bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Recall, Retrieve and Reason: Towards Better In-Context Relation Extraction
Authors: Li Guozheng , Wang Peng , Ke Wenjun , Guo Yikai , Ji Ke , Shang Ziyu , Liu Jiajun , Xu Zijie
Published: July 2024

Relation extraction (RE) aims to identify relations between entities mentioned in texts. Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) abilities in various tasks, they still suffer from poor performances compared to most supervised fine-tuned RE methods. Utilizing ICL for RE with LLMs encounters two challenges: (1) retrieving good demonstrations from training examples, and (2) enabling LLMs exhibit strong ICL abilities in RE. On the one hand, retrieving good demonstrations is a non-trivial process in RE, which easily results in low relevance regarding entities and relations. On the other hand, ICL with an LLM achieves poor performance in RE while RE is different from language modeling in nature or the LLM is not large enough. In this work, we propose a novel recall-retrieve-reason RE framework that synergizes LLMs with retrieval corpora (training examples) to enable relevant retrieving and reliable in-context reasoning. Specifically, we distill the consistently ontological knowledge from training datasets to let LLMs generate relevant entity pairs grounded by retrieval corpora as valid queries. These entity pairs are then used to retrieve relevant training examples from the retrieval corpora as demonstrations for LLMs to conduct better ICL via instruction tuning. Extensive experiments on different LLMs and RE datasets demonstrate that our method generates relevant and valid entity pairs and boosts ICL abilities of LLMs, achieving competitive or new state-of-the-art performance on sentence-level RE compared to previous supervised fine-tuning methods and ICL-based methods.
Bridging LiDAR Gaps: A Multi-LiDARs Domain Adaptation Dataset for 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Chen Shaoyang , Yang Bochun , Xia Yan , Cheng Ming , Shen Siqi , Wang Cheng
Published: July 2024

We focus on the domain adaptation problem for 3D semantic segmentation, addressing the challenge of data variability in point clouds collected by different LiDARs. Existing benchmarks often mix different types of datasets, which blurs and complicates segmentation evaluations. Here, we introduce a Multi-LiDARs Domain Adaptation Segmentation (MLDAS) dataset, which contains point-wise semantic annotated point clouds captured simultaneously by a 128-beam LiDAR, a 64-beam LiDAR, a 32-beam LiDAR. We select 31,875 scans from 2 representative scenarios: campus and urban street. Furthermore, we evaluate the current 3D segmentation unsupervised domain adaptation methods on the proposed dataset and propose Hierarchical Segmentation Network with Spatial Consistency (HSSC) as a novel knowledge transfer method to mitigate the domain gap significantly using spatial-temporal consistency constraints. Extensive experiments show that HSSC greatly improves the state-of-the-art cross-domain semantic segmentation methods. Our project is available at https://sychen320.github.io/projects/MLDAS.
Sentence-Level or Token-Level? A Comprehensive Study on Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Wei Jingxuan , Sun Linzhuang , Leng Yichong , Tan Xu , Yu Bihui , Guo Ruifeng
Published: July 2024

Knowledge distillation, transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model, has emerged as a powerful technique in neural machine translation for compressing models or simplifying training targets. Knowledge distillation encompasses two primary methods: sentence-level distillation and token-level distillation. In sentence-level distillation, the student model is trained to align with the output of the teacher model, which can alleviate the training difficulty and give student model a comprehensive understanding of global structure. Differently, token-level distillation requires the student model to learn the output distribution of the teacher model, facilitating a more fine-grained transfer of knowledge. Studies have revealed divergent performances between sentence-level and token-level distillation across different scenarios, leading to the confusion on the empirical selection of knowledge distillation methods. In this study, we argue that token-level distillation, with its more complex objective (i.e., distribution), is better suited for “simple” scenarios, while sentence-level distillation excels in “complex” scenarios. To substantiate our hypothesis, we systematically analyze the performance of distillation methods by varying the model size of student models, the complexity of text, and the difficulty of decoding procedure. While our experimental results validate our hypothesis, defining the complexity level of a given scenario remains a challenging task. So we further introduce a novel hybrid method that combines token-level and sentence-level distillation through a gating mechanism, aiming to leverage the advantages of both individual methods. Experiments demonstrate that the hybrid method surpasses the performance of token-level or sentence-level distillation methods and the previous works by a margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid method.
InstructEdit: Instruction-Based Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models
Authors: Zhang Ningyu , Tian Bozhong , Cheng Siyuan , Liang Xiaozhuan , Hu Yi , Xue Kouying , Gou Yanjie , Chen Xi , Chen Huajun
Published: July 2024

