Classic automobiles are an important part of the automotive industry and represent the historical and technological achievements of certain eras. However, to be considered masterpieces, they must be maintained in pristine condition or restored according to strict guidelines applied by expert services. Therefore, all data about restoration processes and other relevant information about these vehicles must be rigorously documented to ensure their verifiability and immutability. Here, we report on our ongoing research to adequately provide such capabilities to the classic car ecosystem. Using a design science research approach, we have developed a blockchain-based solution using Hyperledger Fabric that facilitates the proper recording of classic car information, restoration procedures applied, and all related documentation by ensuring that this data is immutable and trustworthy while promoting collaboration between interested parties. This solution was validated and received positive feedback from various entities in the classic car sector. The enhanced and secured documentation is expected to contribute to the digital transformation of the classic car sector, promote authenticity and trustworthiness, and ultimately increase the market value of classic cars.
Current recommendation systems are significantly affected by a serious issue of temporal data shift, which is the inconsistency between the distribution of historical data and that of online data. Most existing models focus on utilizing updated data, overlooking the transferable, temporal data shift-free information that can be learned from shifting data. We propose the Temporal Invariance of Association theorem, which suggests that given a fixed search space, the relationship between the data and the data in the search space keeps invariant over time. Leveraging this principle, we designed a retrieval-based recommendation system framework that can train a data shift-free relevance network using shifting data, significantly enhancing the predictive performance of the original model in the recommendation system. However, retrieval-based recommendation models face substantial inference time costs when deployed online. To address this, we further designed a distill framework that can distill information from the relevance network into a parameterized module using shifting data. The distilled model can be deployed online alongside the original model, with only a minimal increase in inference time. Extensive experiments on multiple real datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the performance of the original model by utilizing shifting data.
The awareness of multi-cultural human values is critical to the ability of language models (LMs) to generate safe and personalized responses. However, this awareness of LMs has been insufficiently studied, since the computer science community lacks access to the large-scale real-world data about multi-cultural values. In this paper, we present WorldValuesBench, a globally diverse, large-scale benchmark dataset for the multi-cultural value prediction task, which requires a model to generate a rating response to a value question based on demographic contexts. Our dataset is derived from an influential social science project, World Values Survey (WVS), that has collected answers to hundreds of value questions (e.g., social, economic, ethical) from 94,728 participants worldwide. We have constructed more than 20 million examples of the type "(demographic attributes, value question) $\rightarrow$ answer" from the WVS responses. We perform a case study using our dataset and show that the task is challenging for strong open and closed-source models. On merely $11.1\%$, $25.0\%$, $72.2\%$, and $75.0\%$ of the questions, Alpaca-7B, Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1, and GPT-3.5 Turbo can respectively achieve $<0.2$ Wasserstein 1-distance from the human normalized answer distributions. WorldValuesBench opens up new research avenues in studying limitations and opportunities in multi-cultural value awareness of LMs.
Blockchain technology ensures secure and trustworthy data flow between multiple participants on the chain, but interoperability of on-chain and off-chain data has always been a difficult problem that needs to be solved. To solve the problem that blockchain systems cannot access off-chain data, oracle is introduced. however, existing research mainly focuses on the consistency and integrity of data, but ignores the problem that oracle nodes may be externally attacked or provide false data for selfish motives, resulting in the unresolved problem of data accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized testing architecture (DesTest) that aims to improve data accuracy. A blockchain oracle random secret testing mechanism is first proposed to enhance the monitoring and verification of nodes by introducing a dynamic anonymized question-verification committee. Based on this, a comprehensive evaluation incentive mechanism is designed to incentivize honest work performance by evaluating nodes based on their reputation scores. The simulation results show that we successfully reduced the discrete entropy value of the acquired data and the real value of the data by 61.4%.
