained on a collection of Persian texts and datasets. This foundational model comes in two versions, with 7 and 13 billion parameters, trained on formal and colloquial Persian texts using two different approaches. PersianLLaMA has been evaluated for natural language generation tasks based on the latest evaluation methods, namely using larger language models, and for natural language understanding tasks based on automated machine metrics. The results indicate that PersianLLaMA significantly outperforms its competitors in both understanding and generating Persian text. PersianLLaMA marks an important step in the development of Persian natural language processing and can be a valuable resource for the Persian-speaking community. This large language model can be used for various natural language processing tasks, especially text generation like chatbots, question-answering, machine translation, and text summarization
Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior

Blind face restoration is an important task in computer vision and has gained significant attention due to its wide-range applications. Previous works mainly exploit facial priors to restore face images and have demonstrated high-quality results. However, generating faithful facial details remains a challenging problem due to the limited prior knowledge obtained from finite data. In this work, we delve into the potential of leveraging the pretrained Stable Diffusion for blind face restoration. We propose BFRffusion which is thoughtfully designed to effectively extract features from low-quality face images and could restore realistic and faithful facial details with the generative prior of the pretrained Stable Diffusion. In addition, we build a privacy-preserving face dataset called PFHQ with balanced attributes like race, gender, and age. This dataset can serve as a viable alternative for training blind face restoration networks, effectively addressing privacy and bias concerns usually associated with the real face datasets. Through an extensive series of experiments, we demonstrate that our BFRffusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world public testing datasets for blind face restoration and our PFHQ dataset is an available resource for training blind face restoration networks. The codes, pretrained models, and dataset are released at https://github.com/chenxx89/BFRffusion.
Control and readout of a transmon using a compact superconducting resonator

We demonstrate control and readout of a superconducting artificial atom based on a transmon qubit using a compact lumped-element resonator. The resonator consists of a parallel-plate capacitor (PPC) with a wire geometric inductor. The footprint of the resonators is about 200 {\mu}m by 200 {\mu}m, which is similar to the standard transmon size and one or two orders of magnitude more compact in the occupied area comparing to coplanar waveguide resonators. We observe coherent Rabi oscillations and obtain time-domain properties of the transmon. The work opens a door to miniaturize essential components of superconducting circuits and to further scaling up quantum systems with superconducting transmons.
Distributed Stochastic Optimization under Heavy-Tailed Noises

This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies a more general assumption. The commonly-used bounded variance assumption is a special case of the considered noise assumption. A typical example of this kind of noise is a Pareto distribution noise with tail index within (1,2], which has infinite variance. Despite that there has been several distributed optimization algorithms proposed for the heavy-tailed noise scenario, these algorithms need a centralized server in the network which collects the information of all clients. Different from these algorithms, this paper considers that there is no centralized server and the agents can only exchange information with neighbors in a communication graph. A distributed method combining gradient clipping and distributed stochastic subgradient projection is proposed. It is proven that when the gradient descent step-size and the gradient clipping step-size meet certain conditions, the state of each agent converges to the optimal solution of the distributed optimization problem with probability 1. The simulation results validate the algorithm.
Learning-To-Rank Approach for Identifying Everyday Objects Using a Physical-World Search Engine

Domestic service robots offer a solution to the increasing demand for daily care and support. A human-in-the-loop approach that combines automation and operator intervention is considered to be a realistic approach to their use in society. Therefore, we focus on the task of retrieving target objects from open-vocabulary user instructions in a human-in-the-loop setting, which we define as the learning-to-rank physical objects (LTRPO) task. For example, given the instruction "Please go to the dining room which has a round table. Pick up the bottle on it," the model is required to output a ranked list of target objects that the operator/user can select. In this paper, we propose MultiRankIt, which is a novel approach for the LTRPO task. MultiRankIt introduces the Crossmodal Noun Phrase Encoder to model the relationship between phrases that contain referring expressions and the target bounding box, and the Crossmodal Region Feature Encoder to model the relationship between the target object and multiple images of its surrounding contextual environment. Additionally, we built a new dataset for the LTRPO task that consists of instructions with complex referring expressions accompanied by real indoor environmental images that feature various target objects. We validated our model on the dataset and it outperformed the baseline method in terms of the mean reciprocal rank and recall@k. Furthermore, we conducted physical experiments in a setting where a domestic service robot retrieved everyday objects in a standardized domestic environment, based on users' instruction in a human--in--the--loop setting. The experimental results demonstrate that the success rate for object retrieval achieved 80%. Our code is available at https://github.com/keio-smilab23/MultiRankIt.
Compositional Generalization in Spoken Language Understanding