Knowledge editing for large language models can offer an efficient solution to alter a model’s behavior without negatively impacting the overall performance. However, the current approaches encounter issues with limited generalizability across tasks, necessitating one distinct editor for each task, significantly hindering the broader applications. To address this, we take the first step to analyze the multi-task generalization issue in knowledge editing. Specifically, we develop an instruction-based editing technique, termed InstructEdit, which facilitates the editor's adaptation to various task performances simultaneously using simple instructions. With only one unified editor for each LLM, we empirically demonstrate that InstructEdit can improve the editor's control, leading to an average 14.86% increase in Reliability in multi-task editing setting. Furthermore, experiments involving holdout unseen task illustrate that InstructEdit consistently surpass previous strong baselines. To further investigate the underlying mechanisms of instruction-based knowledge editing, we analyze the principal components of the editing gradient directions, which unveils that instructions can help control optimization direction with stronger OOD generalization.
Scalable Ultrafast Almost-optimal Euclidean Shortest Paths
Authors: Funke Stefan , Koch Daniel , Proissl Claudius , Schneewind Axel , Weiß Armin , Weitbrecht Felix
Published: July 2024

We consider the problem of computing high-quality Euclidean shortest paths amidst obstacles on a large scale. By transferring and adapting speed-up techniques from the road network setting, we are able to compute source target paths for problem instances with several million obstacle vertices within few milliseconds after moderate preprocessing. We show experimentally that for small instances where optimal solutions are easily available on average our computed paths are less than 0.3% longer than the optimum. For large instances a new lower-bounding technique shows that on average our computed paths are less than 2% longer than the optimum paths. We compare our approach with the current state-of-the-art on problem instances derived from the OpenStreetMap project.
ConstrainedZero: Chance-Constrained POMDP Planning Using Learned Probabilistic Failure Surrogates and Adaptive Safety Constraints
Authors: Moss Robert J. , Jamgochian Arec , Fischer Johannes , Corso Anthony , Kochenderfer Mykel J.
Published: July 2024

To plan safely in uncertain environments, agents must balance utility with safety constraints. Safe planning problems can be modeled as a chance-constrained partially observable Markov decision process (CC-POMDP) and solutions often use expensive rollouts or heuristics to estimate the optimal value and action-selection policy. This work introduces the ConstrainedZero policy iteration algorithm that solves CC-POMDPs in belief space by learning neural network approximations of the optimal value and policy with an additional network head that estimates the failure probability given a belief. This failure probability guides safe action selection during online Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). To avoid overemphasizing search based on the failure estimates, we introduce Δ-MCTS, which uses adaptive conformal inference to update the failure threshold during planning. The approach is tested on a safety-critical POMDP benchmark, an aircraft collision avoidance system, and the sustainability problem of safe CO₂ storage. Results show that by separating safety constraints from the objective we can achieve a target level of safety without optimizing the balance between rewards and costs.
On Using Admissible Bounds for Learning Forward Search Heuristics
Authors: Núñez-Molina Carlos , Asai Masataro , Mesejo Pablo , Fernandez-Olivares Juan
Published: July 2024

In recent years, there has been growing interest in utilizing modern machine learning techniques to learn heuristic functions for forward search algorithms. Despite this, there has been little theoretical understanding of what they should learn, how to train them, and why we do so. This lack of understanding has resulted in the adoption of diverse training targets (suboptimal vs optimal costs vs admissible heuristics) and loss functions (e.g., square vs absolute errors) in the literature. In this work, we focus on how to effectively utilize the information provided by admissible heuristics in heuristic learning. We argue that learning from poly-time admissible heuristics by minimizing mean square errors (MSE) is not the correct approach, since its result is merely a noisy, inadmissible copy of an efficiently computable heuristic. Instead, we propose to model the learned heuristic as a truncated gaussian, where admissible heuristics are used not as training targets but as lower bounds of this distribution. This results in a different loss function from the MSE commonly employed in the literature, which implicitly models the learned heuristic as a gaussian distribution. We conduct experiments where both MSE and our novel loss function are applied to learning a heuristic from optimal plan costs. Results show that our proposed method converges faster during training and yields better heuristics.
Laying the Foundations for Solving FOND HTN Problems: Grounding, Search, Heuristics (and Benchmark Problems)
Authors: Yousefi Mohammad , Bercher Pascal
Published: July 2024

Building upon recent advancements in formalising Fully Observable Non-Deterministic (FOND) Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning, we present the first approach to find strong solutions for HTN problems with uncertainty in action outcomes. We present a search algorithm, along with a compilation that relaxes a FOND HTN problem to a deterministic one. This allows the utilisation of existing grounders and heuristics from the deterministic HTN planning literature.
Improved Approximation Algorithms for Capacitated Location Routing
Authors: Zhao Jingyang , Xiao Mingyu , Wang Shunwang
Published: July 2024

The Capacitated Location Routing Problem is an important planning and routing problem in logistics, which generalizes the capacitated vehicle routing problem and the uncapacitated facility location problem. In this problem, we are given a set of depots and a set of customers where each depot has an opening cost and each customer has a demand, and we need to use minimum cost to open some depots and route capacitated vehicles in the opened depots to satisfy all customers' demand. In this paper, we propose a 4.169-approximation algorithm for this problem, improving the best-known 4.38-approximation ratio (Transportation Science 2013). Moreover, if the demand of each customer is allowed to be delivered by multiple tours, we propose a more refined 4.092-approximation algorithm. Experimental study on benchmark instances shows that the quality of our computed solutions is better than that of previous algorithms and is also much closer to optimality than the provable approximation factor.
Zeta*-SIPP: Improved Time-Optimal Any-Angle Safe-Interval Path Planning
Authors: Zou Yiyuan , Borst Clark
Published: July 2024

