With the development of VR technology, especially the emergence of the metaverse concept, the integration of visual and tactile perception has become an expected experience in human-machine interaction. Therefore, achieving spatial-temporal consistency of visual and tactile information in VR applications has become a necessary factor for realizing this experience. The state-of-the-art vibrotactile datasets generally contain temporal-level vibrotactile information collected by randomly sliding on the surface of an object, along with the corresponding image of the material/texture. However, they lack the position/spatial information that corresponds to the signal acquisition, making it difficult to achieve spatiotemporal alignment of visual-tactile data. Therefore, we develop a new data acquisition system in this paper which can collect visual and vibrotactile signals of different textures/materials with spatial and temporal consistency. In addition, we develop a VR-based application call "V-Touching" by leveraging the dataset generated by the new acquisition system, which can provide pixel-to-taxel joint visual-tactile perception when sliding over the surface of objects in the virtual environment with distinct vibrotactile feedback of different textures/materials. Our data and code are available at \url{//github.com/wmtlab/Pixel2Taxel}.
In machine learning and neural network optimization, algorithms like incremental gradient, and shuffle SGD are popular due to minimizing the number of cache misses and good practical convergence behavior. However, their optimization properties in theory, especially for non-convex smooth functions, remain incompletely explored. This paper delves into the convergence properties of SGD algorithms with arbitrary data ordering, within a broad framework for non-convex smooth functions. Our findings show enhanced convergence guarantees for incremental gradient and single shuffle SGD. Particularly if $n$ is the training set size, we improve $n$ times the optimization term of convergence guarantee to reach accuracy $\varepsilon$ from $O(n / \varepsilon)$ to $O(1 / \varepsilon)$.
With the proliferation of research means and computational methodologies, published biomedical literature is growing exponentially in numbers and volume. Cancer cell lines are frequently used models in biological and medical research that are currently applied for a wide range of purposes, from studies of cellular mechanisms to drug development, which has led to a wealth of related data and publications. Sifting through large quantities of text to gather relevant information on the cell lines of interest is tedious and extremely slow when performed by humans. Hence, novel computational information extraction and correlation mechanisms are required to boost meaningful knowledge extraction. In this work, we present the design, implementation and application of a novel data extraction and exploration system. This system extracts deep semantic relations between textual entities from scientific literature to enrich existing structured clinical data in the domain of cancer cell lines. We introduce a new public data exploration portal, which enables automatic linking of genomic copy number variants plots with ranked, related entities such as affected genes. Each relation is accompanied by literature-derived evidences, allowing for deep, yet rapid, literature search, using existing structured data as a springboard. Our system is publicly available on the web at //cancercelllines.org
Despite the remarkable performance of foundation vision-language models, the shared representation space for text and vision can also encode harmful label associations detrimental to fairness. While prior work has uncovered bias in vision-language models' (VLMs) classification performance across geography, work has been limited along the important axis of harmful label associations due to a lack of rich, labeled data. In this work, we investigate harmful label associations in the recently released Casual Conversations datasets containing more than 70,000 videos. We study bias in the frequency of harmful label associations across self-provided labels for age, gender, apparent skin tone, and physical adornments across several leading VLMs. We find that VLMs are $4-13$x more likely to harmfully classify individuals with darker skin tones. We also find scaling transformer encoder model size leads to higher confidence in harmful predictions. Finally, we find improvements on standard vision tasks across VLMs does not address disparities in harmful label associations.
We study the data-generating mechanism for reconstructive SSL to shed light on its effectiveness. With an infinite amount of labeled samples, we provide a sufficient and necessary condition for perfect linear approximation. The condition reveals a full-rank component that preserves the label classes of Y, along with a redundant component. Motivated by the condition, we propose to approximate the redundant component by a low-rank factorization and measure the approximation quality by introducing a new quantity $\epsilon_s$, parameterized by the rank of factorization s. We incorporate $\epsilon_s$ into the excess risk analysis under both linear regression and ridge regression settings, where the latter regularization approach is to handle scenarios when the dimension of the learned features is much larger than the number of labeled samples n for downstream tasks. We design three stylized experiments to compare SSL with supervised learning under different settings to support our theoretical findings.
We study the problem of learning to predict the next state of a dynamical system when the underlying evolution function is unknown. Unlike previous work, we place no parametric assumptions on the dynamical system, and study the problem from a learning theory perspective. We define new combinatorial measures and dimensions and show that they quantify the optimal mistake and regret bounds in the realizable and agnostic setting respectively.
Intelligent transportation systems play a crucial role in modern traffic management and optimization, greatly improving traffic efficiency and safety. With the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) technologies in the fields of image generation and natural language processing, generative AI has also played a crucial role in addressing key issues in intelligent transportation systems, such as data sparsity, difficulty in observing abnormal scenarios, and in modeling data uncertainty. In this review, we systematically investigate the relevant literature on generative AI techniques in addressing key issues in different types of tasks in intelligent transportation systems. First, we introduce the principles of different generative AI techniques, and their potential applications. Then, we classify tasks in intelligent transportation systems into four types: traffic perception, traffic prediction, traffic simulation, and traffic decision-making. We systematically illustrate how generative AI techniques addresses key issues in these four different types of tasks. Finally, we summarize the challenges faced in applying generative AI to intelligent transportation systems, and discuss future research directions based on different application scenarios.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.