Every day, thousands of digital documents are generated with useful information for companies, public organizations, and citizens. Given the impossibility of processing them manually, the automatic processing of these documents is becoming increasingly necessary in certain sectors. However, this task remains challenging, since in most cases a text-only based parsing is not enough to fully understand the information presented through different components of varying significance. In this regard, Document Layout Analysis (DLA) has been an interesting research field for many years, which aims to detect and classify the basic components of a document. In this work, we used a procedure to semi-automatically annotate digital documents with different layout labels, including 4 basic layout blocks and 4 text categories. We apply this procedure to collect a novel database for DLA in the public affairs domain, using a set of 24 data sources from the Spanish Administration. The database comprises 37.9K documents with more than 441K document pages, and more than 8M labels associated to 8 layout block units. The results of our experiments validate the proposed text labeling procedure with accuracy up to 99%.
Data catalogs play a crucial role in modern data-driven organizations by facilitating the discovery, understanding, and utilization of diverse data assets. However, ensuring their quality and reliability is complex, especially in open and large-scale data environments. This paper proposes a framework to automatically determine the quality of open data catalogs, addressing the need for efficient and reliable quality assessment mechanisms. Our framework can analyze various core quality dimensions, such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, scalability, and timeliness, offer several alternatives for the assessment of compatibility and similarity across such catalogs as well as the implementation of a set of non-core quality dimensions such as provenance, readability, and licensing. The goal is to empower data-driven organizations to make informed decisions based on trustworthy and well-curated data assets. The source code that illustrates our approach can be downloaded from //www.github.com/jorge-martinez-gil/dataq/.
The Internet of Things (IoT) devices are rapidly increasing in popularity, with more individuals using Internet-connected devices that continuously monitor their activities. This work explores privacy concerns and expectations of end-users related to Trigger-Action platforms (TAPs) in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). TAPs allow users to customize their smart environments by creating rules that trigger actions based on specific events or conditions. As personal data flows between different entities, there is a potential for privacy concerns. In this study, we aimed to identify the privacy factors that impact users' concerns and preferences for using IoT TAPs. To address this research objective, we conducted three focus groups with 15 participants and we extracted nine themes related to privacy factors using thematic analysis. Our participants particularly prefer to have control and transparency over the automation and are concerned about unexpected data inferences, risks and unforeseen consequences for themselves and for bystanders that are caused by the automation. The identified privacy factors can help researchers derive predefined and selectable profiles of privacy permission settings for IoT TAPs that represent the privacy preferences of different types of users as a basis for designing usable privacy controls for IoT TAPs.
GAN inversion is indispensable for applying the powerful editability of GAN to real images. However, existing methods invert video frames individually often leading to undesired inconsistent results over time. In this paper, we propose a unified recurrent framework, named \textbf{R}ecurrent v\textbf{I}deo \textbf{G}AN \textbf{I}nversion and e\textbf{D}iting (RIGID), to explicitly and simultaneously enforce temporally coherent GAN inversion and facial editing of real videos. Our approach models the temporal relations between current and previous frames from three aspects. To enable a faithful real video reconstruction, we first maximize the inversion fidelity and consistency by learning a temporal compensated latent code. Second, we observe incoherent noises lie in the high-frequency domain that can be disentangled from the latent space. Third, to remove the inconsistency after attribute manipulation, we propose an \textit{in-between frame composition constraint} such that the arbitrary frame must be a direct composite of its neighboring frames. Our unified framework learns the inherent coherence between input frames in an end-to-end manner, and therefore it is agnostic to a specific attribute and can be applied to arbitrary editing of the same video without re-training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIGID outperforms state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively in both inversion and editing tasks. The deliverables can be found in \url{//cnnlstm.github.io/RIGID}
ChatGPT, as a versatile large language model, has demonstrated remarkable potential in addressing inquiries across various domains. Its ability to analyze, comprehend, and synthesize information from both online sources and user inputs has garnered significant attention. Previous research has explored ChatGPT's competence in code generation and code reviews. In this paper, we delve into ChatGPT's capabilities in security-oriented program analysis, focusing on perspectives from both attackers and security analysts. We present a case study involving several security-oriented program analysis tasks while deliberately introducing challenges to assess ChatGPT's responses. Through an examination of the quality of answers provided by ChatGPT, we gain a clearer understanding of its strengths and limitations in the realm of security-oriented program analysis.