State-of-the-art spoken language understanding (SLU) models have shown tremendous success in benchmark SLU datasets, yet they still fail in many practical scenario due to the lack of model compositionality when trained on limited training data. In this paper, we study two types of compositionality: (a) novel slot combination, and (b) length generalization. We first conduct in-depth analysis, and find that state-of-the-art SLU models often learn spurious slot correlations during training, which leads to poor performance in both compositional cases. To mitigate these limitations, we create the first compositional splits of benchmark SLU datasets and we propose the first compositional SLU model, including compositional loss and paired training that tackle each compositional case respectively. On both benchmark and compositional splits in ATIS and SNIPS, we show that our compositional SLU model significantly outperforms (up to $5\%$ F1 score) state-of-the-art BERT SLU model.
Learning Online Policies for Person Tracking in Multi-View Environments

In this paper, we introduce MVSparse, a novel and efficient framework for cooperative multi-person tracking across multiple synchronized cameras. The MVSparse system is comprised of a carefully orchestrated pipeline, combining edge server-based models with distributed lightweight Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents operating on individual cameras. These RL agents intelligently select informative blocks within each frame based on historical camera data and detection outcomes from neighboring cameras, significantly reducing computational load and communication overhead. The edge server aggregates multiple camera views to perform detection tasks and provides feedback to the individual agents. By projecting inputs from various perspectives onto a common ground plane and applying deep detection models, MVSparse optimally leverages temporal and spatial redundancy in multi-view videos. Notably, our contributions include an empirical analysis of multi-camera pedestrian tracking datasets, the development of a multi-camera, multi-person detection pipeline, and the implementation of MVSparse, yielding impressive results on both open datasets and real-world scenarios. Experimentally, MVSparse accelerates overall inference time by 1.88X and 1.60X compared to a baseline approach while only marginally compromising tracking accuracy by 2.27% and 3.17%, respectively, showcasing its promising potential for efficient multi-camera tracking applications.
WebVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websites

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task aims to enable AI agents to accurately understand and follow natural language instructions to navigate through real-world environments, ultimately reaching specific target locations. We recognise a promising opportunity to extend VLN to a comparable navigation task that holds substantial significance in our daily lives, albeit within the virtual realm: navigating websites on the Internet. This paper proposes a new task named Vision-and-Language Navigation on Websites (WebVLN), where we use question-based instructions to train an agent, emulating how users naturally browse websites. Unlike the existing VLN task that only pays attention to vision and instruction (language), the WebVLN agent further considers underlying web-specific content like HTML, which could not be seen on the rendered web pages yet contains rich visual and textual information. Toward this goal, we contribute a dataset, WebVLN-v1, and introduce a novel approach called Website-aware VLN Network (WebVLN-Net), which is built upon the foundation of state-of-the-art VLN techniques. Experimental results show that WebVLN-Net outperforms current VLN and web-related navigation methods. We believe that the introduction of the new WebVLN task and its dataset will establish a new dimension within the VLN domain and contribute to the broader vision-and-language research community. The code is available at: https://github.com/WebVLN/WebVLN.
PBCounter: Weighted Model Counting on Pseudo-Boolean Formulas

In Weighted Model Counting (WMC), we assign weights to literals and compute the sum of the weights of the models of a given propositional formula where the weight of an assignment is the product of the weights of its literals. The current WMC solvers work on Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) formulas. However, CNF is not a natural representation for human-being in many applications. Motivated by the stronger expressive power of pseudo-Boolean (PB) formulas than CNF, we propose to perform WMC on PB formulas. Based on a recent dynamic programming algorithm framework called ADDMC for WMC, we implement a weighted PB counting tool PBCounter. We compare PBCounter with the state-of-the-art weighted model counters SharpSAT-TD, ExactMC, D4, and ADDMC, where the latter tools work on CNF with encoding methods that convert PB constraints into a CNF formula. The experiments on three domains of benchmarks show that PBCounter is superior to the model counters on CNF formulas.
Option pricing under stochastic volatility on a quantum computer

