The promise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Processing has often been overshadowed by their limited performance in low-resource languages such as Bangla. To address this, our paper presents a pioneering approach that utilizes cross-lingual retrieval augmented in-context learning. By strategically sourcing semantically similar prompts from high-resource language, we enable multilingual pretrained language models (MPLMs), especially the generative model BLOOMZ, to successfully boost performance on Bangla tasks. Our extensive evaluation highlights that the cross-lingual retrieval augmented prompts bring steady improvements to MPLMs over the zero-shot performance.
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a crucial role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) by facilitating communication between vehicles and infrastructure. This communication aims to enhance road safety, improve traffic efficiency, and enhance passenger comfort. The secure and reliable exchange of information is paramount to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data, while the authentication of vehicles and messages is essential to prevent unauthorized access and malicious activities. This survey paper presents a comprehensive analysis of existing authentication mechanisms proposed for cluster-based VANETs. The strengths, weaknesses, and suitability of these mechanisms for various scenarios are carefully examined. Additionally, the integration of secure key management techniques is discussed to enhance the overall authentication process. Cluster-based VANETs are formed by dividing the network into smaller groups or clusters, with designated cluster heads comprising one or more vehicles. Furthermore, this paper identifies gaps in the existing literature through an exploration of previous surveys. Several schemes based on different methods are critically evaluated, considering factors such as throughput, detection rate, security, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay. To provide optimal solutions for authentication in cluster-based VANETs, this paper highlights AI- and ML-based routing-based schemes. These approaches leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to enhance authentication within the cluster-based VANET network. Finally, this paper explores the open research challenges that exist in the realm of authentication for cluster-based Vehicular Adhoc Networks, shedding light on areas that require further investigation and development.
The success of Federated Learning (FL) depends on the quantity and quality of the data owners (DOs) as well as their motivation to join FL model training. Reputation-based FL participant selection methods have been proposed. However, they still face the challenges of the cold start problem and potential selection bias towards highly reputable DOs. Such a bias can result in lower reputation DOs being prematurely excluded from future FL training rounds, thereby reducing the diversity of training data and the generalizability of the resulting models. To address these challenges, we propose the Gradual Participant Selection scheme for Auction-based Federated Learning (GPS-AFL). Unlike existing AFL incentive mechanisms which generally assume that all DOs required for an FL task must be selected in one go, GPS-AFL gradually selects the required DOs over multiple rounds of training as more information is revealed through repeated interactions. It is designed to strike a balance between cost saving and performance enhancement, while mitigating the drawbacks of selection bias in reputation-based FL. Extensive experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate the significant advantages of GPS-AFL, which reduces costs by 33.65% and improved total utility by 2.91%, on average compared to the best-performing state-of-the-art approach.
Our previously proposed MossFormer has achieved promising performance in monaural speech separation. However, it predominantly adopts a self-attention-based MossFormer module, which tends to emphasize longer-range, coarser-scale dependencies, with a deficiency in effectively modelling finer-scale recurrent patterns. In this paper, we introduce a novel hybrid model that provides the capabilities to model both long-range, coarse-scale dependencies and fine-scale recurrent patterns by integrating a recurrent module into the MossFormer framework. Instead of applying the recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that use traditional recurrent connections, we present a recurrent module based on a feedforward sequential memory network (FSMN), which is considered "RNN-free" recurrent network due to the ability to capture recurrent patterns without using recurrent connections. Our recurrent module mainly comprises an enhanced dilated FSMN block by using gated convolutional units (GCU) and dense connections. In addition, a bottleneck layer and an output layer are also added for controlling information flow. The recurrent module relies on linear projections and convolutions for seamless, parallel processing of the entire sequence. The integrated MossFormer2 hybrid model demonstrates remarkable enhancements over MossFormer and surpasses other state-of-the-art methods in WSJ0-2/3mix, Libri2Mix, and WHAM!/WHAMR! benchmarks.
The reconstruction of Configuration Space (CS) from a limited number of samples plays a vital role in expediting motion planning for random tree algorithms. Traditionally, the evaluation of CS reconstruction is performed through collision checking. However, employing the collision checker as an evaluation measure can be misleading. In particular, a collision checker may exhibit high accuracy even when only a subset of the original CS is reconstructed, limiting the motion planner's ability to find paths comparable to those in the original CS. Additionally, a significant challenge arises when dealing with high-dimensional CSs, as it becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to perform qualitative evaluations when working in dimensions higher than three. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for representing high-dimensional CSs of manipulator robots in a 2D format. Specifically, we leverage the kinematic chain of manipulator robots and the human ability to perceive colors based on hue. This allows us to construct a visualization comprising a series of pairs of 2D projections. We showcase the efficacy of our method in representing a 7-degree-of-freedom CS of a manipulator robot in a 2D projection. This representation provides qualitative insights into the joint boundaries of the robot and the collision state combinations. From a quantitative perspective, we show that the proposed representation not only captures accuracy but also furnishes additional information, enhancing our ability to compare two different high-dimensional CSs during the deployment phase, beyond what is usually offered by the collision checker. The source code is publicly available on our repository.
Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a type of challenge-response test widely used in authentication systems. A well-known challenge it faces is the CAPTCHA farm, where workers are hired to solve CAPTCHAs manually. In this work, we propose to tackle this challenge from a novel perspective, converting CAPTCHA farm detection to identity inconsistency detection, which essentially becomes an authentication process. Specifically, we develop a novel embedding model, which measures the similarity between mouse trajectories collected during the session and when registering/solving CAPTCHA, to authenticate and detect identity inconsistency. Moreover, unlike most existing works that employ a separate mouse movement classifier for each individual user, which brings in considerable costs when serving a large number of users, our model performs detection tasks using only one classifier for all users, significantly reducing the cost. Experiment results validate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art time series classification methods, achieving 94.3% and 97.7% of AUC in identity and authentication inconsistency detection, respectively.
A novel method, the Pareto Envelope Augmented with Reinforcement Learning (PEARL), has been developed to address the challenges posed by multi-objective problems, particularly in the field of engineering where the evaluation of candidate solutions can be time-consuming. PEARL distinguishes itself from traditional policy-based multi-objective Reinforcement Learning methods by learning a single policy, eliminating the need for multiple neural networks to independently solve simpler sub-problems. Several versions inspired from deep learning and evolutionary techniques have been crafted, catering to both unconstrained and constrained problem domains. Curriculum Learning is harnessed to effectively manage constraints in these versions. PEARL's performance is first evaluated on classical multi-objective benchmarks. Additionally, it is tested on two practical PWR core Loading Pattern optimization problems to showcase its real-world applicability. The first problem involves optimizing the Cycle length and the rod-integrated peaking factor as the primary objectives, while the second problem incorporates the mean average enrichment as an additional objective. Furthermore, PEARL addresses three types of constraints related to boron concentration, peak pin burnup, and peak pin power. The results are systematically compared against a conventional approach, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm. Notably, PEARL, specifically the PEARL-NdS variant, efficiently uncovers a Pareto front without necessitating additional efforts from the algorithm designer, as opposed to a single optimization with scaled objectives. It also outperforms the classical approach across multiple performance metrics, including the Hyper-volume.
In the field of document understanding, significant advances have been made in the fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with instruction-following data. Nevertheless, the potential of text-grounding capability within text-rich scenarios remains underexplored. In this paper, we present a text-grounding document understanding model, termed TGDoc, which addresses this deficiency by enhancing MLLMs with the ability to discern the spatial positioning of text within images. Empirical evidence suggests that text-grounding improves the model's interpretation of textual content, thereby elevating its proficiency in comprehending text-rich images. Specifically, we compile a dataset containing 99K PowerPoint presentations sourced from the internet. We formulate instruction tuning tasks including text detection, recognition, and spotting to facilitate the cohesive alignment between the visual encoder and large language model. Moreover, we curate a collection of text-rich images and prompt the text-only GPT-4 to generate 12K high-quality conversations, featuring textual locations within text-rich scenarios. By integrating text location data into the instructions, TGDoc is adept at discerning text locations during the visual question process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple text-rich benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of our method.
In speaker verification, ECAPA-TDNN has shown remarkable improvement by utilizing one-dimensional(1D) Res2Net block and squeeze-and-excitation(SE) module, along with multi-layer feature aggregation (MFA). Meanwhile, in vision tasks, ConvNet structures have been modernized by referring to Transformer, resulting in improved performance. In this paper, we present an improved block design for TDNN in speaker verification. Inspired by recent ConvNet structures, we replace the SE-Res2Net block in ECAPA-TDNN with a novel 1D two-step multi-scale ConvNeXt block, which we call TS-ConvNeXt. The TS-ConvNeXt block is constructed using two separated sub-modules: a temporal multi-scale convolution (MSC) and a frame-wise feed-forward network (FFN). This two-step design allows for flexible capturing of inter-frame and intra-frame contexts. Additionally, we introduce global response normalization (GRN) for the FFN modules to enable more selective feature propagation, similar to the SE module in ECAPA-TDNN. Experimental results demonstrate that NeXt-TDNN, with a modernized backbone block, significantly improved performance in speaker verification tasks while reducing parameter size and inference time. We have released our code for future studies.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.