RASP: A Drone-based Reconfigurable Actuation and Sensing Platform Towards Ambient Intelligent Systems

Realizing consumer-grade drones that are as useful as robot vacuums throughout our homes or personal smartphones in our daily lives requires drones to sense, actuate, and respond to general scenarios that may arise. Towards this vision, we propose RASP, a modular and reconfigurable sensing and actuation platform that allows drones to autonomously swap onboard sensors and actuators in only 25 seconds, allowing a single drone to quickly adapt to a diverse range of tasks. RASP consists of a mechanical layer to physically swap sensor modules, an electrical layer to maintain power and communication lines to the sensor/actuator, and a software layer to maintain a common interface between the drone and any sensor module in our platform. Leveraging recent advances in large language and visual language models, we further introduce the architecture, implementation, and real-world deployments of a personal assistant system utilizing RASP. We demonstrate that RASP can enable a diverse range of useful tasks in home, office, lab, and other indoor settings.

SISSA: Real-time Monitoring of Hardware Functional Safety and Cybersecurity with In-vehicle SOME/IP Ethernet Traffic

Scalable service-Oriented Middleware over IP (SOME/IP) is an Ethernet communication standard protocol in the Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR), promoting ECU-to-ECU communication over the IP stack. However, SOME/IP lacks a robust security architecture, making it susceptible to potential attacks. Besides, random hardware failure of ECU will disrupt SOME/IP communication. In this paper, we propose SISSA, a SOME/IP communication traffic-based approach for modeling and analyzing in-vehicle functional safety and cyber security. Specifically, SISSA models hardware failures with the Weibull distribution and addresses five potential attacks on SOME/IP communication, including Distributed Denial-of-Services, Man-in-the-Middle, and abnormal communication processes, assuming a malicious user accesses the in-vehicle network. Subsequently, SISSA designs a series of deep learning models with various backbones to extract features from SOME/IP sessions among ECUs. We adopt residual self-attention to accelerate the model's convergence and enhance detection accuracy, determining whether an ECU is under attack, facing functional failure, or operating normally. Additionally, we have created and annotated a dataset encompassing various classes, including indicators of attack, functionality, and normalcy. This contribution is noteworthy due to the scarcity of publicly accessible datasets with such characteristics.Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of SISSA.

From Scroll to Misbelief: Modeling the Unobservable Susceptibility to Misinformation on Social Media

Susceptibility to misinformation describes the extent to believe unverifiable claims, which is hidden in people's mental process and infeasible to observe. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on the self-reported beliefs, making any downstream applications on susceptability hard to scale. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose a computational model to infer users' susceptibility levels given their activities. Since user's susceptibility is a key indicator for their reposting behavior, we utilize the supervision from the observable sharing behavior to infer the underlying susceptibility tendency. The evaluation shows that our model yields estimations that are highly aligned with human judgment on users' susceptibility level comparisons. Building upon such large-scale susceptibility labeling, we further conduct a comprehensive analysis of how different social factors relate to susceptibility. We find that political leanings and psychological factors are associated with susceptibility in varying degrees.

Task-Agnostic Low-Rank Adapters for Unseen English Dialects

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on corpora disproportionally weighted in favor of Standard American English. As a result, speakers of other dialects experience significantly more failures when interacting with these technologies. In practice, these speakers often accommodate their speech to be better understood. Our work shares the belief that language technologies should be designed to accommodate the diversity in English dialects and not the other way around. However, prior works on dialect struggle with generalizing to evolving and emerging dialects in a scalable manner. To fill this gap, our method, HyperLoRA, leverages expert linguistic knowledge to enable resource-efficient adaptation via hypernetworks. By disentangling dialect-specific and cross-dialectal information, HyperLoRA improves generalization to unseen dialects in a task-agnostic fashion. Not only is HyperLoRA more scalable in the number of parameters, but it also achieves the best or most competitive performance across 5 dialects in a zero-shot setting. In this way, our approach facilitates access to language technology for billions of English dialect speakers who are traditionally underrepresented.

Investigating the Fairness of Large Language Models for Predictions on Tabular Data

Recent literature has suggested the potential of using large language models (LLMs) to make predictions for tabular tasks. However, LLMs have been shown to exhibit harmful social biases that reflect the stereotypes and inequalities present in the society. To this end, as well as the widespread use of tabular data in many high-stake applications, it is imperative to explore the following questions: what sources of information do LLMs draw upon when making predictions for tabular tasks; whether and to what extent are LLM predictions for tabular tasks influenced by social biases and stereotypes; and what are the consequential implications for fairness? Through a series of experiments, we delve into these questions and show that LLMs tend to inherit social biases from their training data which significantly impact their fairness in tabular prediction tasks. Furthermore, our investigations show that in the context of bias mitigation, though in-context learning and fine-tuning have a moderate effect, the fairness metric gap between different subgroups is still larger than that in traditional machine learning models, such as Random Forest and shallow Neural Networks. This observation emphasizes that the social biases are inherent within the LLMs themselves and inherited from their pre-training corpus, not only from the downstream task datasets. Besides, we demonstrate that label-flipping of in-context examples can significantly reduce biases, further highlighting the presence of inherent bias within LLMs.

