Given the broad application of infrared technology across diverse fields, there is an increasing emphasis on investigating super-resolution techniques for infrared images within the realm of deep learning. Despite the impressive results of current Transformer-based methods in image super-resolution tasks, their reliance on the self-attentive mechanism intrinsic to the Transformer architecture results in images being treated as one-dimensional sequences, thereby neglecting their inherent two-dimensional structure. Moreover, infrared images exhibit a uniform pixel distribution and a limited gradient range, posing challenges for the model to capture effective feature information. Consequently, we suggest a potent Transformer model, termed Large Kernel Transformer (LKFormer), to address this issue. Specifically, we have designed a Large Kernel Residual Attention (LKRA) module with linear complexity. This mainly employs depth-wise convolution with large kernels to execute non-local feature modeling, thereby substituting the standard self-attentive layer. Additionally, we have devised a novel feed-forward network structure called Gated-Pixel Feed-Forward Network (GPFN) to augment the LKFormer's capacity to manage the information flow within the network. Comprehensive experimental results reveal that our method surpasses the most advanced techniques available, using fewer parameters and yielding considerably superior performance.The source code will be available at //github.com/sad192/large-kernel-Transformer.
Foundation models have revolutionized the landscape of Deep Learning (DL), serving as a versatile platform which can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks. Despite their adaptability, applications of foundation models to downstream graph-based tasks have been limited, and there remains no convenient way to leverage large-scale non-graph pretrained models in graph-structured settings. In this work, we present a new framework which we term Foundation-Informed Message Passing (FIMP) to bridge the fields of foundational models and GNNs through a simple concept: constructing message-passing operators from pretrained foundation model weights. We show that this approach results in improved performance for graph-based tasks in a number of data domains, allowing graph neural networks to leverage the knowledge of foundation models.
The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a widely studied combinatorial optimization problem and has been applied to various practical problems. While the explainability for VRP is significant for improving the reliability and interactivity in practical VRP applications, it remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose RouteExplainer, a post-hoc explanation framework that explains the influence of each edge in a generated route. Our framework realizes this by rethinking a route as the sequence of actions and extending counterfactual explanations based on the action influence model to VRP. To enhance the explanation, we additionally propose an edge classifier that infers the intentions of each edge, a loss function to train the edge classifier, and explanation-text generation by Large Language Models (LLMs). We quantitatively evaluate our edge classifier on four different VRPs. The results demonstrate its rapid computation while maintaining reasonable accuracy, thereby highlighting its potential for deployment in practical applications. Moreover, on the subject of a tourist route, we qualitatively evaluate explanations generated by our framework. This evaluation not only validates our framework but also shows the synergy between explanation frameworks and LLMs. See //ntt-dkiku.github.io/xai-vrp for our code, datasets, models, and demo.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of autonomous driving, the capability to accurately predict future events and assess their implications is paramount for both safety and efficiency, critically aiding the decision-making process. World models have emerged as a transformative approach, enabling autonomous driving systems to synthesize and interpret vast amounts of sensor data, thereby predicting potential future scenarios and compensating for information gaps. This paper provides an initial review of the current state and prospective advancements of world models in autonomous driving, spanning their theoretical underpinnings, practical applications, and the ongoing research efforts aimed at overcoming existing limitations. Highlighting the significant role of world models in advancing autonomous driving technologies, this survey aspires to serve as a foundational reference for the research community, facilitating swift access to and comprehension of this burgeoning field, and inspiring continued innovation and exploration.
As the errors of microelectromechanical system (MEMS) gyroscopes are complex and nonlinear, the current calibration methods, which rely on linear models or networks with numerous parameters, are inadequate for low-cost embedded computing platforms to achieve both precision and real-time performance. In this paper, we introduce a extremely tiny network (TGC-Net) that characterizes the measurement model of MEMS gyroscopes. The network has a small number of parameters and can be trained on a central processing unit (CPU) before being deployed on a microcontroller unit (MCU). The TGC-Net leverage the robust data processing capabilities of deep learning to derive a nonlinear measurement model from fragmented gyroscope data. Subsequently, this model is used to regress errors on the gyroscope data. Moreover, we analyze the relationship between the compact network and the traditional linear model for MEMS gyroscopes, and emphasize the significance of the adequate angular motion stimulation for train the network. The experimental results, based on public datasets and real-world scenarios, demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method. These findings suggest that this technique is a viable candidate for applications that require MEMS gyroscopes.
Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications, they still suffer from trustworthiness issues, such as hallucinations and misalignments. Retrieval-augmented language models (RAG) have been proposed to enhance the credibility of generations by grounding external knowledge, but the theoretical understandings of their generation risks remains unexplored. In this paper, we answer: 1) whether RAG can indeed lead to low generation risks, 2) how to provide provable guarantees on the generation risks of RAG and vanilla LLMs, and 3) what sufficient conditions enable RAG models to reduce generation risks. We propose C-RAG, the first framework to certify generation risks for RAG models. Specifically, we provide conformal risk analysis for RAG models and certify an upper confidence bound of generation risks, which we refer to as conformal generation risk. We also provide theoretical guarantees on conformal generation risks for general bounded risk functions under test distribution shifts. We prove that RAG achieves a lower conformal generation risk than that of a single LLM when the quality of the retrieval model and transformer is non-trivial. Our intensive empirical results demonstrate the soundness and tightness of our conformal generation risk guarantees across four widely-used NLP datasets on four state-of-the-art retrieval models.
The growing system complexity from microservice architectures and the bilateral enhancement of artificial intelligence (AI) for both attackers and defenders presents increasing security challenges for cloud-native operations. In particular, cloud-native operators require a holistic view of the dynamic security posture for the cloud-native environment from a defense aspect. Additionally, both attackers and defenders can adopt advanced AI technologies. This makes the dynamic interaction and benchmark among different intelligent offense and defense strategies more crucial. Hence, following the multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm, this research develops an agent-based intelligent security service framework (ISSF) for cloud-native operation. It includes a dynamic access graph model to represent the cloud-native environment and an action model to represent offense and defense actions. Then we develop an approach to enable the training, publishing, and evaluating of intelligent security services using diverse deep RL algorithms and training strategies, facilitating their systematic development and benchmark. The experiments demonstrate that our framework can sufficiently model the security posture of a cloud-native system for defenders, effectively develop and quantitatively benchmark different services for both attackers and defenders and guide further service optimization.
Labeled data are critical to modern machine learning applications, but obtaining labels can be expensive. To mitigate this cost, machine learning methods, such as transfer learning, semi-supervised learning and active learning, aim to be label-efficient: achieving high predictive performance from relatively few labeled examples. While obtaining the best label-efficiency in practice often requires combinations of these techniques, existing benchmark and evaluation frameworks do not capture a concerted combination of all such techniques. This paper addresses this deficiency by introducing LabelBench, a new computationally-efficient framework for joint evaluation of multiple label-efficient learning techniques. As an application of LabelBench, we introduce a novel benchmark of state-of-the-art active learning methods in combination with semi-supervised learning for fine-tuning pretrained vision transformers. Our benchmark demonstrates better label-efficiencies than previously reported in active learning. LabelBench's modular codebase is open-sourced for the broader community to contribute label-efficient learning methods and benchmarks. The repository can be found at: //github.com/EfficientTraining/LabelBench.
Optimization metrics are crucial for building recommendation systems at scale. However, an effective and efficient metric for practical use remains elusive. While Top-K ranking metrics are the gold standard for optimization, they suffer from significant computational overhead. Alternatively, the more efficient accuracy and AUC metrics often fall short of capturing the true targets of recommendation tasks, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome this dilemma, we propose a new optimization metric, Lower-Left Partial AUC (LLPAUC), which is computationally efficient like AUC but strongly correlates with Top-K ranking metrics. Compared to AUC, LLPAUC considers only the partial area under the ROC curve in the Lower-Left corner to push the optimization focus on Top-K. We provide theoretical validation of the correlation between LLPAUC and Top-K ranking metrics and demonstrate its robustness to noisy user feedback. We further design an efficient point-wise recommendation loss to maximize LLPAUC and evaluate it on three datasets, validating its effectiveness and robustness.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
The cross-domain recommendation technique is an effective way of alleviating the data sparsity in recommender systems by leveraging the knowledge from relevant domains. Transfer learning is a class of algorithms underlying these techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach for cross-domain recommendation by using neural networks as the base model. We assume that hidden layers in two base networks are connected by cross mappings, leading to the collaborative cross networks (CoNet). CoNet enables dual knowledge transfer across domains by introducing cross connections from one base network to another and vice versa. CoNet is achieved in multi-layer feedforward networks by adding dual connections and joint loss functions, which can be trained efficiently by back-propagation. The proposed model is evaluated on two real-world datasets and it outperforms baseline models by relative improvements of 3.56\% in MRR and 8.94\% in NDCG, respectively.