We develop quantum algorithms for pricing Asian and barrier options under the Heston model, a popular stochastic volatility model, and estimate their costs, in terms of T-count, T-depth and number of logical qubits, on instances under typical market conditions. These algorithms are based on combining well-established numerical methods for stochastic differential equations and quantum amplitude estimation technique. In particular, we empirically show that, despite its simplicity, weak Euler method achieves the same level of accuracy as the better-known strong Euler method in this task. Furthermore, by eliminating the expensive procedure of preparing Gaussian states, the quantum algorithm based on weak Euler scheme achieves drastically better efficiency than the one based on strong Euler scheme. Our resource analysis suggests that option pricing under stochastic volatility is a promising application of quantum computers, and that our algorithms render the hardware requirement for reaching practical quantum advantage in financial applications less stringent than prior art.
MoTCoder: Elevating Large Language Models with Modular of Thought for Challenging Programming Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in handling straightforward programming tasks. However, their performance tends to falter when confronted with more challenging programming problems. We observe that conventional models often generate solutions as monolithic code blocks, restricting their effectiveness in tackling intricate questions. To overcome this limitation, we present Modular-of-Thought Coder (MoTCoder). We introduce a pioneering framework for MoT instruction tuning, designed to promote the decomposition of tasks into logical sub-tasks and sub-modules. Our investigations reveal that, through the cultivation and utilization of sub-modules, MoTCoder significantly improves both the modularity and correctness of the generated solutions, leading to substantial relative pass@1 improvements of 12.9% on APPS and 9.43% on CodeContests. Our codes are available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/MoTCoder.
Pano-NeRF: Synthesizing High Dynamic Range Novel Views with Geometry from Sparse Low Dynamic Range Panoramic Images

Panoramic imaging research on geometry recovery and High Dynamic Range (HDR) reconstruction becomes a trend with the development of Extended Reality (XR). Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) provide a promising scene representation for both tasks without requiring extensive prior data. However, in the case of inputting sparse Low Dynamic Range (LDR) panoramic images, NeRF often degrades with under-constrained geometry and is unable to reconstruct HDR radiance from LDR inputs. We observe that the radiance from each pixel in panoramic images can be modeled as both a signal to convey scene lighting information and a light source to illuminate other pixels. Hence, we propose the irradiance fields from sparse LDR panoramic images, which increases the observation counts for faithful geometry recovery and leverages the irradiance-radiance attenuation for HDR reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the irradiance fields outperform state-of-the-art methods on both geometry recovery and HDR reconstruction and validate their effectiveness. Furthermore, we show a promising byproduct of spatially-varying lighting estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/Lu-Zhan/Pano-NeRF.
A fully decentralized auditing approach for edge computing: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

Edge storage presents a viable data storage alternative for application vendors (AV), offering benefits such as reduced bandwidth overhead and latency compared to cloud storage. However, data cached in edge computing systems is susceptible to intentional or accidental disturbances. This paper proposes a decentralized integrity auditing scheme to safeguard data integrity and counter the traditional reliance on centralized third-party auditors (TPA), which are unfit for distributed systems. Our novel approach employs edge servers (ES) as mutual auditors, eliminating the need for a centralized entity. This decentralization minimizes potential collusion with malicious auditors and biases in audit outcomes. Using a strategic game model, we demonstrate that ESs are more motivated to audit each other than TPAs. The auditing process is addressed as a Nash Equilibrium problem, assuring accurate integrity proof through incentives for ESs. Our scheme's security and performance are rigorously assessed, showing it is secure within the random oracle model, offers improved speed, and is cost-effective compared to existing methods.
BAL: Balancing Diversity and Novelty for Active Learning

The objective of Active Learning is to strategically label a subset of the dataset to maximize performance within a predetermined labeling budget. In this study, we harness features acquired through self-supervised learning. We introduce a straightforward yet potent metric, Cluster Distance Difference, to identify diverse data. Subsequently, we introduce a novel framework, Balancing Active Learning (BAL), which constructs adaptive sub-pools to balance diverse and uncertain data. Our approach outperforms all established active learning methods on widely recognized benchmarks by 1.20%. Moreover, we assess the efficacy of our proposed framework under extended settings, encompassing both larger and smaller labeling budgets. Experimental results demonstrate that, when labeling 80% of the samples, the performance of the current SOTA method declines by 0.74%, whereas our proposed BAL achieves performance comparable to the full dataset. Codes are available at https://github.com/JulietLJY/BAL.
Error Correction Using Squeezed Fock States