Any-angle path planning is an extension of traditional path-planning algorithms that aims to generate smoother and shorter paths in graphs by allowing any-angle moves between vertices, rather than being restricted by edges. Many any-angle path-planning algorithms have been proposed, such as Theta*, Block A* and Anya, but most of them are designed only for static environments, which is not applicable when dynamic obstacles are present. Time-Optimal Any-Angle Safe-Interval Path Planning (TO-AA-SIPP) was developed to fill this gap, which can find an optimal collision-free any-angle path that minimizes the traversal time. However, as indicated by its authors, TO-AA-SIPP may not be efficient enough to be used in multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF). Therefore, this paper presents a new algorithm Zeta*-SIPP to improve TO-AA-SIPP by means of 1) reducing useless search nodes that have no contribution to finding optimal solutions, and 2) introducing Field of View (FoV) instead of Line of Sight (LoS) to speed up visibility checks with static obstacles. Benchmark experiments showed that Zeta*-SIPP reduced the computation time of TO-AA-SIPP by around 70%-90% on average.
Physics-Informed Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving under Missing Observation
Authors: Liao Haicheng , Wang Chengyue , Li Zhenning , Li Yongkang , Wang Bonan , Li Guofa , Xu Chengzhong
Published: July 2024

This paper introduces a novel trajectory prediction approach for autonomous vehicles (AVs), adeptly addressing the challenges of missing observations and the need for adherence to physical laws in real-world driving environments. This study proposes a hierarchical two-stage trajectory prediction model for AVs. In the first stage we propose the Wavelet Reconstruction Network, an innovative tool expertly crafted for reconstructing missing observations, offering optional integration with state-of-the-art models to enhance their robustness. Additionally, the second stage of the model features the Wave Fusion Encoder, a quantum mechanics-inspired innovation for sophisticated vehicle interaction modeling. By incorporating the Kinematic Bicycle Model, we ensure that our predictions align with realistic vehicular kinematics. Complementing our methodological advancements, we introduce MoCAD-missing, a comprehensive real-world traffic dataset, alongside enhanced versions of the NGSIM and HighD datasets, designed to facilitate rigorous testing in environments with missing observations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach markedly outperforms existing methods, achieving high accuracy even in scenarios with up to 75% missing observations.
Peptide Vaccine Design by Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Liu Dan-Xuan , Xu Yi-Heng , Qian Chao
Published: July 2024

Peptide vaccines are growing in significance for fighting diverse diseases. Machine learning has improved the identification of peptides that can trigger immune responses, and the main challenge of peptide vaccine design now lies in selecting an effective subset of peptides due to the allelic diversity among individuals. Previous works mainly formulated this task as a constrained optimization problem, aiming to maximize the expected number of peptide-Major Histocompatibility Complex (peptide-MHC) bindings across a broad range of populations by selecting a subset of diverse peptides with limited size; and employed a greedy algorithm, whose performance, however, may be limited due to the greedy nature. In this paper, we propose a new framework PVD-EMO based on Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimization, which reformulates Peptide Vaccine Design as a bi-objective optimization problem that maximizes the expected number of peptide-MHC bindings and minimizes the number of selected peptides simultaneously, and employs a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) to solve it. We also incorporate warm-start and repair strategies into MOEAs to improve efficiency and performance. We prove that the warm-start strategy ensures that PVD-EMO maintains the same worst-case approximation guarantee as the previous greedy algorithm, and meanwhile, the EMO framework can help avoid local optima. Experiments on a peptide vaccine design for COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, demonstrate the superiority of PVD-EMO.
Prompt Learning for Generalized Vehicle Routing
Authors: Liu Fei , Lin Xi , Liao Weiduo , Wang Zhenkun , Zhang Qingfu , Tong Xialiang , Yuan Mingxuan
Published: July 2024

Neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) is a promising learning-based approach to solving various vehicle routing problems without much manual algorithm design. However, the current NCO methods mainly focus on the in-distribution performance, while the real-world problem instances usually come from different distributions. A costly fine-tuning approach or generalized model retraining from scratch could be needed to tackle the out-of-distribution instances. Unlike the existing methods, this work investigates an efficient prompt learning approach in NCO for cross-distribution adaptation. To be concrete, we propose a novel prompt learning method to facilitate fast zero-shot adaptation of a pre-trained model to solve routing problem instances from different distributions. The proposed model learns a set of prompts among various distributions and then selects the best-matched one to prompt a pre-trained attention model for each problem instance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed prompt learning approach facilitates the fast adaptation of pre-trained routing models. It also outperforms existing generalized models on both in-distribution prediction and zero-shot generalization to a diverse set of new tasks. Our code implementation is available online at https://github.com/FeiLiu36/PromptVRP.
Nukplex: An Efficient Local Search Algorithm for Maximum K-Plex Problem
Authors: Sun Rui , Wang Yiyuan , Wang Shimao , Li Hui , Li Ximing , Yin Minghao
Published: July 2024