Static meshes with texture maps have attracted considerable attention in both industrial manufacturing and academic research, leading to an urgent requirement for effective and robust objective quality evaluation. However, current model-based static mesh quality metrics have obvious limitations: most of them only consider geometry information, while color information is ignored, and they have strict constraints for the meshes' geometrical topology. Other metrics, such as image-based and point-based metrics, are easily influenced by the prepossessing algorithms, e.g., projection and sampling, hampering their ability to perform at their best. In this paper, we propose Geodesic Patch Similarity (GeodesicPSIM), a novel model-based metric to accurately predict human perception quality for static meshes. After selecting a group keypoints, 1-hop geodesic patches are constructed based on both the reference and distorted meshes cleaned by an effective mesh cleaning algorithm. A two-step patch cropping algorithm and a patch texture mapping module refine the size of 1-hop geodesic patches and build the relationship between the mesh geometry and color information, resulting in the generation of 1-hop textured geodesic patches. Three types of features are extracted to quantify the distortion: patch color smoothness, patch discrete mean curvature, and patch pixel color average and variance. To the best of our knowledge, GeodesicPSIM is the first model-based metric especially designed for static meshes with texture maps. GeodesicPSIM provides state-of-the-art performance in comparison with image-based, point-based, and video-based metrics on a newly created and challenging database. We also prove the robustness of GeodesicPSIM by introducing different settings of hyperparameters. Ablation studies also exhibit the effectiveness of three proposed features and the patch cropping algorithm.
Metaverse enables users to communicate, collaborate and socialize with each other through their digital avatars. Due to the spatio-temporal characteristics, co-located users are served well by performing their software components in a collaborative manner such that a Metaverse service provider (MSP) eliminates redundant data transmission and processing, ultimately reducing the total energy consumption. The energyefficient service provision is crucial for enabling the green and sustainable Metaverse. In this article, we take an augmented reality (AR) application as an example to achieve this goal. Moreover, we study an economic issue on how the users reserve offloading services from the MSP and how the MSP determines an optimal charging price since each user is rational to decide whether to accept the offloading service by taking into account the monetary cost. A single-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game is formulated between the MSP and users while each user optimizes an offloading probability to minimize the weighted sum of time, energy consumption and monetary cost. Numerical results show that our scheme achieves energy savings and satisfies individual rationality simultaneously compared with the conventional schemes. Finally, we identify and discuss open directions on how several emerging technologies are combined with the sustainable green Metaverse.
Data visualizations and narratives are often integrated to convey data stories effectively. Among various data storytelling formats, data videos have been garnering increasing attention. These videos provide an intuitive interpretation of data charts while vividly articulating the underlying data insights. However, the production of data videos demands a diverse set of professional skills and considerable manual labor, including understanding narratives, linking visual elements with narration segments, designing and crafting animations, recording audio narrations, and synchronizing audio with visual animations. To simplify this process, our paper introduces a novel method, referred to as Data Player, capable of automatically generating dynamic data videos with narration-animation interplay. This approach lowers the technical barriers associated with creating data videos rich in narration. To enable narration-animation interplay, Data Player constructs references between visualizations and text input. Specifically, it first extracts data into tables from the visualizations. Subsequently, it utilizes large language models to form semantic connections between text and visuals. Finally, Data Player encodes animation design knowledge as computational low-level constraints, allowing for the recommendation of suitable animation presets that align with the audio narration produced by text-to-speech technologies. We assessed Data Player's efficacy through an example gallery, a user study, and expert interviews. The evaluation results demonstrated that Data Player can generate high-quality data videos that are comparable to human-composed ones.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
With the advent of 5G commercialization, the need for more reliable, faster, and intelligent telecommunication systems are envisaged for the next generation beyond 5G (B5G) radio access technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are not just immensely popular in the service layer applications but also have been proposed as essential enablers in many aspects of B5G networks, from IoT devices and edge computing to cloud-based infrastructures. However, most of the existing surveys in B5G security focus on the performance of AI/ML models and their accuracy, but they often overlook the accountability and trustworthiness of the models' decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) methods are promising techniques that would allow system developers to identify the internal workings of AI/ML black-box models. The goal of using XAI in the security domain of B5G is to allow the decision-making processes of the security of systems to be transparent and comprehensible to stakeholders making the systems accountable for automated actions. In every facet of the forthcoming B5G era, including B5G technologies such as RAN, zero-touch network management, E2E slicing, this survey emphasizes the role of XAI in them and the use cases that the general users would ultimately enjoy. Furthermore, we presented the lessons learned from recent efforts and future research directions on top of the currently conducted projects involving XAI.
Stickers with vivid and engaging expressions are becoming increasingly popular in online messaging apps, and some works are dedicated to automatically select sticker response by matching text labels of stickers with previous utterances. However, due to their large quantities, it is impractical to require text labels for the all stickers. Hence, in this paper, we propose to recommend an appropriate sticker to user based on multi-turn dialog context history without any external labels. Two main challenges are confronted in this task. One is to learn semantic meaning of stickers without corresponding text labels. Another challenge is to jointly model the candidate sticker with the multi-turn dialog context. To tackle these challenges, we propose a sticker response selector (SRS) model. Specifically, SRS first employs a convolutional based sticker image encoder and a self-attention based multi-turn dialog encoder to obtain the representation of stickers and utterances. Next, deep interaction network is proposed to conduct deep matching between the sticker with each utterance in the dialog history. SRS then learns the short-term and long-term dependency between all interaction results by a fusion network to output the the final matching score. To evaluate our proposed method, we collect a large-scale real-world dialog dataset with stickers from one of the most popular online chatting platform. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all commonly-used metrics. Experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component of SRS. To facilitate further research in sticker selection field, we release this dataset of 340K multi-turn dialog and sticker pairs.