Artistic performances involving robotic systems present unique technical challenges akin to those encountered in other field deployments. In this paper, we delve into the orchestration of robotic artistic performances, focusing on the complexities inherent in communication protocols and localization methods. Through our case studies and experimental insights, we demonstrate the breadth of technical requirements for this type of deployment, and, most importantly, the significant contributions of working closely with non-experts.
Machine unlearning is a promising paradigm for removing unwanted data samples from a trained model, towards ensuring compliance with privacy regulations and limiting harmful biases. Although unlearning has been shown in, e.g., classification and recommendation systems, its potential in medical image-to-image translation, specifically in image recon-struction, has not been thoroughly investigated. This paper shows that machine unlearning is possible in MRI tasks and has the potential to benefit for bias removal. We set up a protocol to study how much shared knowledge exists between datasets of different organs, allowing us to effectively quantify the effect of unlearning. Our study reveals that combining training data can lead to hallucinations and reduced image quality in the reconstructed data. We use unlearning to remove hallucinations as a proxy exemplar of undesired data removal. Indeed, we show that machine unlearning is possible without full retraining. Furthermore, our observations indicate that maintaining high performance is feasible even when using only a subset of retain data. We have made our code publicly accessible.
In the evolving landscape of machine learning, a pivotal challenge lies in deciphering the internal representations harnessed by neural networks and Transformers. Building on recent progress toward comprehending how networks execute distinct target functions, our study embarks on an exploration of the underlying reasons behind networks adopting specific computational strategies. We direct our focus to the complex algebraic learning task of modular addition involving $k$ inputs. Our research presents a thorough analytical characterization of the features learned by stylized one-hidden layer neural networks and one-layer Transformers in addressing this task. A cornerstone of our theoretical framework is the elucidation of how the principle of margin maximization shapes the features adopted by one-hidden layer neural networks. Let $p$ denote the modulus, $D_p$ denote the dataset of modular arithmetic with $k$ inputs and $m$ denote the network width. We demonstrate that a neuron count of $ m \geq 2^{2k-2} \cdot (p-1) $, these networks attain a maximum $ L_{2,k+1} $-margin on the dataset $ D_p $. Furthermore, we establish that each hidden-layer neuron aligns with a specific Fourier spectrum, integral to solving modular addition problems. By correlating our findings with the empirical observations of similar studies, we contribute to a deeper comprehension of the intrinsic computational mechanisms of neural networks. Furthermore, we observe similar computational mechanisms in the attention matrix of the one-layer Transformer. This research stands as a significant stride in unraveling their operation complexities, particularly in the realm of complex algebraic tasks.
LiDAR sensors play a crucial role in various applications, especially in autonomous driving. Current research primarily focuses on optimizing perceptual models with point cloud data as input, while the exploration of deeper cognitive intelligence remains relatively limited. To address this challenge, parallel LiDARs have emerged as a novel theoretical framework for the next-generation intelligent LiDAR systems, which tightly integrate physical, digital, and social systems. To endow LiDAR systems with cognitive capabilities, we introduce the 3D visual grounding task into parallel LiDARs and present a novel human-computer interaction paradigm for LiDAR systems. We propose Talk2LiDAR, a large-scale benchmark dataset tailored for 3D visual grounding in autonomous driving. Additionally, we present a two-stage baseline approach and an efficient one-stage method named BEVGrounding, which significantly improves grounding accuracy by fusing coarse-grained sentence and fine-grained word embeddings with visual features. Our experiments on Talk2Car-3D and Talk2LiDAR datasets demonstrate the superior performance of BEVGrounding, laying a foundation for further research in this domain.
Language models (LMs) have long been used to improve results of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but they are unaware of the errors that ASR systems make. Error correction models are designed to fix ASR errors, however, they showed little improvement over traditional LMs mainly due to the lack of supervised training data. In this paper, we present Denoising LM (DLM), which is a $\textit{scaled}$ error correction model trained with vast amounts of synthetic data, significantly exceeding prior attempts meanwhile achieving new state-of-the-art ASR performance. We use text-to-speech (TTS) systems to synthesize audio, which is fed into an ASR system to produce noisy hypotheses, which are then paired with the original texts to train the DLM. DLM has several $\textit{key ingredients}$: (i) up-scaled model and data; (ii) usage of multi-speaker TTS systems; (iii) combination of multiple noise augmentation strategies; and (iv) new decoding techniques. With a Transformer-CTC ASR, DLM achieves 1.5% word error rate (WER) on $\textit{test-clean}$ and 3.3% WER on $\textit{test-other}$ on Librispeech, which to our knowledge are the best reported numbers in the setting where no external audio data are used and even match self-supervised methods which use external audio data. Furthermore, a single DLM is applicable to different ASRs, and greatly surpassing the performance of conventional LM based beam-search rescoring. These results indicate that properly investigated error correction models have the potential to replace conventional LMs, holding the key to a new level of accuracy in ASR systems.
