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This paper proposes the creation of a Swahili Question Answering (QA) benchmark dataset, aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of Swahili in natural language processing (NLP). Drawing from established benchmarks like SQuAD, GLUE, KenSwQuAD, and KLUE, the dataset will focus on providing high-quality, annotated question-answer pairs that capture the linguistic diversity and complexity of Swahili. The dataset is designed to support a variety of applications, including machine translation, information retrieval, and social services like healthcare chatbots. Ethical considerations, such as data privacy, bias mitigation, and inclusivity, are central to the dataset development. Additionally, the paper outlines future expansion plans to include domain-specific content, multimodal integration, and broader crowdsourcing efforts. The Swahili QA dataset aims to foster technological innovation in East Africa and provide an essential resource for NLP research and applications in low-resource languages.

This paper introduces SELAR, a framework designed to effectively help teachers integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their curriculum. The framework was designed by running workshops organized to gather lecturers' feedback. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of the framework through additional workshops organized with lecturers from the Hague University of Applied Sciences. The workshops tested the application of the framework to adapt existing courses to leverage generative AI technology. Each participant was tasked to apply SELAR to one of their learning goals in order to evaluate AI integration potential and, if successful, to update the teaching methods accordingly. Findings show that teachers were able to effectively use the SELAR to integrate generative AI into their courses. Future work will focus on providing additional guidance and examples to use the framework more effectively., Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures

With the rapid development of the internet, the richness of User-Generated Contentcontinues to increase, making Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) a research hotspot. Existing studies have achieved certain results in MABSA, but they have not effectively addressed the analytical challenges in scenarios where multiple entities and sentiments coexist. This paper innovatively introduces Large Language Models (LLMs) for event decomposition and proposes a reinforcement learning framework for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA-RL) framework. This framework decomposes the original text into a set of events using LLMs, reducing the complexity of analysis, introducing reinforcement learning to optimize model parameters. Experimental results show that MABSA-RL outperforms existing advanced methods on two benchmark datasets. This paper provides a new research perspective and method for multimodal aspect-level sentiment analysis.

We present Movie Gen, a cast of foundation models that generates high-quality, 1080p HD videos with different aspect ratios and synchronized audio. We also show additional capabilities such as precise instruction-based video editing and generation of personalized videos based on a user's image. Our models set a new state-of-the-art on multiple tasks: text-to-video synthesis, video personalization, video editing, video-to-audio generation, and text-to-audio generation. Our largest video generation model is a 30B parameter transformer trained with a maximum context length of 73K video tokens, corresponding to a generated video of 16 seconds at 16 frames-per-second. We show multiple technical innovations and simplifications on the architecture, latent spaces, training objectives and recipes, data curation, evaluation protocols, parallelization techniques, and inference optimizations that allow us to reap the benefits of scaling pre-training data, model size, and training compute for training large scale media generation models. We hope this paper helps the research community to accelerate progress and innovation in media generation models. All videos from this paper are available at https://go.fb.me/MovieGenResearchVideos.

Coarse-grained(CG) molecular dynamics simulations offer computational efficiency for exploring protein conformational ensembles and thermodynamic properties. Though coarse representations enable large-scale simulations across extended temporal and spatial ranges, the sacrifice of atomic-level details limits their utility in tasks such as ligand docking and protein-protein interaction prediction. Backmapping, the process of reconstructing all-atom structures from coarse-grained representations, is crucial for recovering these fine details. While recent machine learning methods have made strides in protein structure generation, challenges persist in reconstructing diverse atomistic conformations that maintain geometric accuracy and chemical validity. In this paper, we present Latent Diffusion Backmapping (LDB), a novel approach leveraging denoising diffusion within latent space to address these challenges. By combining discrete latent encoding with diffusion, LDB bypasses the need for equivariant and internal coordinate manipulation, significantly simplifying the training and sampling processes as well as facilitating better and wider exploration in configuration space. We evaluate LDB's state-of-the-art performance on three distinct protein datasets, demonstrating its ability to efficiently reconstruct structures with high structural accuracy and chemical validity. Moreover, LDB shows exceptional versatility in capturing diverse protein ensembles, highlighting its capability to explore intricate conformational spaces. Our results position LDB as a powerful and scalable approach for backmapping, effectively bridging the gap between CG simulations and atomic-level analyses in computational biology., Comment: Paper under review

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) techniques play a pivotal role in transforming symbolic Knowledge Graphs (KGs) into numerical representations, thereby enhancing various deep learning models for knowledge-augmented applications. Unlike entities, relations in KGs are the carriers of semantic meaning, and their accurate modeling is crucial for the performance of KGE models. Firstly, we address the complex mapping properties inherent in relations, such as one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many mappings. We provide a comprehensive summary of relation-aware mapping-based models, models that utilize specific representation spaces, tensor decomposition-based models, and neural network-based models. Next, focusing on capturing various relation patterns like symmetry, asymmetry, inversion, and composition, we review models that employ modified tensor decomposition, those based on modified relation-aware mappings, and those that leverage rotation operations. Subsequently, considering the implicit hierarchical relations among entities, we introduce models that incorporate auxiliary information, models based on hyperbolic spaces, and those that utilize the polar coordinate system. Finally, in response to more complex scenarios such as sparse and dynamic KGs, this paper discusses potential future research directions. We explore innovative ideas such as integrating multimodal information into KGE, enhancing relation pattern modeling with rules, and developing models to capture relation characteristics in dynamic KGE settings., Comment: 22 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, this paper is a modified English version of our article already published in Computer Science journal (in Chinese), released to facilitate communication among international researchers in the relevant fields

