Polysemantic neurons -- neurons that activate for a set of unrelated features -- have been seen as a significant obstacle towards interpretability of task-optimized deep networks, with implications for AI safety. The classic origin story of polysemanticity is that the data contains more ``features" than neurons, such that learning to perform a task forces the network to co-allocate multiple unrelated features to the same neuron, endangering our ability to understand networks' internal processing. In this work, we present a second and non-mutually exclusive origin story of polysemanticity. We show that polysemanticity can arise incidentally, even when there are ample neurons to represent all features in the data, a phenomenon we term \textit{incidental polysemanticity}. Using a combination of theory and experiments, we show that incidental polysemanticity can arise due to multiple reasons including regularization and neural noise; this incidental polysemanticity occurs because random initialization can, by chance alone, initially assign multiple features to the same neuron, and the training dynamics then strengthen such overlap. Our paper concludes by calling for further research quantifying the performance-polysemanticity tradeoff in task-optimized deep neural networks to better understand to what extent polysemanticity is avoidable.
In image restoration (IR), leveraging semantic priors from segmentation models has been a common approach to improve performance. The recent segment anything model (SAM) has emerged as a powerful tool for extracting advanced semantic priors to enhance IR tasks. However, the computational cost of SAM is prohibitive for IR, compared to existing smaller IR models. The incorporation of SAM for extracting semantic priors considerably hampers the model inference efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a general framework to distill SAM's semantic knowledge to boost exiting IR models without interfering with their inference process. Specifically, our proposed framework consists of the semantic priors fusion (SPF) scheme and the semantic priors distillation (SPD) scheme. SPF fuses two kinds of information between the restored image predicted by the original IR model and the semantic mask predicted by SAM for the refined restored image. SPD leverages a self-distillation manner to distill the fused semantic priors to boost the performance of original IR models. Additionally, we design a semantic-guided relation (SGR) module for SPD, which ensures semantic feature representation space consistency to fully distill the priors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework across multiple IR models and tasks, including deraining, deblurring, and denoising.
The two-dimensional track of an animal on a landscape has progressed over the past three decades from hourly to second-by-second recordings of locations. Track segmentation methods for analyzing the behavioral information in such relocation data has lagged somewhat behind, with scales of analysis currently at the sub-hourly to minute level. A new approach is needed to bring segmentation analysis down to a second-by-second level. Here, such an approach is presented that rests heavily on concepts from Shannon's Information Theory. In this paper, we first briefly review and update concepts relating to movement path segmentation. We then discuss how cluster analysis can be used to organize the smallest viable statistical movement elements (StaMEs), which are $\mu$ steps long, and to code the next level of movement elements called ``words'' that are $m \mu$ steps long. Centroids of these word clusters are identified as canonical activity modes (CAMs). Unlike current segmentation schemes, the approach presented here allows us to provide entropy measures for movement paths, compute the coding efficiencies of derived StaMEs and CAMs, and assess error rates in the allocation of strings of $m$ StaMEs to CAM types. In addition our approach allows us to employ the Jensen-Shannon divergence measure to assess and compare the best choices for the various parameters (number of steps in a StaME, number of StaME types, number of StaMEs in a word, number of CAM types), as well as the best clustering methods for generating segments that can then be used to interpret and predict sequences of higher order segments. The theory presented here provides another tool in our toolbox for dealing with the effects of global change on the movement and redistribution of animals across altered landscapes
Speaking out for women's daily needs on social media has become a crucial form of everyday feminism in China. Gender debate naturally intertwines with such feminist advocacy, where users in opposite stances discuss gender-related issues through intense discourse. The complexities of gender debate necessitate a systematic understanding of discursive strategies for achieving effective gender communication that balances civility and constructiveness. To address this problem, we adopted a mixed-methods study to navigate discursive strategies in gender debate, focusing on 38,636 posts and 187,539 comments from two representative cases in China. Through open coding, we identified a comprehensive taxonomy of linguistic strategies in gender debate, capturing five overarching themes including derogation, gender distinction, intensification, mitigation, and cognizance guidance. Further, we applied regression analysis to unveil these strategies' correlations with user participation and response, illustrating the tension between debating tactics and public engagement. We discuss design implications to facilitate feminist advocacy on social media.
We explore a spectral initialization method that plays a central role in contemporary research on signal estimation in nonconvex scenarios. In a noiseless phase retrieval framework, we precisely analyze the method's performance in the high-dimensional limit when sensing vectors follow a multivariate Gaussian distribution for two rotationally invariant models of the covariance matrix C. In the first model C is a projector on a lower dimensional space while in the second it is a Wishart matrix. Our analytical results extend the well-established case when C is the identity matrix. Our examination shows that the introduction of biased spatial directions leads to a substantial improvement in the spectral method's effectiveness, particularly when the number of measurements is less than the signal's dimension. This extension also consistently reveals a phase transition phenomenon dependent on the ratio between sample size and signal dimension. Surprisingly, both of these models share the same threshold value.