The maximum k-plex problem (MKPP) is an significant relaxation version of the maximum clique problem with extensive applications. Recently, lots of researchers have proposed many heuristic algorithms based on various methods to solve the MKPP. In this work, to further improve the performance of solving the MKPP, we propose an efficient local search algorithm based on three main ideas. First, we propose a relaxed bounded configuration checking strategy that considers two kinds of historical searching information to relax the restricted strength of configuration checking and the forbidden condition of candidate vertices for the operation Add, respectively. Second, we present a novel solution information-based vertex selection strategy based on two kinds of solution information to select high-quality candidate vertices. Third, we define the solution core and then introduce a core-based perturbation strategy to help the algorithm jump out of local optima.

The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MKPP algorithms in almost all the instances.
A Swap Relaxation-Based Local Search for the Latin Square Completion Problem
Authors: Xie Zhenxuan , Lü Zhipeng , Su Zhouxing , Li Chu-Min , Ding Junwen , Wang Yuxuan
Published: July 2024

The Latin square completion (LSC) problem aims to assign n symbols to the empty cells of a partially filled Latin square such that in each row and each column, each symbol appears exactly once. In this paper, we propose a swap relaxation-based fast local search algorithm called SRLS for solving the LSC problem. First, it introduces a novel search space definition, which forbids row conflicts based on which a swap-based neighborhood is defined. Second, a color domain relaxation technique is employed in the swap-based neighborhood by temporarily accepting the violation of some constraints to connect high-quality solutions. Third, two effective scoring functions are adopted to select neighborhood moves minimizing the number of conflicting edges as well as the number of color domain violations. Finally, SRLS employs an adaptive restart mechanism to balance the exploitation and exploration of the search. Extensive experiments on 1819 public benchmark instances demonstrate that SRLS outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in the literature in terms of both success rate and computational efficiency.
Imperio: Language-Guided Backdoor Attacks for Arbitrary Model Control
Authors: Chow Ka-Ho , Wei Wenqi , Yu Lei
Published: July 2024

Natural language processing (NLP) has received unprecedented attention. While advancements in NLP models have led to extensive research into their backdoor vulnerabilities, the potential for these advancements to introduce new backdoor threats remains unexplored. This paper proposes Imperio, which harnesses the language understanding capabilities of NLP models to enrich backdoor attacks. Imperio provides a new model control experience. Demonstrated through controlling image classifiers, it empowers the adversary to manipulate the victim model with arbitrary output through language-guided instructions. This is achieved using a language model to fuel a conditional trigger generator, with optimizations designed to extend its language understanding capabilities to backdoor instruction interpretation and execution. Our experiments across three datasets, five attacks, and nine defenses confirm Imperio's effectiveness. It can produce contextually adaptive triggers from text descriptions and control the victim model with desired outputs, even in scenarios not encountered during training. The attack reaches a high success rate without compromising the accuracy of clean inputs and exhibits resilience against representative defenses. Supplementary materials are available at https://khchow.com/Imperio.
Anytime Sorting Algorithms
Authors: Caizergues Emma , Durand François , Mathieu Fabien
Published: July 2024

This paper addresses the anytime sorting problem, aiming to develop algorithms providing tentative estimates of the sorted list at each execution step. Comparisons are treated as steps, and the Spearman's footrule metric evaluates estimation accuracy. We propose a general approach for making any sorting algorithm anytime and introduce two new algorithms: multizip sort and Corsort. Simulations showcase the superior performance of both algorithms compared to existing methods. Multizip sort keeps a low global complexity, while Corsort produces intermediate estimates surpassing previous algorithms.
Proportion-based Sensitivity Analysis of Uncontrolled Confounding Bias in Causal Inference
Authors: Yoshida Haruka , Kuroki Manabu
Published: July 2024

Uncontrolled confounding bias causes a spurious relationship between an exposure variable and an outcome variable and precludes reliable evaluation of the causal effect from observed data.Thus, it is important to observe a sufficient set of confounders to reliably evaluate the causal effect.However, there is no statistical method for judging whether an available set of covariates is sufficient to derive a reliable estimator for the causal effect.To address this problem, we focus on the fact that the mean squared error (MSE) of the outcome variable with respect to the average causal risk can be described as the sum of "the conditional variance of the outcome variable given the exposure variable" and "the square of the uncontrolled confounding bias".We then propose a novel sensitivity analysis, namely, the proportion-based sensitivity analysis of uncontrolled confounding bias in causal effects (PSA) in which the sensitivity parameter is formulated as the proportion of "the square of the uncontrolled confounding bias" to the MSE, and we clarify some properties.We also demonstrate the applicability of the PSA through two case studies.
Using Causal Inference to Investigate Contraceptive Discontinuation in Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Akinwande Victor , MacGregor Megan , Cintas Celia , Karavani Ehud , Wei Dennis , Varshney Kush R. , Nepomnaschy Pablo
Published: July 2024