Many machine learning (ML) classifiers are claimed to outperform humans, but they still make mistakes that humans do not. The most notorious examples of such mistakes are adversarial visual metamers. This paper aims to define and investigate the phenomenon of adversarial Doppelgangers (AD), which includes adversarial visual metamers, and to compare the performance and robustness of ML classifiers to human performance. We find that AD are inputs that are close to each other with respect to a perceptual metric defined in this paper. AD are qualitatively different from the usual adversarial examples. The vast majority of classifiers are vulnerable to AD and robustness-accuracy trade-offs may not improve them. Some classification problems may not admit any AD robust classifiers because the underlying classes are ambiguous. We provide criteria that can be used to determine whether a classification problem is well defined or not; describe the structure and attributes of an AD-robust classifier; introduce and explore the notions of conceptual entropy and regions of conceptual ambiguity for classifiers that are vulnerable to AD attacks, along with methods to bound the AD fooling rate of an attack. We define the notion of classifiers that exhibit hypersensitive behavior, that is, classifiers whose only mistakes are adversarial Doppelgangers. Improving the AD robustness of hyper-sensitive classifiers is equivalent to improving accuracy. We identify conditions guaranteeing that all classifiers with sufficiently high accuracy are hyper-sensitive. Our findings are aimed at significant improvements in the reliability and security of machine learning systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used in code completion, and researchers are focusing on scaling up LLMs to improve their accuracy. However, larger LLMs will increase the response time of code completion and decrease the developers' productivity. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and effective LLM for code completion named aiXcoder-7B. Compared to existing LLMs, aiXcoder-7B achieves higher code completion accuracy while having smaller scales (i.e., 7 billion parameters). We attribute the superiority of aiXcoder-7B to three key factors: (1) Multi-objective training. We employ three training objectives, one of which is our proposed Structured Fill-In-the-Middle (SFIM). SFIM considers the syntax structures in code and effectively improves the performance of LLMs for code. (2) Diverse data sampling strategies. They consider inter-file relationships and enhance the capability of LLMs in understanding cross-file contexts. (3) Extensive high-quality data. We establish a rigorous data collection pipeline and consume a total of 1.2 trillion unique tokens for training aiXcoder-7B. This vast volume of data enables aiXcoder-7B to learn a broad distribution of code. We evaluate aiXcoder-7B in five popular code completion benchmarks and a new benchmark collected by this paper. The results show that aiXcoder-7B outperforms the latest six LLMs with similar sizes and even surpasses four larger LLMs (e.g., StarCoder2-15B and CodeLlama-34B), positioning aiXcoder-7B as a lightweight and effective LLM for academia and industry. Finally, we summarize three valuable insights for helping practitioners train the next generations of LLMs for code. aiXcoder-7B has been open-souced and gained significant attention. As of the submission date, aiXcoder-7B has received 2,193 GitHub Stars., Comment: aiXcoder-7B is available at https://github.com/aixcoder-plugin/aiXcoder-7B

This paper proposes a novel framework for understanding large language models (LLMs) by reconceptualizing them as semiotic machines rather than as imitations of human cognition. Drawing from structuralist and post-structuralist theories of language-specifically the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida-I argue that LLMs should be understood as models of language itself, aligning with Derrida's concept of 'writing' (l'ecriture). The paper is structured into three parts. First, I lay the theoretical groundwork by explaining how the word2vec embedding algorithm operates within Saussure's framework of language as a relational system of signs. Second, I apply Derrida's critique of Saussure to position 'writing' as the object modeled by LLMs, offering a view of the machine's 'mind' as a statistical approximation of sign behavior. Finally, the third section addresses how modern LLMs reflect post-structuralist notions of unfixed meaning, arguing that the "next token generation" mechanism effectively captures the dynamic nature of meaning. By reconceptualizing LLMs as semiotic machines rather than cognitive models, this framework provides an alternative lens through which to assess the strengths and limitations of LLMs, offering new avenues for future research., Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures

Recent advancements in learning-based combinatorial optimization (CO) methods have shown promising results in solving NP-hard problems without the need for expert-crafted heuristics. However, high performance of these approaches often rely on problem-specific human-expertise-based search after generating candidate solutions, limiting their applicability to commonly solved CO problems such as Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). In this paper, we present IC/DC, a CO framework that operates without any supervision. IC/DC is specialized in addressing problems involving two distinct sets of items, and it does not need problem-specific search processes to generate valid solutions. IC/DC employs a novel architecture capable of capturing the intricate relationships between items, and thereby enabling effective optimization in challenging CO scenarios. We train our model in a self-supervised way to minimize the cost of the solution while adhering to the problem-specific constraints. IC/DC not only achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous learning methods, but also surpasses well-known solvers and heuristic approaches on Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (ATSP)., Comment: Our experiment contained an error in the main paper, so we are withdrawing it

This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for attributing malware to specific Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups through detailed behavioural analysis. By analysing over 3500 malware samples from 12 distinct APT groups, the study utilises sophisticated tools like Cuckoo Sandbox to extract behavioural data, providing a deep insight into the operational patterns of malware. The research demonstrates that the DRL model significantly outperforms traditional machine learning approaches such as SGD, SVC, KNN, MLP, and Decision Tree Classifiers, achieving an impressive test accuracy of 89.27 %. It highlights the model capability to adeptly manage complex, variable, and elusive malware attributes. Furthermore, the paper discusses the considerable computational resources and extensive data dependencies required for deploying these advanced AI models in cybersecurity frameworks. Future research is directed towards enhancing the efficiency of DRL models, expanding the diversity of the datasets, addressing ethical concerns, and leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to refine reward mechanisms and optimise the DRL framework. By showcasing the transformative potential of DRL in malware attribution, this research advocates for a responsible and balanced approach to AI integration, with the goal of advancing cybersecurity through more adaptable, accurate, and robust systems., Comment: 21 Pages

