Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can often make life difficult for children, therefore early diagnosis is necessary for proper treatment and care. Thus, in this work, we consider the problem of detecting or classifying ASD in children to aid medical professionals in early detection. To this end, we develop a deep learning model that analyzes video clips of children reacting to sensory stimuli, with the intent on capturing key differences in reactions and behavior between ASD and non-ASD patients. Unlike many works in ASD classification, their data consist of MRI data, which requires expensive specialized MRI equipment, meanwhile our method need only rely on a powerful but relatively cheaper GPU, a decent computer setup, and a video camera for inference. Results on our data show that our model can generalize well and can understand key differences in the distinct movements of the patients. This is despite limited amounts of data for a deep learning problem, limited temporal information available to the model as input, and even when there is noise due to movement.
In this paper, the problem of joint transmission and computation resource allocation for a multi-user probabilistic semantic communication (PSC) network is investigated. In the considered model, users employ semantic information extraction techniques to compress their large-sized data before transmitting them to a multi-antenna base station (BS). Our model represents large-sized data through substantial knowledge graphs, utilizing shared probability graphs between the users and the BS for efficient semantic compression. The resource allocation problem is formulated as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the sum of equivalent rate of all users, considering total power budget and semantic resource limit constraints. The computation load considered in the PSC network is formulated as a non-smooth piecewise function with respect to the semantic compression ratio. To tackle this non-convex non-smooth optimization challenge, a three-stage algorithm is proposed where the solutions for the receive beamforming matrix of the BS, transmit power of each user, and semantic compression ratio of each user are obtained stage by stage. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
Detecting objects across various scales remains a significant challenge in computer vision, particularly in tasks such as Rice Leaf Disease (RLD) detection, where objects exhibit considerable scale variations. Traditional object detection methods often struggle to address these variations, resulting in missed detections or reduced accuracy. In this study, we propose the multi-scale Attention Pyramid module (mAPm), a novel approach that integrates dilated convolutions into the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) to enhance multi-scale information ex-traction. Additionally, we incorporate a global Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanism and a deconvolutional layer to refine the up-sampling process. We evaluate mAPm on YOLOv7 using the MRLD and COCO datasets. Compared to vanilla FPN, BiFPN, NAS-FPN, PANET, and ACFPN, mAPm achieved a significant improvement in Average Precision (AP), with a +2.61% increase on the MRLD dataset compared to the baseline FPN method in YOLOv7. This demonstrates its effectiveness in handling scale variations. Furthermore, the versatility of mAPm allows its integration into various FPN-based object detection models, showcasing its potential to advance object detection techniques.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation (MT). However, careful evaluations by human reveal that the translations produced by LLMs still contain multiple errors. Importantly, feeding back such error information into the LLMs can lead to self-correction and result in improved translation performance. Motivated by these insights, we introduce a systematic LLM-based self-correcting translation framework, named TER, which stands for Translate, Estimate, and Refine, marking a significant step forward in this direction. Our findings demonstrate that 1) our self-correction framework successfully assists LLMs in improving their translation quality across a wide range of languages, whether it's from high-resource languages to low-resource ones or whether it's English-centric or centered around other languages; 2) TER exhibits superior systematicity and interpretability compared to previous methods; 3) different estimation strategies yield varied impacts on AI feedback, directly affecting the effectiveness of the final corrections. We further compare different LLMs and conduct various experiments involving self-correction and cross-model correction to investigate the potential relationship between the translation and evaluation capabilities of LLMs.
In the digital realm, rich data serves as a crucial source of insights into the complexities of social, political, and economic landscapes. Addressing the growing need for high-quality information on events and the imperative to combat hate speech, this research led to the establishment of the Shared Task on Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection at CASE 2024. Focused on climate activists contending with hate speech on social media, our study contributes to hate speech identification from tweets. Analyzing three sub-tasks - Hate Speech Detection (Sub-task A), Targets of Hate Speech Identification (Sub-task B), and Stance Detection (Sub-task C) - Team Z-AGI Labs evaluated various models, including LSTM, Xgboost, and LGBM based on Tf-Idf. Results unveiled intriguing variations, with Catboost excelling in Subtask-B (F1: 0.5604) and Subtask-C (F1: 0.7081), while LGBM emerged as the top-performing model for Subtask-A (F1: 0.8684). This research provides valuable insights into the suitability of classical machine learning models for climate hate speech and stance detection, aiding informed model selection for robust mechanisms.