Discontinuation rates vary by family planning method and across socio-economic contexts. Understanding these variations and their causes is paramount for developing and implementing policies aimed at curbing discontinuation rates. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are ideal for obtaining this information, but this design can be extremely expensive and logistically complex. The ongoing collection of comprehensive data sets, such as Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS data), when combined with machine learning methods, present an alternative and relatively cost-effective means of evidence gathering for policy development. Here, we use causal inference to estimate the effect of injectable contraceptive use on discontinuation over the 12-month period that follows its adoption. To that aim, we use retrospective observational data from seven sub-Saharan African countries captured by the DHS’ Contraceptive Calendar. We use machine learning methods to characterize data regions that share common covariate support. We find that the use of injectables increased the risk of discontinuation in four of the seven countries analyzed. Consistent with existing literature, we find that concerns with the side-effects of injectables appear to be the most frequent reason for discontinuation. However, these risks decreased after adjusting for socio-economic factors. As risk estimates may not apply uniformly within populations, we characterized the sub-populations for robust estimations by their geographical region, level of unmet needs, marital status, level of education, and age of first sex.
Endogenous Energy Reactive Modules Games: Modelling Side Payments among Resource-Bounded Agents
Authors: Gutierrez Julian , Hyland David , Najib Muhammad , Perelli Giuseppe , Wooldridge Michael
Published: July 2024

We introduce Energy Reactive Modules Games (ERMGs), an extension of Reactive Modules Games (RMGs) in which actions incur an energy cost (which may be positive or negative), and the choices that players make are restricted by the energy available to them. In ERMGs, each action is associated with an energy level update, which determines how their energy level is affected by the performance of the action. In addition, agents are provided with an initial energy allowance. This allowance plays a crucial role in shaping an agent’s behaviour, as it must be taken into consideration when one is determining their strategy: agents may only perform actions if they have the requisite energy. We begin by studying rational verification for ERMGs and then introduce Endogenous ERMGs, where agents can choose to transfer their energy to other agents. This exchange may enable equilibria that are impossible to achieve without such transfers. We study the decision problem of whether a stable outcome exists under both the Nash equilibrium and Core solution concepts.
Hybrid Frequency Modulation Network for Image Restoration
Authors: Cui Yuning , Liu Mingyu , Ren Wenqi , Knoll Alois
Published: July 2024

Image restoration involves recovering a high-quality image from its corrupted counterpart. This paper presents an effective and efficient framework for image restoration, termed CSNet, based on ``channel + spatial" hybrid frequency modulation. Different feature channels include different degradation patterns and degrees, however, most current networks ignore the importance of channel interactions. To alleviate this issue, we propose a frequency-based channel feature modulation module to facilitate channel interactions through the channel-dimension Fourier transform. Furthermore, based on our observations, we develop a multi-scale frequency-based spatial feature modulation module to refine the direct-current component of features using extremely lightweight learnable parameters. This module contains a densely connected coarse-to-fine learning paradigm for enhancing multi-scale representation learning. In addition, we introduce a frequency-inspired loss function to achieve omni-frequency learning. Extensive experiments on nine datasets demonstrate that the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance for three image restoration tasks, including image dehazing, image defocus deblurring, and image desnowing. The code and models are available at https://github.com/c-yn/CSNet.
Time-Evolving Data Science and Artificial Intelligence for Advanced Open Environmental Science (TAIAO) Programme
Authors: Koh Yun Sing , Bifet Albert , Bryan Karin , Cassales Guilherme , Graffeuille Olivier , Lim Nick , Mourot Phil , Ning Ding , Pfahringer Bernhard , Vetrova Varvara , Murilo Gomes Heitor
Published: July 2024

New Zealand's unique ecosystems face increasing threats from climate change, impacting biodiversity and posing challenges to safety, livelihoods, and well-being. To tackle these complex issues, advanced data science and artificial intelligence techniques can provide unique solutions. Currently, in its fourth year of a seven-year program, TAIAO focuses on methods for analyzing environmental datasets. Recognizing this urgency, the open-source TAIAO platform was developed. This platform enables new artificial intelligence research for environmental data and offers an open-access repository to enhance reproducibility in the field. This paper will showcase four environmental case studies, artificial intelligence research, platform implementation details, and future development plans.
FreqFormer: Frequency-aware Transformer for Lightweight Image Super-resolution
Authors: Dai Tao , Wang Jianping , Guo Hang , Li Jinmin , Wang Jinbao , Zhu Zexuan
Published: July 2024