Before deploying outputs from foundation models in high-stakes tasks, it is imperative to ensure that they align with human values. For instance, in radiology report generation, reports generated by a vision-language model must align with human evaluations before their use in medical decision-making. This paper presents Conformal Alignment, a general framework for identifying units whose outputs meet a user-specified alignment criterion. It is guaranteed that on average, a prescribed fraction of selected units indeed meet the alignment criterion, regardless of the foundation model or the data distribution. Given any pre-trained model and new units with model-generated outputs, Conformal Alignment leverages a set of reference data with ground-truth alignment status to train an alignment predictor. It then selects new units whose predicted alignment scores surpass a data-dependent threshold, certifying their corresponding outputs as trustworthy. Through applications to question answering and radiology report generation, we demonstrate that our method is able to accurately identify units with trustworthy outputs via lightweight training over a moderate amount of reference data. En route, we investigate the informativeness of various features in alignment prediction and combine them with standard models to construct the alignment predictor.
In the post-deep learning era, the Transformer architecture has demonstrated its powerful performance across pre-trained big models and various downstream tasks. However, the enormous computational demands of this architecture have deterred many researchers. To further reduce the complexity of attention models, numerous efforts have been made to design more efficient methods. Among them, the State Space Model (SSM), as a possible replacement for the self-attention based Transformer model, has drawn more and more attention in recent years. In this paper, we give the first comprehensive review of these works and also provide experimental comparisons and analysis to better demonstrate the features and advantages of SSM. Specifically, we first give a detailed description of principles to help the readers quickly capture the key ideas of SSM. After that, we dive into the reviews of existing SSMs and their various applications, including natural language processing, computer vision, graph, multi-modal and multi-media, point cloud/event stream, time series data, and other domains. In addition, we give statistical comparisons and analysis of these models and hope it helps the readers to understand the effectiveness of different structures on various tasks. Then, we propose possible research points in this direction to better promote the development of the theoretical model and application of SSM. More related works will be continuously updated on the following GitHub: //github.com/Event-AHU/Mamba_State_Space_Model_Paper_List.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
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.
The rapid recent progress in machine learning (ML) has raised a number of scientific questions that challenge the longstanding dogma of the field. One of the most important riddles is the good empirical generalization of overparameterized models. Overparameterized models are excessively complex with respect to the size of the training dataset, which results in them perfectly fitting (i.e., interpolating) the training data, which is usually noisy. Such interpolation of noisy data is traditionally associated with detrimental overfitting, and yet a wide range of interpolating models -- from simple linear models to deep neural networks -- have recently been observed to generalize extremely well on fresh test data. Indeed, the recently discovered double descent phenomenon has revealed that highly overparameterized models often improve over the best underparameterized model in test performance. Understanding learning in this overparameterized regime requires new theory and foundational empirical studies, even for the simplest case of the linear model. The underpinnings of this understanding have been laid in very recent analyses of overparameterized linear regression and related statistical learning tasks, which resulted in precise analytic characterizations of double descent. This paper provides a succinct overview of this emerging theory of overparameterized ML (henceforth abbreviated as TOPML) that explains these recent findings through a statistical signal processing perspective. We emphasize the unique aspects that define the TOPML research area as a subfield of modern ML theory and outline interesting open questions that remain.
Deep learning methods are achieving ever-increasing performance on many artificial intelligence tasks. A major limitation of deep models is that they are not amenable to interpretability. This limitation can be circumvented by developing post hoc techniques to explain the predictions, giving rise to the area of explainability. Recently, explainability of deep models on images and texts has achieved significant progress. In the area of graph data, graph neural networks (GNNs) and their explainability are experiencing rapid developments. However, there is neither a unified treatment of GNN explainability methods, nor a standard benchmark and testbed for evaluations. In this survey, we provide a unified and taxonomic view of current GNN explainability methods. Our unified and taxonomic treatments of this subject shed lights on the commonalities and differences of existing methods and set the stage for further methodological developments. To facilitate evaluations, we generate a set of benchmark graph datasets specifically for GNN explainability. We summarize current datasets and metrics for evaluating GNN explainability. Altogether, this work provides a unified methodological treatment of GNN explainability and a standardized testbed for evaluations.