Existing image inpainting methods leverage convolution-based downsampling approaches to reduce spatial dimensions. This may result in information loss from corrupted images where the available information is inherently sparse, especially for the scenario of large missing regions. Recent advances in self-attention mechanisms within transformers have led to significant improvements in many computer vision tasks including inpainting. However, limited by the computational costs, existing methods cannot fully exploit the efficacy of long-range modelling capabilities of such models. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end High-quality INpainting Transformer, abbreviated as HINT, which consists of a novel mask-aware pixel-shuffle downsampling module (MPD) to preserve the visible information extracted from the corrupted image while maintaining the integrity of the information available for high-level inferences made within the model. Moreover, we propose a Spatially-activated Channel Attention Layer (SCAL), an efficient self-attention mechanism interpreting spatial awareness to model the corrupted image at multiple scales. To further enhance the effectiveness of SCAL, motivated by recent advanced in speech recognition, we introduce a sandwich structure that places feed-forward networks before and after the SCAL module. We demonstrate the superior performance of HINT compared to contemporary state-of-the-art models on four datasets, CelebA, CelebA-HQ, Places2, and Dunhuang.
Information retrieval is a rapidly evolving field. However it still faces significant limitations in the scientific and industrial vast amounts of information, such as semantic divergence and vocabulary gaps in sparse retrieval, low precision and lack of interpretability in semantic search, or hallucination and outdated information in generative models. In this paper, we introduce a two-block approach to tackle these hurdles for long documents. The first block enhances language understanding in sparse retrieval by query expansion to retrieve relevant documents. The second block deepens the result by providing comprehensive and informative answers to the complex question using only the information spread in the long document, enabling bidirectional engagement. At various stages of the pipeline, intermediate results are presented to users to facilitate understanding of the system's reasoning. We believe this bidirectional approach brings significant advancements in terms of transparency, logical thinking, and comprehensive understanding in the field of scientific information retrieval.
This paper studies the evolving domain of Continual Learning (CL) in large language models (LLMs), with a focus on developing strategies for efficient and sustainable training. Our primary emphasis is on continual domain-adaptive pretraining, a process designed to equip LLMs with the ability to integrate new information from various domains while retaining previously learned knowledge and enhancing cross-domain knowledge transfer without relying on domain-specific identification. Unlike previous studies, which mostly concentrate on a limited selection of tasks or domains and primarily aim to address the issue of forgetting, our research evaluates the adaptability and capabilities of LLMs to changing data landscapes in practical scenarios. To this end, we introduce a new benchmark designed to measure the adaptability of LLMs to these evolving data environments, offering a comprehensive framework for evaluation. We examine the impact of model size on learning efficacy and forgetting, as well as how the progression and similarity of emerging domains affect the knowledge transfer within these models. Our findings uncover several key insights: (i) when the sequence of domains shows semantic similarity, continual pretraining enables LLMs to better specialize in the current domain compared to stand-alone fine-tuning, (ii) training across a diverse range of domains enhances both backward and forward knowledge transfer, and (iii) smaller models are particularly sensitive to continual pretraining, showing the most significant rates of both forgetting and learning. We posit that our research marks a shift towards establishing a more realistic benchmark for investigating CL in LLMs, and has the potential to play a key role in guiding the direction of future research in the field.
Advances in generative models have made it possible for AI-generated text, code, and images to mirror human-generated content in many applications. Watermarking, a technique that aims to embed information in the output of a model to verify its source, is useful for mitigating misuse of such AI-generated content. However, existing watermarking schemes remain surprisingly susceptible to attack. In particular, we show that desirable properties shared by existing LLM watermarking systems such as quality preservation, robustness, and public detection APIs can in turn make these systems vulnerable to various attacks. We rigorously study potential attacks in terms of common watermark design choices, and propose best practices and defenses for mitigation -- establishing a set of practical guidelines for embedding and detection of LLM watermarks.
Large language models contain noisy general knowledge of the world, yet are hard to train or fine-tune. On the other hand cognitive architectures have excellent interpretability and are flexible to update but require a lot of manual work to instantiate. In this work, we combine the best of both worlds: bootstrapping a cognitive-based model with the noisy knowledge encoded in large language models. Through an embodied agent doing kitchen tasks, we show that our proposed framework yields better efficiency compared to an agent based entirely on large language models. Our experiments indicate that large language models are a good source of information for cognitive architectures, and the cognitive architecture in turn can verify and update the knowledge of large language models to a specific domain.