Real-world autonomous driving systems must make safe decisions in the face of rare and diverse traffic scenarios. Current state-of-the-art planners are mostly evaluated on real-world datasets like nuScenes (open-loop) or nuPlan (closed-loop). In particular, nuPlan seems to be an expressive evaluation method since it is based on real-world data and closed-loop, yet it mostly covers basic driving scenarios. This makes it difficult to judge a planner's capabilities to generalize to rarely-seen situations. Therefore, we propose a novel closed-loop benchmark interPlan containing several edge cases and challenging driving scenarios. We assess existing state-of-the-art planners on our benchmark and show that neither rule-based nor learning-based planners can safely navigate the interPlan scenarios. A recently evolving direction is the usage of foundation models like large language models (LLM) to handle generalization. We evaluate an LLM-only planner and introduce a novel hybrid planner that combines an LLM-based behavior planner with a rule-based motion planner that achieves state-of-the-art performance on our benchmark.
There is a prevalent opinion in the recent literature that Diffusion-based models outperform GAN-based counterparts on the Image Super Resolution (ISR) problem. However, in most studies, Diffusion-based ISR models were trained longer and utilized larger networks than the GAN baselines. This raises the question of whether the superiority of Diffusion models is due to the Diffusion paradigm being better suited for the ISR task or if it is a consequence of the increased scale and computational resources used in contemporary studies. In our work, we compare Diffusion-based and GAN-based Super Resolution under controlled settings, where both approaches are matched in terms of architecture, model and dataset size, and computational budget. We show that a GAN-based model can achieve results comparable to a Diffusion-based model. Additionally, we explore the impact of design choices such as text conditioning and augmentation on the performance of ISR models, showcasing their effect on several downstream tasks. We will release the inference code and weights of our scaled GAN.
Cambodia's agricultural landscape is rapidly transforming, particularly in the cashew sector. Despite the country's rapid emergence and ambition to become the largest cashew producer, comprehensive data on plantation areas and the environmental impacts of this expansion are lacking. This study addresses the gap in detailed land use data for cashew plantations in Cambodia and assesses the implications of agricultural advancements. We collected over 80,000 training polygons across Cambodia to train a convolutional neural network using high-resolution optical and SAR satellite data for precise cashew plantation mapping. Our findings indicate that Cambodia ranks among the top five in terms of cultivated area and the top three in global cashew production, driven by high yields. Significant cultivated areas are located in Kampong Thom, Kratie, and Ratanak Kiri provinces. Balancing rapid agricultural expansion with environmental stewardship, particularly forest conservation, is crucial. Cambodia's cashew production is poised for further growth, driven by high-yielding trees and premium nuts. However, sustainable expansion requires integrating agricultural practices with economic and environmental strategies to enhance local value and protect forested areas. Advanced mapping technologies offer comprehensive tools to support these objectives and ensure the sustainable development of Cambodia's cashew industry.
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have made significant progress in general scenarios. However, it remains challenging to transcribe contextual named entities (NEs) in the contextual ASR scenario. Previous approaches have attempted to address this by utilizing the NE dictionary. These approaches treat entities as individual tokens and generate them token-by-token, which may result in incomplete transcriptions of entities. In this paper, we treat entities as indivisible wholes and introduce the idea of copying into ASR. We design a systematic mechanism called CopyNE, which can copy entities from the NE dictionary. By copying all tokens of an entity at once, we can reduce errors during entity transcription, ensuring the completeness of the entity. Experiments demonstrate that CopyNE consistently improves the accuracy of transcribing entities compared to previous approaches. Even when based on the strong Whisper, CopyNE still achieves notable improvements.
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse languages. This study explores how LLMs handle multilingualism. Based on observed language ratio shifts among layers and the relationships between network structures and certain capabilities, we hypothesize the LLM's multilingual workflow ($\texttt{MWork}$): LLMs initially understand the query, converting multilingual inputs into English for task-solving. In the intermediate layers, they employ English for thinking and incorporate multilingual knowledge with self-attention and feed-forward structures, respectively. In the final layers, LLMs generate responses aligned with the original language of the query. To verify $\texttt{MWork}$, we introduce Parallel Language-specific Neuron Detection ($\texttt{PLND}$) to identify activated neurons for inputs in different languages without any labeled data. Using $\texttt{PLND}$, we validate $\texttt{MWork}$ through extensive experiments involving the deactivation of language-specific neurons across various layers and structures. Moreover, $\texttt{MWork}$ allows fine-tuning of language-specific neurons with a small dataset, enhancing multilingual abilities in a specific language without compromising others. This approach results in an average improvement of $3.6\%$ for high-resource languages and $2.3\%$ for low-resource languages across all tasks with just $400$ documents.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been widely used for code generation. Due to the complexity and opacity of LLMs, little is known about how these models generate code. We made the first attempt to bridge this knowledge gap by investigating whether LLMs attend to the same parts of a task description as human programmers during code generation. An analysis of six LLMs, including GPT-4, on two popular code generation benchmarks revealed a consistent misalignment between LLMs' and programmers' attention. We manually analyzed 211 incorrect code snippets and found five attention patterns that can be used to explain many code generation errors. Finally, a user study showed that model attention computed by a perturbation-based method is often favored by human programmers. Our findings highlight the need for human-aligned LLMs for better interpretability and programmer trust.