The advent of the Attention mechanism and Transformer architecture enables contextually natural text generation and compresses the burden of processing entire source information into singular vectors. Based on these two main ideas, model sizes gradually increases to accommodate more precise and comprehensive information, leading to the current state-of-the-art LLMs being very large, with parameters around 70 billion. As the model sizes are growing, the demand for substantial storage and computational capacity increases. This leads to the development of high-bandwidth memory and accelerators, as well as a variety of model architectures designed to meet these requirements. We note that LLM architectures have increasingly converged. This paper analyzes how these converged architectures perform in terms of layer configurations, operational mechanisms, and model sizes, considering various hyperparameter settings. In this paper, we conduct a concise survey of the history of LLMs by tracing the evolution of their operational improvements. Furthermore, we summarize the performance trends of LLMs under various hyperparameter settings using the RTX 6000, which features the state-of-the-art Ada Lovelace architecture. We conclude that even the same model can exhibit different behaviors depending on the hyperparameters or whether it is deployed in server or edge environments., Comment: 13 pages and 16 figures

This paper concerns the evaluation of reward models used in language modeling. A reward model is a function that takes a prompt and a response and assigns a score indicating how good that response is for the prompt. A key challenge is that reward models are usually imperfect proxies for actual preferences. For example, we may worry that a model trained to reward helpfulness learns to instead prefer longer responses. In this paper, we develop an evaluation method, RATE (Rewrite-based Attribute Treatment Estimators), that allows us to measure the causal effect of a given attribute of a response (e.g., length) on the reward assigned to that response. The core idea is to use large language models to rewrite responses to produce imperfect counterfactuals, and to adjust for rewriting error by rewriting twice. We show that the RATE estimator is consistent under reasonable assumptions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RATE on synthetic and real-world data, showing that it can accurately estimate the effect of a given attribute on the reward model., Comment: Submitted as a conference paper to ICLR 2025. Code is available at https://github.com/toddnief/RATE

In reinforcement learning, agents often learn policies for specific tasks without the ability to generalize this knowledge to related tasks. This paper introduces an algorithm that attempts to address this limitation by decomposing neural networks encoding policies for Markov Decision Processes into reusable sub-policies, which are used to synthesize temporally extended actions, or options. We consider neural networks with piecewise linear activation functions, so that they can be mapped to an equivalent tree that is similar to oblique decision trees. Since each node in such a tree serves as a function of the input of the tree, each sub-tree is a sub-policy of the main policy. We turn each of these sub-policies into options by wrapping it with while-loops of varied number of iterations. Given the large number of options, we propose a selection mechanism based on minimizing the Levin loss for a uniform policy on these options. Empirical results in two grid-world domains where exploration can be difficult confirm that our method can identify useful options, thereby accelerating the learning process on similar but different tasks., Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2024

This paper reviews the large spectrum of methods for generating robot motion proposed over the 50 years of robotics research culminating in recent developments. It crosses the boundaries of methodologies, typically not surveyed together, from those that operate over explicit models to those that learn implicit ones. The paper discusses the current state-of-the-art as well as properties of varying methodologies, highlighting opportunities for integration., Comment: To be presented at the International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR), 2024

Recent works have introduced LEAPS and HPRL, systems that learn latent spaces of domain-specific languages, which are used to define programmatic policies for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). These systems induce a latent space while optimizing losses such as the behavior loss, which aim to achieve locality in program behavior, meaning that vectors close in the latent space should correspond to similarly behaving programs. In this paper, we show that the programmatic space, induced by the domain-specific language and requiring no training, presents values for the behavior loss similar to those observed in latent spaces presented in previous work. Moreover, algorithms searching in the programmatic space significantly outperform those in LEAPS and HPRL. To explain our results, we measured the "friendliness" of the two spaces to local search algorithms. We discovered that algorithms are more likely to stop at local maxima when searching in the latent space than when searching in the programmatic space. This implies that the optimization topology of the programmatic space, induced by the reward function in conjunction with the neighborhood function, is more conducive to search than that of the latent space. This result provides an explanation for the superior performance in the programmatic space., Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2024

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace structure and the outcomes of control decisions giving rise to an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP). Existing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for LTL tasks typically rely on exploring a product MDP state-space uniformly (using e.g., an $\epsilon$-greedy policy) compromising sample-efficiency. This issue becomes more pronounced as the rewards get sparser and the MDP size or the task complexity increase. In this paper, we propose an accelerated RL algorithm that can learn control policies significantly faster than competitive approaches. Its sample-efficiency relies on a novel task-driven exploration strategy that biases exploration towards directions that may contribute to task satisfaction. We provide theoretical analysis and extensive comparative experiments demonstrating the sample-efficiency of the proposed method. The benefit of our method becomes more evident as the task complexity or the MDP size increases., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.04424

This paper addresses the Restricted Longest Common Subsequence (RLCS) problem, an extension of the well-known Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) problem. This problem has significant applications in bioinformatics, particularly for identifying similarities and discovering mutual patterns and important motifs among DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. Building on recent advancements in solving this problem through a general search framework, this paper introduces two novel heuristic approaches designed to enhance the search process by steering it towards promising regions in the search space. The first heuristic employs a probabilistic model to evaluate partial solutions during the search process. The second heuristic is based on a neural network model trained offline using a genetic algorithm. A key aspect of this approach is extracting problem-specific features of partial solutions and the complete problem instance. An effective hybrid method, referred to as the learning beam search, is developed by combining the trained neural network model with a beam search framework. An important contribution of this paper is found in the generation of real-world instances where scientific abstracts serve as input strings, and a set of frequently occurring academic words from the literature are used as restricted patterns. Comprehensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in solving the RLCS problem. Finally, an empirical explainability analysis is applied to the obtained results. In this way, key feature combinations and their respective contributions to the success or failure of the algorithms across different problem types are identified., Comment: 33 pages, 12 figures

Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in perfect information games such as Go and Atari, enabling agents to compete at the highest levels against human players. However, research in reinforcement learning for imperfect information games has been relatively limited due to the more complex game structures and randomness. Traditional methods face challenges in training and improving performance in imperfect information games due to issues like inaccurate Q value estimation and reward sparsity. In this paper, we focus on Uno, an imperfect information game, and aim to address these problems by reducing Q value overestimation and reshaping reward function. We propose a novel algorithm that utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search to average the value estimations in Q function. Even though we choose Double Deep Q Learning as the foundational framework in this paper, our method can be generalized and used in any algorithm which needs Q value estimation, such as the Actor-Critic. Additionally, we employ Monte Carlo Tree Search to reshape the reward structure in the game environment. We compare our algorithm with several traditional methods applied to games such as Double Deep Q Learning, Deep Monte Carlo and Neural Fictitious Self Play, and the experiments demonstrate that our algorithm consistently outperforms these approaches, especially as the number of players in Uno increases, indicating a higher level of difficulty.

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing images is a fundamental task in geospatial research. However, widely used Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have notable drawbacks: CNNs may be limited by insufficient remote sensing modeling capability, while Transformers face challenges due to computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a remote-sensing image semantic segmentation network named LKASeg, which combines Large Kernel Attention(LSKA) and Full-Scale Skip Connections(FSC). Specifically, we propose a decoder based on Large Kernel Attention (LKA), which extract global features while avoiding the computational overhead of self-attention and providing channel adaptability. To achieve full-scale feature learning and fusion, we apply Full-Scale Skip Connections (FSC) between the encoder and decoder. We conducted experiments by combining the LKA-based decoder with FSC. On the ISPRS Vaihingen dataset, the mF1 and mIoU scores achieved 90.33% and 82.77%., Comment: The paper is under consideration at 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2025)

While end-to-end multi-channel electroencephalography (EEG) learning approaches have shown significant promise, their applicability is often constrained in neurological diagnostics, such as intracranial EEG resources. When provided with a single-channel EEG, how can we learn representations that are robust to multi-channels and scalable across varied tasks, such as seizure prediction? In this paper, we present SplitSEE, a structurally splittable framework designed for effective temporal-frequency representation learning in single-channel EEG. The key concept of SplitSEE is a self-supervised framework incorporating a deep clustering task. Given an EEG, we argue that the time and frequency domains are two distinct perspectives, and hence, learned representations should share the same cluster assignment. To this end, we first propose two domain-specific modules that independently learn domain-specific representation and address the temporal-frequency tradeoff issue in conventional spectrogram-based methods. Then, we introduce a novel clustering loss to measure the information similarity. This encourages representations from both domains to coherently describe the same input by assigning them a consistent cluster. SplitSEE leverages a pre-training-to-fine-tuning framework within a splittable architecture and has following properties: (a) Effectiveness: it learns representations solely from single-channel EEG but has even outperformed multi-channel baselines. (b) Robustness: it shows the capacity to adapt across different channels with low performance variance. Superior performance is also achieved with our collected clinical dataset. (c) Scalability: With just one fine-tuning epoch, SplitSEE achieves high and stable performance using partial model layers., Comment: This paper has been accepted by ICDM2024

Closed-source large language models deliver strong performance but have limited downstream customizability. Semi-open models, combining both closed-source and public layers, were introduced to improve customizability. However, parameters in the closed-source layers are found vulnerable to recovery attacks. In this paper, we explore the design of semi-open models with fewer closed-source layers, aiming to increase customizability while ensuring resilience to recovery attacks. We analyze the contribution of closed-source layer to the overall resilience and theoretically prove that in a deep transformer-based model, there exists a transition layer such that even small recovery errors in layers before this layer can lead to recovery failure. Building on this, we propose \textbf{SCARA}, a novel approach that keeps only a few bottom layers as closed-source. SCARA employs a fine-tuning-free metric to estimate the maximum number of layers that can be publicly accessible for customization. We apply it to five models (1.3B to 70B parameters) to construct semi-open models, validating their customizability on six downstream tasks and assessing their resilience against various recovery attacks on sixteen benchmarks. We compare SCARA to baselines and observe that it generally improves downstream customization performance and offers similar resilience with over \textbf{10} times fewer closed-source parameters. We empirically investigate the existence of transition layers, analyze the effectiveness of our scheme and finally discuss its limitations., Comment: 10 pages for main content of the paper

The integration of Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS) into military operations presents both significant opportunities and challenges. This paper explores the multifaceted nature of trust in AWS, emphasising the necessity of establishing reliable and transparent systems to mitigate risks associated with bias, operational failures, and accountability. Despite advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the trustworthiness of these systems, especially in high-stakes military applications, remains a critical issue. Through a systematic review of existing literature, this research identifies gaps in the understanding of trust dynamics during the development and deployment phases of AWS. It advocates for a collaborative approach that includes technologists, ethicists, and military strategists to address these ongoing challenges. The findings underscore the importance of Human-Machine teaming and enhancing system intelligibility to ensure accountability and adherence to International Humanitarian Law. Ultimately, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing discourse on the ethical implications of AWS and the imperative for trustworthy AI in defense contexts., Comment: Accepted as a workshop paper at MILCOM 2024, 8 pages