Transformer-based models have been widely and successfully used in various low-vision visual tasks, and have achieved remarkable performance in single image super-resolution (SR). Despite the significant progress in SR, Transformer-based SR methods (e.g., SwinIR) still suffer from the problems of heavy computation cost and low-frequency preference, while ignoring the reconstruction of rich high-frequency information, hence hindering the representational power of Transformers. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel Frequency-aware Transformer (FreqFormer) for lightweight image SR. Specifically, a Frequency Division Module (FDM) is first introduced to separately handle high- and low-frequency information in a divide-and-conquer manner. Moreover, we present Frequency-aware Transformer Block (FTB) to extracting both spatial frequency attention and channel transposed attention to recover high-frequency details. Extensive experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our FreqFormer over state-of-the-art SR methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality. Code and models are available at https://github.com/JPWang-CS/FreqFormer.
Drug Overdose Vital-Signs Evaluator Using Machine Learning
Authors: Lingamoorthy Anush Niranjan , Mishra Abhishek Kumar , Kumar Suman , Gordon David , Brenner Jacob , Kandasamy Nagarajan , Watson Amanda
Published: July 2024

Opioid overdose is an escalating global epidemic, affecting 16 million individuals. Lack of overdose detection and slower response times are the leading causes of overdose deaths. During a fatal opioid overdose, the user exhibits motionlessness, lack of breathing, and hypoxemia (oxygen saturation drops). In this paper, we discuss the development of a shoulder-based wearable overdose detection device that monitors hypoxemia, motion, and respiration. The device's design considers the underserved socio-economic population and their psychological contexts. However, conventional approaches to detecting an overdose typically focus on a single biomarker. To address this, we have developed a robust capsule networks based machine learning (ML) model, OxyCaps that integrates oxygen saturation, respiration rate, and motion to classify different levels of hypoxemia. This also helps improve patient adherence by decreasing the chances of false positive alerts. To determine a hypoxemic state, the model considers various features like skin tone, body physiology, motion, and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. In the absence of real-world opioid overdose data, our research leverages data collected by our device from 19 patients experiencing sleep apnea, exploiting the parallels between overdose and apnea biomarkers. Our dataset provides a novel compilation of raw PPG and motion signals detected from the shoulder. Our model classifies 3 stages of hypoxemia with an average accuracy of 92%, specifically achieving a high recall of 0.98 for the critical hypoxemic state that is crucial in determining an overdose.
Revealing Hierarchical Structure of Leaf Venations in Plant Science via Label-Efficient Segmentation: Dataset and Method
Authors: Liu Weizhen , Li Ao , Wu Ze , Li Yue , Ge Baobin , Lan Guangyu , Chen Shilin , Li Minghe , Liu Yunfei , Yuan Xiaohui , Dong Nanqing
Published: July 2024

Hierarchical leaf vein segmentation is a crucial but under-explored task in agricultural sciences, where analysis of the hierarchical structure of plant leaf venation can contribute to plant breeding. While current segmentation techniques rely on data-driven models, there is no publicly available dataset specifically designed for hierarchical leaf vein segmentation.

To address this gap, we introduce the HierArchical Leaf Vein Segmentation (HALVS) dataset, the first public hierarchical leaf vein segmentation dataset. HALVS comprises 5,057 real-scanned high-resolution leaf images collected from three plant species: soybean, sweet cherry, and London planetree. It also includes human-annotated ground truth for three orders of leaf veins, with a total labeling effort of 83.8 person-days. Based on HALVS, we further develop a label-efficient learning paradigm that leverages partial label information, i.e. missing annotations for tertiary veins. Empirical studies are performed on HALVS, revealing new observations, challenges, and research directions on leaf vein segmentation. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WeizhenLiuBioinform/

HALVS-Hierarchical-Vein-Segment.
Deploying Mobility-On-Demand for All by Optimizing Paratransit Services
Authors: Pavia Sophie , Rogers David , Sivagnanam Amutheezan , Wilbur Michael , Edirimanna Danushka , Kim Youngseo , Pugliese Philip , Samaranayake Samitha , Laszka Aron , Mukhopadhyay Ayan , Dubey Abhishek
Published: July 2024

While on-demand ride-sharing services have become popular in recent years, traditional on-demand transit services cannot be used by everyone, e.g., people who use wheelchairs. Paratransit services, operated by public transit agencies, are a critical infrastructure that offers door-to-door transportation assistance for individuals who face challenges in using standard transit routes. However, with declining ridership and mounting financial pressure, public transit agencies in the USA struggle to operate existing services. We collaborate with a public transit agency from the southern USA, highlight the specific nuances of paratransit optimization, and present a vehicle routing problem formulation for optimizing paratransit. We validate our approach using real-world data from the transit agency, present results from an actual pilot deployment of the proposed approach in the city, and show how the proposed approach comprehensively outperforms existing approaches used by the transit agency. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents one of the first examples of using open-source algorithmic approaches for paratransit optimization.
A Novel GAN Approach to Augment Limited Tabular Data for Short-Term Substance Use Prediction
Authors: Thach Nguyen , Habecker Patrick , Johnston Bergen , Cervantes Lillianna , Eisenbraun Anika , Mason Alex , Tyler Kimberly , Khan Bilal , Chan Hau
Published: July 2024