MIDDAG: Where Does Our News Go? Investigating Information Diffusion via Community-Level Information Pathways

We present MIDDAG, an intuitive, interactive system that visualizes the information propagation paths on social media triggered by COVID-19-related news articles accompanied by comprehensive insights including user/community susceptibility level, as well as events and popular opinions raised by the crowd while propagating the information. Besides discovering information flow patterns among users, we construct communities among users and develop the propagation forecasting capability, enabling tracing and understanding of how information is disseminated at a higher level.

Textureless Deformable Surface Reconstruction with Invisible Markers

Reconstructing and tracking deformable surface with little or no texture has posed long-standing challenges. Fundamentally, the challenges stem from textureless surfaces lacking features for establishing cross-image correspondences. In this work, we present a novel type of markers to proactively enrich the object's surface features, and thereby ease the 3D surface reconstruction and correspondence tracking. Our markers are made of fluorescent dyes, visible only under the ultraviolet (UV) light and invisible under regular lighting condition. Leveraging the markers, we design a multi-camera system that captures surface deformation under the UV light and the visible light in a time multiplexing fashion. Under the UV light, markers on the object emerge to enrich its surface texture, allowing high-quality 3D shape reconstruction and tracking. Under the visible light, markers become invisible, allowing us to capture the object's original untouched appearance. We perform experiments on various challenging scenes, including hand gestures, facial expressions, waving cloth, and hand-object interaction. In all these cases, we demonstrate that our system is able to produce robust, high-quality 3D reconstruction and tracking.

DADA: Dialect Adaptation via Dynamic Aggregation of Linguistic Rules

Existing large language models (LLMs) that mainly focus on Standard American English (SAE) often lead to significantly worse performance when being applied to other English dialects. While existing mitigations tackle discrepancies for individual target dialects, they assume access to high-accuracy dialect identification systems. The boundaries between dialects are inherently flexible, making it difficult to categorize language into discrete predefined categories. In this paper, we propose DADA (Dialect Adaptation via Dynamic Aggregation), a modular approach to imbue SAE-trained models with multi-dialectal robustness by composing adapters which handle specific linguistic features. The compositional architecture of DADA allows for both targeted adaptation to specific dialect variants and simultaneous adaptation to various dialects. We show that DADA is effective for both single task and instruction finetuned language models, offering an extensible and interpretable framework for adapting existing LLMs to different English dialects.

SMoA: Sparse Mixture of Adapters to Mitigate Multiple Dataset Biases

Recent studies reveal that various biases exist in different NLP tasks, and over-reliance on biases results in models' poor generalization ability and low adversarial robustness. To mitigate datasets biases, previous works propose lots of debiasing techniques to tackle specific biases, which perform well on respective adversarial sets but fail to mitigate other biases. In this paper, we propose a new debiasing method Sparse Mixture-of-Adapters (SMoA), which can mitigate multiple dataset biases effectively and efficiently. Experiments on Natural Language Inference and Paraphrase Identification tasks demonstrate that SMoA outperforms full-finetuning, adapter tuning baselines, and prior strong debiasing methods. Further analysis indicates the interpretability of SMoA that sub-adapter can capture specific pattern from the training data and specialize to handle specific bias.

Cardiac Adipose Tissue Segmentation via Image-Level Annotations

Automatically identifying the structural substrates underlying cardiac abnormalities can potentially provide real-time guidance for interventional procedures. With the knowledge of cardiac tissue substrates, the treatment of complex arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation and ventricular tachycardia can be further optimized by detecting arrhythmia substrates to target for treatment (i.e., adipose) and identifying critical structures to avoid. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a real-time imaging modality that aids in addressing this need. Existing approaches for cardiac image analysis mainly rely on fully supervised learning techniques, which suffer from the drawback of workload on labor-intensive annotation process of pixel-wise labeling. To lessen the need for pixel-wise labeling, we develop a two-stage deep learning framework for cardiac adipose tissue segmentation using image-level annotations on OCT images of human cardiac substrates. In particular, we integrate class activation mapping with superpixel segmentation to solve the sparse tissue seed challenge raised in cardiac tissue segmentation. Our study bridges the gap between the demand on automatic tissue analysis and the lack of high-quality pixel-wise annotations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to address cardiac tissue segmentation on OCT images via weakly supervised learning techniques. Within an in-vitro human cardiac OCT dataset, we demonstrate that our weakly supervised approach on image-level annotations achieves comparable performance as fully supervised methods trained on pixel-wise annotations.