This paper considers the problem of combinatorial multi-armed bandits with semi-bandit feedback and a cardinality constraint on the super-arm size. Existing algorithms for solving this problem typically involve two key sub-routines: (1) a parameter estimation routine that sequentially estimates a set of base-arm parameters, and (2) a super-arm selection policy for selecting a subset of base arms deemed optimal based on these parameters. State-of-the-art algorithms assume access to an exact oracle for super-arm selection with unbounded computational power. At each instance, this oracle evaluates a list of score functions, the number of which grows as low as linearly and as high as exponentially with the number of arms. This can be prohibitive in the regime of a large number of arms. This paper introduces a novel realistic alternative to the perfect oracle. This algorithm uses a combination of group-testing for selecting the super arms and quantized Thompson sampling for parameter estimation. Under a general separability assumption on the reward function, the proposed algorithm reduces the complexity of the super-arm-selection oracle to be logarithmic in the number of base arms while achieving the same regret order as the state-of-the-art algorithms that use exact oracles. This translates to at least an exponential reduction in complexity compared to the oracle-based approaches., Comment: 26 pages

Mosques are worship places of Allah and must be preserved clean, immaculate, provide all the comforts of the worshippers in them. The prophet's mosque in Medina/ Saudi Arabia is one of the most important mosques for Muslims. It occupies second place after the sacred mosque in Mecca/ Saudi Arabia, which is in constant overcrowding by all Muslims to visit the prophet Mohammad's tomb. This paper aims to propose a smart dome model to preserve the fresh air and allow the sunlight to enter the mosque using artificial intelligence techniques. The proposed model controls domes movements based on the weather conditions and the overcrowding rates in the mosque. The data have been collected from two different resources, the first one from the database of Saudi Arabia weather's history, and the other from Shanghai Technology Database. Congested Scene Recognition Network (CSRNet) and Fuzzy techniques have applied using Python programming language to control the domes to be opened and closed for a specific time to renew the air inside the mosque. Also, this model consists of several parts that are connected for controlling the mechanism of opening/closing domes according to weather data and the situation of crowding in the mosque. Finally, the main goal of this paper has been achieved, and the proposed model has worked efficiently and specifies the exact duration time to keep the domes open automatically for a few minutes for each hour head.

Since the onset of COVID-19, rural communities worldwide have faced significant challenges in accessing healthcare due to the migration of experienced medical professionals to urban centers. Semi-trained caregivers, such as Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs), have stepped in to fill this gap, but often lack formal training. This paper proposes an advanced agentic medical assistant system designed to improve healthcare delivery in rural areas by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic approaches. The system is composed of five crucial components: translation, medical complexity assessment, expert network integration, final medical advice generation, and response simplification. Our innovative framework ensures context-sensitive, adaptive, and reliable medical assistance, capable of clinical triaging, diagnostics, and identifying cases requiring specialist intervention. The system is designed to handle cultural nuances and varying literacy levels, providing clear and actionable medical advice in local languages. Evaluation results using the MedQA, PubMedQA, and JAMA datasets demonstrate that this integrated approach significantly enhances the effectiveness of rural healthcare workers, making healthcare more accessible and understandable for underserved populations. All code and supplemental materials associated with the paper and IMAS are available at https://github.com/uheal/imas.

In this paper, we identify and analyze a recurring training loss pattern, which we term the \textit{Epochal Sawtooth Effect (ESE)}, commonly observed during training with adaptive gradient-based optimizers, particularly Adam optimizer. This pattern is characterized by a sharp drop in loss at the beginning of each epoch, followed by a gradual increase, resulting in a sawtooth-shaped loss curve. Through empirical observations, we demonstrate that while this effect is most pronounced with Adam, it persists, although less severely, with other optimizers such as RMSProp. We provide an in-depth explanation of the underlying mechanisms that lead to the Epochal Sawtooth Effect. The influences of factors like \(\beta\), batch size, data shuffling on this pattern have been studied. We quantify the influence of \(\beta_2\) on the shape of the loss curve, showing that higher values of \(\beta_2\) result in a nearly linear increase in loss, while lower values create a concave upward trend. Our analysis reveals that this behavior stems from the adaptive learning rate controlled by the second moment estimate, with \(\beta_1\) playing a minimal role when \(\beta_2\) is large. To support our analysis, we replicate this phenomenon through a controlled quadratic minimization task. By incrementally solving a series of quadratic optimization problems using Adam, we demonstrate that the Epochal Sawtooth Effect can emerge even in simple optimization scenarios, reinforcing the generality of this pattern. This paper provides both theoretical insights and quantitative analysis, offering a comprehensive understanding of this ubiquitous phenomenon in modern optimization techniques., Comment: 15 pages, 21 figures

Kenya, known for its linguistic diversity, faces unique challenges and promising opportunities in advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, particularly for its underrepresented indigenous languages. This survey provides a detailed assessment of the current state of NLP in Kenya, emphasizing ongoing efforts in dataset creation, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition for local dialects such as Kiswahili, Dholuo, Kikuyu, and Luhya. Despite these advancements, the development of NLP in Kenya remains constrained by limited resources and tools, resulting in the underrepresentation of most indigenous languages in digital spaces. This paper uncovers significant gaps by critically evaluating the available datasets and existing NLP models, most notably the need for large-scale language models and the insufficient digital representation of Indigenous languages. We also analyze key NLP applications: machine translation, information retrieval, and sentiment analysis-examining how they are tailored to address local linguistic needs. Furthermore, the paper explores the governance, policies, and regulations shaping the future of AI and NLP in Kenya and proposes a strategic roadmap to guide future research and development efforts. Our goal is to provide a foundation for accelerating the growth of NLP technologies that meet Kenya's diverse linguistic demands., Comment: 21 pages

With the rapid development of the internet and the explosion of information, providing users with accurate personalized recommendations has become an important research topic. This paper designs and analyzes a personalized recommendation system based on a dynamic user interest model. The system captures user behavior data, constructs a dynamic user interest model, and combines multiple recommendation algorithms to provide personalized content to users. The research results show that this system significantly improves recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction. This paper discusses the system's architecture design, algorithm implementation, and experimental results in detail and explores future research directions.