Substance use is a global issue that negatively impacts millions of persons who use drugs (PWUDs). In practice, identifying vulnerable PWUDs for efficient allocation of appropriate resources is challenging due to their complex use patterns (e.g., their tendency to change usage within months) and the high acquisition costs for collecting PWUD-focused substance use data. Thus, there has been a paucity of machine learning models for accurately predicting short-term substance use behaviors of PWUDs. In this paper, using longitudinal survey data of 258 PWUDs in the U.S. Great Plains collected by our team, we design a novel GAN that deals with high-dimensional low-sample-size tabular data and survey skip logic to augment existing data to improve classification models' prediction on (A) whether the PWUDs would increase usage and (B) at which ordinal frequency they would use a particular drug within the next 12 months. Our evaluation results show that, when trained on augmented data from our proposed GAN, the classification models improve their predictive performance (AUROC) by up to 13.4% in Problem (A) and 15.8% in Problem (B) for usage of marijuana, meth, amphetamines, and cocaine, which outperform state-of-the-art generative models.
Unified Physical-Digital Face Attack Detection
Authors: Fang Hao , Liu Ajian , Yuan Haocheng , Zheng Junze , Zeng Dingheng , Liu Yanhong , Deng Jiankang , Escalera Sergio , Liu Xiaoming , Wan Jun , Lei Zhen
Published: July 2024

Face Recognition (FR) systems can suffer from physical (i.e., print photo) and digital (i.e., DeepFake) attacks. However, previous related work rarely considers both situations at the same time. This implies the deployment of multiple models and thus more computational burden. The main reasons for this lack of an integrated model are caused by two factors: (1) The lack of a dataset including both physical and digital attacks which the same ID covers the real face and all attack types; (2) Given the large intra-class variance between these two attacks, it is difficult to learn a compact feature space to detect both attacks simultaneously. To address these issues, we collect a Unified physical-digital Attack dataset, called UniAttackData. The dataset consists of 1,800 participations of 2 and 12 physical and digital attacks, respectively, resulting in a total of 28,706 videos. Then, we propose a Unified Attack Detection framework based on Vision-Language Models (VLMs), namely UniAttackDetection, which includes three main modules: the Teacher-Student Prompts (TSP) module, focused on acquiring unified and specific knowledge respectively; the Unified Knowledge Mining (UKM) module, designed to capture a comprehensive feature space; and the Sample-Level Prompt Interaction (SLPI) module, aimed at grasping sample-level semantics. These three modules seamlessly form a robust unified attack detection framework. Extensive experiments on UniAttackData and three other datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach for unified face attack detection. Dataset link: https://sites.google.com/view/face-anti-spoofing-challenge/dataset-download/uniattackdatacvpr2024
MuseCL: Predicting Urban Socioeconomic Indicators via Multi-Semantic Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yong Xixian , Zhou Xiao
Published: July 2024

Predicting socioeconomic indicators within urban regions is crucial for fostering inclusivity, resilience, and sustainability in cities and human settlements. While pioneering studies have attempted to leverage multi-modal data for socioeconomic prediction, jointly exploring their underlying semantics remains a significant challenge. To address the gap, this paper introduces a Multi-Semantic Contrastive Learning (MuseCL) framework for fine-grained urban region profiling and socioeconomic prediction. Within this framework, we initiate the process by constructing contrastive sample pairs for street view and remote sensing images, capitalizing on the similarities in human mobility and Point of Interest (POI) distribution to derive semantic features from the visual modality. Additionally, we extract semantic insights from POI texts embedded within these regions, employing a pre-trained text encoder. To merge the acquired visual and textual features, we devise an innovative cross-modality-based attentional fusion module, which leverages a contrastive mechanism for integration. Experimental results across multiple cities and indicators consistently highlight the superiority of MuseCL, demonstrating an average improvement of 10% in R2 compared to various competitive baseline models. The code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/XixianYong/MuseCL.
Detecting AI-Generated Sentences in Human-AI Collaborative Hybrid Texts: Challenges, Strategies, and Insights
Authors: Zeng Zijie , Liu Shiqi , Sha Lele , Li Zhuang , Yang Kaixun , Liu Sannyuya , Gasevic Dragan , Chen Guangliang
Published: July 2024