Standard federated learning (FL) approaches are vulnerable to the free-rider dilemma: participating agents can contribute little to nothing yet receive a well-trained aggregated model. While prior mechanisms attempt to solve the free-rider dilemma, none have addressed the issue of truthfulness. In practice, adversarial agents can provide false information to the server in order to cheat its way out of contributing to federated training. In an effort to make free-riding-averse federated mechanisms truthful, and consequently less prone to breaking down in practice, we propose FACT. FACT is the first federated mechanism that: (1) eliminates federated free riding by using a penalty system, (2) ensures agents provide truthful information by creating a competitive environment, and (3) encourages agent participation by offering better performance than training alone. Empirically, FACT avoids free-riding when agents are untruthful, and reduces agent loss by over 4x.
When companies release marketing materials aimed at promoting their privacy practices or highlighting specific privacy features, what do they actually communicate to consumers? In this paper, we explore the impact of privacy marketing materials on: (1) consumers' attitude towards the organizations providing the campaigns, (2) overall privacy awareness, and (3) the actionability of suggested privacy advice. To this end, we investigated the impact of four privacy advertising videos and one privacy game published by five different technology companies. We conducted 24 semi-structured interviews with participants randomly assigned to view one or two of the videos or play the game. Our findings suggest that awareness of privacy features can contribute to positive perceptions of a company or its products. The ads we tested were more successful in communicating the advertised privacy features than the game we tested. We observed that advertising a single privacy feature using a single metaphor in a short ad increased awareness of the advertised feature. The game failed to communicate privacy features or motivate study participants to use the features. Our results also suggest that privacy campaigns can be useful for raising awareness about privacy features and improving brand image, but may not be the most effective way to teach viewers how to use privacy features.
This paper studies an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system where a multi-antenna base station (BS) aims to communicate with a single-antenna user in the downlink and sense the unknown and random angle parameter of a target via exploiting its prior distribution information. We consider a general transmit beamforming structure where the BS sends one communication beam and potentially one or multiple dedicated sensing beam(s). Firstly, motivated by the periodic feature of the angle parameter, we derive the periodic posterior Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound (PCRB) for quantifying a lower bound of the mean-cyclic error (MCE), which is more accurate than the conventional PCRB for bounding the mean-squared error (MSE). Then, note that more sensing beams enable higher flexibility in enhancing the sensing performance, while also generating extra interference to the communication user. To resolve this trade-off, we formulate the transmit beamforming optimization problem to minimize the periodic PCRB subject to a communication rate requirement for the user. Despite the non-convexity of this problem, we derive the optimal solution by leveraging the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) technique and Lagrange duality theory. Moreover, we analytically prove that at most one dedicated sensing beam is needed. Numerical results validate our analysis and the advantage of having a dedicated sensing beam.
The real-world data tends to be heavily imbalanced and severely skew the data-driven deep neural networks, which makes Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) a massive challenging task. Existing LTR methods seldom train Vision Transformers (ViTs) with Long-Tailed (LT) data, while the off-the-shelf pretrain weight of ViTs always leads to unfair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically investigate the ViTs' performance in LTR and propose LiVT to train ViTs from scratch only with LT data. With the observation that ViTs suffer more severe LTR problems, we conduct Masked Generative Pretraining (MGP) to learn generalized features. With ample and solid evidence, we show that MGP is more robust than supervised manners. In addition, Binary Cross Entropy (BCE) loss, which shows conspicuous performance with ViTs, encounters predicaments in LTR. We further propose the balanced BCE to ameliorate it with strong theoretical groundings. Specially, we derive the unbiased extension of Sigmoid and compensate extra logit margins to deploy it. Our Bal-BCE contributes to the quick convergence of ViTs in just a few epochs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with MGP and Bal-BCE, LiVT successfully trains ViTs well without any additional data and outperforms comparable state-of-the-art methods significantly, e.g., our ViT-B achieves 81.0% Top-1 accuracy in iNaturalist 2018 without bells and whistles. Code is available at //github.com/XuZhengzhuo/LiVT.
Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in learning universal language representations. As a state-of-the-art language model pre-training model, BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) has achieved amazing results in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we conduct exhaustive experiments to investigate different fine-tuning methods of BERT on text classification task and provide a general solution for BERT fine-tuning. Finally, the proposed solution obtains new state-of-the-art results on eight widely-studied text classification datasets.