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as they allow attackers to manipulate model predictions with backdoor triggers. To address these security vulnerabilities, various backdoor purification methods have been proposed to purify compromised models. Typically, these purified models exhibit low Attack Success Rates (ASR), rendering them resistant to backdoored inputs. However, Does achieving a low ASR through current safety purification methods truly eliminate learned backdoor features from the pretraining phase? In this paper, we provide an affirmative answer to this question by thoroughly investigating the Post-Purification Robustness of current backdoor purification methods. We find that current safety purification methods are vulnerable to the rapid re-learning of backdoor behavior, even when further fine-tuning of purified models is performed using a very small number of poisoned samples. Based on this, we further propose the practical Query-based Reactivation Attack (QRA) which could effectively reactivate the backdoor by merely querying purified models. We find the failure to achieve satisfactory post-purification robustness stems from the insufficient deviation of purified models from the backdoored model along the backdoor-connected path. To improve the post-purification robustness, we propose a straightforward tuning defense, Path-Aware Minimization (PAM), which promotes deviation along backdoor-connected paths with extra model updates. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PAM significantly improves post-purification robustness while maintaining a good clean accuracy and low ASR. Our work provides a new perspective on understanding the effectiveness of backdoor safety tuning and highlights the importance of faithfully assessing the model's safety., Comment: NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight paper. The first two authors contributed equally

What will information entry look like in the next generation of digital products? Since the 1970s, user access to relevant information has relied on domain-specific architectures of information retrieval (IR). Over the past two decades, the advent of modern IR systems, including web search engines and personalized recommender systems, has greatly improved the efficiency of retrieving relevant information from vast data corpora. However, the core paradigm of these IR systems remains largely unchanged, relying on filtering a predefined set of candidate items. Since 2022, breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have begun transforming how information is accessed, establishing a new technical paradigm. In this position paper, we introduce Agentic Information Retrieval (Agentic IR), a novel IR paradigm shaped by the capabilities of LLM agents. Agentic IR expands the scope of accessible tasks and leverages a suite of new techniques to redefine information retrieval. We discuss three types of cutting-edge applications of agentic IR and the challenges faced. We propose that agentic IR holds promise for generating innovative applications, potentially becoming a central information entry point in future digital ecosystems., Comment: 11 pages, position paper

While advances in mobility technology including autonomous vehicles and multi-modal navigation systems can improve mobility equity for people with disabilities, these technologies depend crucially on accurate, standardized, and complete pedestrian path networks. Ad hoc collection efforts lead to a data record that is sparse, unreliable, and non-interoperable. This paper presents a sociotechnical methodology to collect, manage, serve, and maintain pedestrian path data at a statewide scale. Combining the automation afforded by computer-vision approaches applied to aerial imagery and existing road network data with the quality control afforded by interactive tools, we aim to produce routable pedestrian pathways for the entire State of Washington within approximately two years. We extract paths, crossings, and curb ramps at scale from aerial imagery, integrating multi-input segmentation methods with road topology data to ensure connected, routable networks. We then organize the predictions into project regions selected for their value to the public interest, where each project region is divided into intersection-scale tasks. These tasks are assigned and tracked through an interactive tool that manages concurrency, progress, feedback, and data management. We demonstrate that our automated systems outperform state-of-the-art methods in producing routable pathway networks, which then significantly reduces the time required for human vetting. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of yielding accurate, robust pedestrian pathway networks at the scale of an entire state. This paper intends to inform procedures for national-scale ADA compliance by providing pedestrian equity, safety, and accessibility, and improving urban environments for all users., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2303.02323

In this paper, we discuss learning algorithms and their importance in different types of applications which includes training to identify important patterns and features in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner. We will review the main concepts of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and hybrid models. Some important subsets of Machine Learning algorithms such as supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning are also discussed in this paper. These techniques can be used for some important tasks like prediction, classification, and segmentation. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used for image and video processing and many more applications. We dive into the architecture of CNNs and how to integrate CNNs with ML algorithms to build hybrid models. This paper explores the vulnerability of learning algorithms to noise, leading to misclassification. We further discuss the integration of learning algorithms with Large Language Models (LLM) to generate coherent responses applicable to many domains such as healthcare, marketing, and finance by learning important patterns from large volumes of data. Furthermore, we discuss the next generation of learning algorithms and how we may have an unified Adaptive and Dynamic Network to perform important tasks. Overall, this article provides brief overview of learning algorithms, exploring their current state, applications and future direction.

The safety alignment ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is prone to be degraded by the integration of the vision module compared to its LLM backbone. We investigate this phenomenon, dubbed as ''safety alignment degradation'' in this paper, and show that the challenge arises from the representation gap that emerges when introducing vision modality to VLMs. In particular, we show that the representations of multi-modal inputs shift away from that of text-only inputs which represent the distribution that the LLM backbone is optimized for. At the same time, the safety alignment capabilities, initially developed within the textual embedding space, do not successfully transfer to this new multi-modal representation space. To reduce safety alignment degradation, we introduce Cross-Modality Representation Manipulation (CMRM), an inference time representation intervention method for recovering the safety alignment ability that is inherent in the LLM backbone of VLMs, while simultaneously preserving the functional capabilities of VLMs. The empirical results show that our framework significantly recovers the alignment ability that is inherited from the LLM backbone with minimal impact on the fluency and linguistic capabilities of pre-trained VLMs even without additional training. Specifically, the unsafe rate of LLaVA-7B on multi-modal input can be reduced from 61.53% to as low as 3.15% with only inference-time intervention. WARNING: This paper contains examples of toxic or harmful language., Comment: Preprint