This study explores the challenge of sentence-level AI-generated text detection within human-AI collaborative hybrid texts (abbreviated as hybrid texts). Existing studies of AI-generated text detection for hybrid texts often rely on synthetic datasets. These typically involve hybrid texts with a limited number of boundaries, e.g., single-boundary hybrid texts that begin with human-written content and end with machine-generated continuations. We contend that studies of detecting AI-generated content within hybrid texts should cover different types of hybrid texts generated in realistic settings to better inform real-world applications. Therefore, our study utilizes the CoAuthor dataset, which includes diverse, realistic hybrid texts generated through the collaboration between human writers and an intelligent writing system in multi-turn interactions. We adopt a two-step, segmentation-based pipeline: (i) detect segments within a given hybrid text where each segment contains sentences of consistent authorship, and (ii) classify the authorship of each identified segment. Our empirical findings highlight (1) detecting AI-generated sentences in hybrid texts is overall a challenging task because (1.1) human writers' selecting and even editing AI-generated sentences based on personal preferences adds difficulty in identifying the authorship of segments; (1.2) the frequent change of authorship between neighboring sentences within the hybrid text creates difficulties for segment detectors in identifying authorship-consistent segments; (1.3) the short length of text segments within hybrid texts provides limited stylistic cues for reliable authorship determination; (2) before embarking on the detection process, it is beneficial to assess the average length of segments within the hybrid text. This assessment aids in deciding whether (2.1) to employ a text segmentation-based strategy for hybrid texts with longer segments, or (2.2) to adopt a direct sentence-by-sentence classification strategy for those with shorter segments.
Arrange, Inpaint, and Refine: Steerable Long-term Music Audio Generation and Editing via Content-based Controls
Authors: Lin Liwei , Xia Gus , Zhang Yixiao , Jiang Junyan
Published: July 2024

Controllable music generation plays a vital role in human-AI music co-creation. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating high-quality music, their focus on autoregressive generation limits their utility in music editing tasks. To bridge this gap, To address this gap, we propose a novel approach leveraging a parameter-efficient heterogeneous adapter combined with a masking training scheme. This approach enables autoregressive language models to seamlessly address music inpainting tasks. Additionally, our method integrates frame-level content-based controls, facilitating track-conditioned music refinement and score-conditioned music arrangement. We apply this method to fine-tune MusicGen, a leading autoregressive music generation model. Our experiments demonstrate promising results across multiple music editing tasks, offering more flexible controls for future AI-driven music editing tools. The source codes and a demo page showcasing our work are available at https://kikyo-16.github.io/AIR.
Inferring Iterated Function Systems Approximately from Fractal Images
Authors: Liu Haotian , Luo Dixin , Xu Hongteng
Published: July 2024

As an important mathematical concept, fractals commonly appear in nature and inspire the design of many artistic works.

Although we can generate various fractal images easily based on different iterated function systems (IFSs), inferring an IFS from a given fractal image is still a challenging inverse problem for both scientific research and artistic design.

In this study, we explore the potential of deep learning techniques for this problem, learning a multi-head auto-encoding model to infer typical IFSs (including Julia set and L-system) from fractal images.

In principle, the proposed model encodes fractal images in a latent space and decodes their corresponding IFSs based on the latent representations.

For the fractal images generated by heterogeneous IFSs, we let them share the same encoder and apply two decoders to infer the sequential and non-sequential parameters of their IFSs, respectively.

By introducing one more decoder to reconstruct fractal images, we can leverage large-scale unlabeled fractal images to learn the model in a semi-supervised way, which suppresses the risk of over-fitting.

Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method provides a promising solution to infer IFSs approximately from fractal images.

Code and supplementary file are available at \url{https://github.com/HaotianLiu123/Inferring-IFSs-From-Fractal-Images}.
A Dataset and Model for Realistic License Plate Deblurring
Authors: Gong Haoyan , Feng Yuzheng , Zhang Zhenrong , Hou Xianxu , Liu Jingxin , Huang Siqi , Liu Hongbin
Published: July 2024

Vehicle license plate recognition is a crucial task in intelligent traffic management systems. However, the challenge of achieving accurate recognition persists due to motion blur from fast-moving vehicles. Despite the widespread use of image synthesis approaches in existing deblurring and recognition algorithms, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios remains unproven. To address this, we introduce the first large-scale license plate deblurring dataset named License Plate Blur (LPBlur), captured by a dual-camera system and processed through a post-processing pipeline to avoid misalignment issues. Then, we propose a License Plate Deblurring Generative Adversarial Network (LPDGAN) to tackle the license plate deblurring: 1) a Feature Fusion Module to integrate multi-scale latent codes; 2) a Text Reconstruction Module to restore structure through textual modality; 3) a Partition Discriminator Module to enhance the model's perception of details in each letter. Extensive experiments validate the reliability of the LPBlur dataset for both model training and testing, showcasing that our proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art motion deblurring methods in realistic license plate deblurring scenarios. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/haoyGONG/LPDGAN.
MusicMagus: Zero-Shot Text-to-Music Editing via Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhang Yixiao , Ikemiya Yukara , Xia Gus , Murata Naoki , Martínez-Ramírez Marco A. , Liao Wei-Hsiang , Mitsufuji Yuki , Dixon Simon
Published: July 2024

Recent advances in text-to-music generation models have opened new avenues in musical creativity. However, the task of editing these generated music remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach to edit music generated by such models, enabling the modification of specific attributes, such as genre, mood, and instrument, while maintaining other aspects unchanged. Our method transforms text editing to the latent space manipulation, and adds an additional constraint to enforce consistency. It seamlessly integrates with existing pretrained text-to-music diffusion models without requiring additional training. Experimental results demonstrate superior performance over both zero-shot and certain supervised baselines in style and timbre transfer evaluations. We also show the practical applicability of our approach in real-world music editing scenarios.