Counterfactual reasoning, as a crucial manifestation of human intelligence, refers to making presuppositions based on established facts and extrapolating potential outcomes. Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have exhibited impressive cognitive and reasoning capabilities, which have been examined across a wide range of Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks. Nevertheless, how will existing MLLMs perform when faced with counterfactual questions? To answer this question, we first curate a novel \textbf{C}ounter\textbf{F}actual \textbf{M}ulti\textbf{M}odal reasoning benchmark, abbreviated as \textbf{CFMM}, to systematically assess the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Our CFMM comprises six challenging tasks, each including hundreds of carefully human-labeled counterfactual questions, to evaluate MLLM's counterfactual reasoning capabilities across diverse aspects. Through experiments, interestingly, we find that existing MLLMs prefer to believe what they see, but ignore the counterfactual presuppositions presented in the question, thereby leading to inaccurate responses. Furthermore, we evaluate a wide range of prevalent MLLMs on our proposed CFMM. The significant gap between their performance on our CFMM and that on several VQA benchmarks indicates that there is still considerable room for improvement in existing MLLMs toward approaching human-level intelligence. On the other hand, through boosting MLLMs performances on our CFMM in the future, potential avenues toward developing MLLMs with advanced intelligence can be explored.
With the rapid advancements of sensor technology and deep learning, autonomous driving systems are providing safe and efficient access to intelligent vehicles as well as intelligent transportation. Among these equipped sensors, the radar sensor plays a crucial role in providing robust perception information in diverse environmental conditions. This review focuses on exploring different radar data representations utilized in autonomous driving systems. Firstly, we introduce the capabilities and limitations of the radar sensor by examining the working principles of radar perception and signal processing of radar measurements. Then, we delve into the generation process of five radar representations, including the ADC signal, radar tensor, point cloud, grid map, and micro-Doppler signature. For each radar representation, we examine the related datasets, methods, advantages and limitations. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges faced in these data representations and propose potential research directions. Above all, this comprehensive review offers an in-depth insight into how these representations enhance autonomous system capabilities, providing guidance for radar perception researchers. To facilitate retrieval and comparison of different data representations, datasets and methods, we provide an interactive website at //radar-camera-fusion.github.io/radar.
The automotive industry is transitioning from traditional ECU-based systems to software-defined vehicles. A central role of this revolution is played by containers, lightweight virtualization technologies that enable the flexible consolidation of complex software applications on a common hardware platform. Despite their widespread adoption, the impact of containerization on fundamental real-time metrics such as end-to-end latency, communication jitter, as well as memory and CPU utilization has remained virtually unexplored. This paper presents a microservice architecture for a real-world autonomous driving application where containers isolate each service. Our comprehensive evaluation shows the benefits in terms of end-to-end latency of such a solution even over standard bare-Linux deployments. Specifically, in the case of the presented microservice architecture, the mean end-to-end latency can be improved by 5-8 %. Also, the maximum latencies were significantly reduced using container deployment.
Adversarial example detection, which can be conveniently applied in many scenarios, is important in the area of adversarial defense. Unfortunately, existing detection methods suffer from poor generalization performance, because their training process usually relies on the examples generated from a single known adversarial attack and there exists a large discrepancy between the training and unseen testing adversarial examples. To address this issue, we propose a novel method, named Adversarial Example Detection via Principal Adversarial Domain Adaptation (AED-PADA). Specifically, our approach identifies the Principal Adversarial Domains (PADs), i.e., a combination of features of the adversarial examples from different attacks, which possesses large coverage of the entire adversarial feature space. Then, we pioneer to exploit multi-source domain adaptation in adversarial example detection with PADs as source domains. Experiments demonstrate the superior generalization ability of our proposed AED-PADA. Note that this superiority is particularly achieved in challenging scenarios characterized by employing the minimal magnitude constraint for the perturbations.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a ``chatbot'', and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively-increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is a increasingly popular technique that aims to represent entities and relations of knowledge graphs into low-dimensional semantic spaces for a wide spectrum of applications such as link prediction, knowledge reasoning and knowledge completion. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of existing KGE techniques based on representation spaces. Particularly, we build a fine-grained classification to categorise the models based on three mathematical perspectives of the representation spaces: (1) Algebraic perspective, (2) Geometric perspective, and (3) Analytical perspective. We introduce the rigorous definitions of fundamental mathematical spaces before diving into KGE models and their mathematical properties. We further discuss different KGE methods over the three categories, as well as summarise how spatial advantages work over different embedding needs. By collating the experimental results from downstream tasks, we also explore the advantages of mathematical space in different scenarios and the reasons behind them. We further state some promising research directions from a representation space perspective, with which we hope to inspire researchers to design their KGE models as well as their related applications with more consideration of their mathematical space properties.
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.