In the evolving landscape of autonomous vehicles, ensuring robust in-vehicle network (IVN) security is paramount. This paper introduces an advanced intrusion detection system (IDS) called KD-XVAE that uses a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based knowledge distillation approach to enhance both performance and efficiency. Our model significantly reduces complexity, operating with just 1669 parameters and achieving an inference time of 0.3 ms per batch, making it highly suitable for resource-constrained automotive environments. Evaluations in the HCRL Car-Hacking dataset demonstrate exceptional capabilities, attaining perfect scores (Recall, Precision, F1 Score of 100%, and FNR of 0%) under multiple attack types, including DoS, Fuzzing, Gear Spoofing, and RPM Spoofing. Comparative analysis on the CICIoV2024 dataset further underscores its superiority over traditional machine learning models, achieving perfect detection metrics. We furthermore integrate Explainable AI (XAI) techniques to ensure transparency in the model's decisions. The VAE compresses the original feature space into a latent space, on which the distilled model is trained. SHAP(SHapley Additive exPlanations) values provide insights into the importance of each latent dimension, mapped back to original features for intuitive understanding. Our paper advances the field by integrating state-of-the-art techniques, addressing critical challenges in the deployment of efficient, trustworthy, and reliable IDSes for autonomous vehicles, ensuring enhanced protection against emerging cyber threats.

The transferable belief model, as a semantic interpretation of Dempster-Shafer theory, enables agents to perform reasoning and decision making in imprecise and incomplete environments. The model offers distinct semantics for handling unreliable testimonies, allowing for a more reasonable and general process of belief transfer compared to the Bayesian approach. However, because both the belief masses and the structure of focal sets must be considered when updating belief functions-leading to extra computational complexity during reasoning-the transferable belief model has gradually lost favor among researchers in recent developments. In this paper, we implement the transferable belief model on quantum circuits and demonstrate that belief functions offer a more concise and effective alternative to Bayesian approaches within the quantum computing framework. Furthermore, leveraging the unique characteristics of quantum computing, we propose several novel belief transfer approaches. More broadly, this paper introduces a new perspective on basic information representation for quantum AI models, suggesting that belief functions are more suitable than Bayesian approach for handling uncertainty on quantum circuits.

3D-aware image generation necessitates extensive training data to ensure stable training and mitigate the risk of overfitting. This paper first considers a novel task known as One-shot 3D Generative Domain Adaptation (GDA), aimed at transferring a pre-trained 3D generator from one domain to a new one, relying solely on a single reference image. One-shot 3D GDA is characterized by the pursuit of specific attributes, namely, high fidelity, large diversity, cross-domain consistency, and multi-view consistency. Within this paper, we introduce 3D-Adapter, the first one-shot 3D GDA method, for diverse and faithful generation. Our approach begins by judiciously selecting a restricted weight set for fine-tuning, and subsequently leverages four advanced loss functions to facilitate adaptation. An efficient progressive fine-tuning strategy is also implemented to enhance the adaptation process. The synergy of these three technological components empowers 3D-Adapter to achieve remarkable performance, substantiated both quantitatively and qualitatively, across all desired properties of 3D GDA. Furthermore, 3D-Adapter seamlessly extends its capabilities to zero-shot scenarios, and preserves the potential for crucial tasks such as interpolation, reconstruction, and editing within the latent space of the pre-trained generator. Code will be available at https://github.com/iceli1007/3D-Adapter., Comment: IJCV

With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous mature applications of LLMs have emerged in the field of content safety detection. However, we have found that LLMs exhibit blind trust in safety detection agents. The general LLMs can be compromised by hackers with this vulnerability. Hence, this paper proposed an attack named Feign Agent Attack (F2A).Through such malicious forgery methods, adding fake safety detection results into the prompt, the defense mechanism of LLMs can be bypassed, thereby obtaining harmful content and hijacking the normal conversation. Continually, a series of experiments were conducted. In these experiments, the hijacking capability of F2A on LLMs was analyzed and demonstrated, exploring the fundamental reasons why LLMs blindly trust safety detection results. The experiments involved various scenarios where fake safety detection results were injected into prompts, and the responses were closely monitored to understand the extent of the vulnerability. Also, this paper provided a reasonable solution to this attack, emphasizing that it is important for LLMs to critically evaluate the results of augmented agents to prevent the generating harmful content. By doing so, the reliability and security can be significantly improved, protecting the LLMs from F2A., Comment: 1. Fixed typo in abstract 2. Provisionally completed the article update to facilitate future version revisions

In this paper, we investigate the use of N-gram models and Large Pre-trained Multilingual models for Language Identification (LID) across 11 South African languages. For N-gram models, this study shows that effective data size selection remains crucial for establishing effective frequency distributions of the target languages, that efficiently model each language, thus, improving language ranking. For pre-trained multilingual models, we conduct extensive experiments covering a diverse set of massively pre-trained multilingual (PLM) models -- mBERT, RemBERT, XLM-r, and Afri-centric multilingual models -- AfriBERTa, Afro-XLMr, AfroLM, and Serengeti. We further compare these models with available large-scale Language Identification tools: Compact Language Detector v3 (CLD V3), AfroLID, GlotLID, and OpenLID to highlight the importance of focused-based LID. From these, we show that Serengeti is a superior model across models: N-grams to Transformers on average. Moreover, we propose a lightweight BERT-based LID model (za_BERT_lid) trained with NHCLT + Vukzenzele corpus, which performs on par with our best-performing Afri-centric models., Comment: The paper has been accepted at The 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities (NLP4DH 2024)