The paper addresses the construction an error correction code for quantum calculations based on squeezed Fock states. It is shown that the use of squeezed Fock states makes it possible to satisfy the Knill-Laflamme (KL) criteria for bosonic error correction codes. It is shown that the first squeezed Fock state corrects both photon loss and dephasing errors better than higher-order states. A comparison of the proposed protocol with an error correction protocol based on the squeezed Schrodinger's cat states is carried out on the basis of the KL cost function. It is shown that the squeezed first Fock state better protects a channel with photon loss and dephasing.
Robust Neural Pruning with Gradient Sampling Optimization for Residual Neural Networks

In this study, we explore an innovative approach for neural network optimization, focusing on the application of gradient sampling techniques, similar to those in StochGradAdam, during the pruning process. Our primary objective is to maintain high accuracy levels in pruned models, a critical challenge in resource-limited scenarios. Our extensive experiments reveal that models optimized with gradient sampling techniques are more effective at preserving accuracy during pruning compared to those using traditional optimization methods. This finding underscores the significance of gradient sampling in facilitating robust learning and enabling networks to retain crucial information even after substantial reduction in their complexity. We validate our approach across various datasets and neural architectures, demonstrating its broad applicability and effectiveness. The paper also delves into the theoretical aspects, explaining how gradient sampling techniques contribute to the robustness of models during pruning. Our results suggest a promising direction for creating efficient neural networks that do not compromise on accuracy, even in environments with constrained computational resources.
Detection-based Intermediate Supervision for Visual Question Answering

Recently, neural module networks (NMNs) have yielded ongoing success in answering compositional visual questions, especially those involving multi-hop visual and logical reasoning. NMNs decompose the complex question into several sub-tasks using instance-modules from the reasoning paths of that question and then exploit intermediate supervisions to guide answer prediction, thereby improving inference interpretability. However, their performance may be hindered due to sketchy modeling of intermediate supervisions. For instance, (1) a prior assumption that each instance-module refers to only one grounded object yet overlooks other potentially associated grounded objects, impeding full cross-modal alignment learning; (2) IoU-based intermediate supervisions may introduce noise signals as the bounding box overlap issue might guide the model's focus towards irrelevant objects. To address these issues, a novel method, \textbf{\underline{D}}etection-based \textbf{\underline{I}}ntermediate \textbf{\underline{S}}upervision (DIS), is proposed, which adopts a generative detection framework to facilitate multiple grounding supervisions via sequence generation. As such, DIS offers more comprehensive and accurate intermediate supervisions, thereby boosting answer prediction performance. Furthermore, by considering intermediate results, DIS enhances the consistency in answering compositional questions and their sub-questions.Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DIS, showcasing both improved accuracy and state-of-the-art reasoning consistency compared to prior approaches.
A Comprehensive Survey of Evaluation Techniques for Recommendation Systems

The effectiveness of recommendation systems is pivotal to user engagement and satisfaction in online platforms. As these recommendation systems increasingly influence user choices, their evaluation transcends mere technical performance and becomes central to business success. This paper addresses the multifaceted nature of recommendations system evaluation by introducing a comprehensive suite of metrics, each tailored to capture a distinct aspect of system performance. We discuss * Similarity Metrics: to quantify the precision of content-based filtering mechanisms and assess the accuracy of collaborative filtering techniques. * Candidate Generation Metrics: to evaluate how effectively the system identifies a broad yet relevant range of items. * Predictive Metrics: to assess the accuracy of forecasted user preferences. * Ranking Metrics: to evaluate the effectiveness of the order in which recommendations are presented. * Business Metrics: to align the performance of the recommendation system with economic objectives. Our approach emphasizes the contextual application of these metrics and their interdependencies. In this paper, we identify the strengths and limitations of current evaluation practices and highlight the nuanced trade-offs that emerge when optimizing recommendation systems across different metrics. The paper concludes by proposing a framework for selecting and interpreting these metrics to not only improve system performance but also to advance business goals. This work is to aid researchers and practitioners in critically assessing recommendation systems and fosters the development of more nuanced, effective, and economically viable personalization strategies. Our code is available at GitHub - https://github.com/aryan-jadon/Evaluation-Metrics-for-Recommendation-Systems.