Complete complementary codes (CCCs) play a vital role not only in wireless communication, particularly in multicarrier systems where achieving an interference-free environment is of paramount importance, but also in the construction of other codes that necessitate appropriate functions to meet the diverse demands within today's landscape of wireless communication evaluation. This research is focused on the area of constructing $q$-ary functions for both of {traditional and spectrally null constraint (SNC) CCCs}\footnote{When no codes in CCCs having zero components, we call it as traditonal CCCs, else, we call it as SNC-CCCs in this pape.} of flexible length, set size and alphabet. We construct traditional CCCs with lengths, defined as $L = \prod_{i=1}^k p_i^{m_i}$, set sizes, defined as $K = \prod_{i=1}^k p_i^{n_i+1}$, and an alphabet size of $q=\prod_{i=1}^k p_i$, such that $p_1<p_2<\cdots<p_k $. The parameters $m_1, m_2, \ldots, m_k$ (each greater than or equal to $2$) are positive integers, while $n_1, n_2, \ldots, n_k$ are non-negative integers satisfying $n_i \leq m_i-1$, and the variable $k$ represents a positive integer. To achieve these specific parameters, we define $q$-ary functions over a domain $\mathbf{Z}_{p_1}^{m_1}\times \cdots \times \mathbf{Z}_{p_k}^{m_k}$ that is considered a proper subset of $\mathbb{Z}_{q}^m$ and encompasses $\prod_{i=1}^k p_i^{m_i}$ vectors, where $\mathbf{Z}_{p_i}^{m_i}=\{0,1,\hdots,p_i-1\}^{m_i}$, and the value of $m$ is derived from the sum of $m_1, m_2, \ldots, m_k$. This organization of the domain allows us to encompass all conceivable integer-valued length sequences over the alphabet $\mathbb{Z}_q$. It has been demonstrated that by constraining a $q$-ary function that generates traditional CCCs, we can derive SNC-CCCs with identical length and alphabet, yet a smaller or equal set size compared to the traditional CCCs.
DeepFakes, which refer to AI-generated media content, have become an increasing concern due to their use as a means for disinformation. Detecting DeepFakes is currently solved with programmed machine learning algorithms. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of multimodal large language models (LLMs) in DeepFake detection. We conducted qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate multimodal LLMs and show that they can expose AI-generated images through careful experimental design and prompt engineering. This is interesting, considering that LLMs are not inherently tailored for media forensic tasks, and the process does not require programming. We discuss the limitations of multimodal LLMs for these tasks and suggest possible improvements.
The growing low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations have become an essential part of the fifth-generation (5G) non-terrestrial network (NTN) market. These satellites can enable direct-to-cell connectivity for mobile devices and support various applications with ubiquitous coverage for 5G and beyond networks. However, satellite-based NTNs bring several challenges to the 5G handover protocol design. The high mobility of satellites can lead to signaling storms and security compromises during handovers. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a secure and efficient group handover protocol. The protocol's effectiveness is evaluated on a custom discrete-event simulator and compared against the baseline 5G handover scheme. The simulator is made publicly available.
Residual networks (ResNets) have displayed impressive results in pattern recognition and, recently, have garnered considerable theoretical interest due to a perceived link with neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs). This link relies on the convergence of network weights to a smooth function as the number of layers increases. We investigate the properties of weights trained by stochastic gradient descent and their scaling with network depth through detailed numerical experiments. We observe the existence of scaling regimes markedly different from those assumed in neural ODE literature. Depending on certain features of the network architecture, such as the smoothness of the activation function, one may obtain an alternative ODE limit, a stochastic differential equation or neither of these. These findings cast doubts on the validity of the neural ODE model as an adequate asymptotic description of deep ResNets and point to an alternative class of differential equations as a better description of the deep network limit.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.
Recommender System (RS) is a hot area where artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be effectively applied to improve performance. Since the well-known Netflix Challenge, collaborative filtering (CF) has become the most popular and effective recommendation method. Despite their success in CF, various AI techniques still have to face the data sparsity and cold start problems. Previous works tried to solve these two problems by utilizing auxiliary information, such as social connections among users and meta-data of items. However, they process different types of information separately, leading to information loss. In this work, we propose to utilize Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), which is a natural and general representation of different types of data, to enhance CF-based recommending methods. HIN-based recommender systems face two problems: how to represent high-level semantics for recommendation and how to fuse the heterogeneous information to recommend. To address these problems, we propose to applying meta-graph to HIN-based RS and solve the information fusion problem with a "matrix factorization (MF) + factorization machine (FM)" framework. For the "MF" part, we obtain user-item similarity matrices from each meta-graph and adopt low-rank matrix approximation to get latent features for both users and items. For the "FM" part, we propose to apply FM with Group lasso (FMG) on the obtained features to simultaneously predict missing ratings and select useful meta-graphs. Experimental results on two large real-world datasets, i.e., Amazon and Yelp, show that our proposed approach is better than that of the state-of-the-art FM and other HIN-based recommending methods.