Citation networks are critical in modern science, and predicting which previous papers (candidates) will a new paper (query) cite is a critical problem. However, the roles of a paper's citations vary significantly, ranging from foundational knowledge basis to superficial contexts. Distinguishing these roles requires a deeper understanding of the logical relationships among papers, beyond simple edges in citation networks. The emergence of LLMs with textual reasoning capabilities offers new possibilities for discerning these relationships, but there are two major challenges. First, in practice, a new paper may select its citations from gigantic existing papers, where the texts exceed the context length of LLMs. Second, logical relationships between papers are implicit, and directly prompting an LLM to predict citations may result in surface-level textual similarities rather than the deeper logical reasoning. In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of core citation, which identifies the critical references that go beyond superficial mentions. Thereby, we elevate the citation prediction task from a simple binary classification to distinguishing core citations from both superficial citations and non-citations. To address this, we propose $\textbf{HLM-Cite}$, a $\textbf{H}$ybrid $\textbf{L}$anguage $\textbf{M}$odel workflow for citation prediction, which combines embedding and generative LMs. We design a curriculum finetune procedure to adapt a pretrained text embedding model to coarsely retrieve high-likelihood core citations from vast candidates and then design an LLM agentic workflow to rank the retrieved papers through one-shot reasoning, revealing the implicit relationships among papers. With the pipeline, we can scale the candidate sets to 100K papers. We evaluate HLM-Cite across 19 scientific fields, demonstrating a 17.6% performance improvement comparing SOTA methods., Comment: NeurIPS 2024 paper

The detection of bias in natural language processing (NLP) is a critical challenge, particularly with the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) in various domains. This paper introduces GUS-Net, an innovative approach to bias detection that focuses on three key types of biases: (G)eneralizations, (U)nfairness, and (S)tereotypes. GUS-Net leverages generative AI and automated agents to create a comprehensive synthetic dataset, enabling robust multi-label token classification. Our methodology enhances traditional bias detection methods by incorporating the contextual encodings of pre-trained models, resulting in improved accuracy and depth in identifying biased entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that GUS-Net outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, achieving superior performance in terms of accuracy, F1-score, and Hamming Loss. The findings highlight GUS-Net's effectiveness in capturing a wide range of biases across diverse contexts, making it a valuable tool for social bias detection in text. This study contributes to the ongoing efforts in NLP to address implicit bias, providing a pathway for future research and applications in various fields. The Jupyter notebooks used to create the dataset and model are available at: https://github.com/Ethical-Spectacle/fair-ly/tree/main/resources. Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language, and reader discretion is recommended.

On-device adapting to continual, unpredictable domain shifts is essential for mobile applications like autonomous driving and augmented reality to deliver seamless user experiences in evolving environments. Test-time adaptation (TTA) emerges as a promising solution by tuning model parameters with unlabeled live data immediately before prediction. However, TTA's unique forward-backward-reforward pipeline notably increases the latency over standard inference, undermining the responsiveness in time-sensitive mobile applications. This paper presents AdaShadow, a responsive test-time adaptation framework for non-stationary mobile data distribution and resource dynamics via selective updates of adaptation-critical layers. Although the tactic is recognized in generic on-device training, TTA's unsupervised and online context presents unique challenges in estimating layer importance and latency, as well as scheduling the optimal layer update plan. AdaShadow addresses these challenges with a backpropagation-free assessor to rapidly identify critical layers, a unit-based runtime predictor to account for resource dynamics in latency estimation, and an online scheduler for prompt layer update planning. Also, AdaShadow incorporates a memory I/O-aware computation reuse scheme to further reduce latency in the reforward pass. Results show that AdaShadow achieves the best accuracy-latency balance under continual shifts. At low memory and energy costs, Adashadow provides a 2x to 3.5x speedup (ms-level) over state-of-the-art TTA methods with comparable accuracy and a 14.8% to 25.4% accuracy boost over efficient supervised methods with similar latency., Comment: This paper is accepted by SenSys 2024. Copyright may be transferred without notice

We present a novel framework for free-viewpoint facial performance relighting using diffusion-based image-to-image translation. Leveraging a subject-specific dataset containing diverse facial expressions captured under various lighting conditions, including flat-lit and one-light-at-a-time (OLAT) scenarios, we train a diffusion model for precise lighting control, enabling high-fidelity relit facial images from flat-lit inputs. Our framework includes spatially-aligned conditioning of flat-lit captures and random noise, along with integrated lighting information for global control, utilizing prior knowledge from the pre-trained Stable Diffusion model. This model is then applied to dynamic facial performances captured in a consistent flat-lit environment and reconstructed for novel-view synthesis using a scalable dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting method to maintain quality and consistency in the relit results. In addition, we introduce unified lighting control by integrating a novel area lighting representation with directional lighting, allowing for joint adjustments in light size and direction. We also enable high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) composition using multiple directional lights to produce dynamic sequences under complex lighting conditions. Our evaluations demonstrate the models efficiency in achieving precise lighting control and generalizing across various facial expressions while preserving detailed features such as skintexture andhair. The model accurately reproduces complex lighting effects like eye reflections, subsurface scattering, self-shadowing, and translucency, advancing photorealism within our framework., Comment: 18 pages, SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Conference Papers (SA Conference Papers '24), December 3--6, 2024, Tokyo, Japan. Project page: https://www.eyelinestudios.com/research/diffrelight.html

Cognitive Architectures are the forefront of the research into developing an artificial cognition. However, they approach the problem from a separated memory and program model of computation. This model of computation poses a fundamental problem: the knowledge retrieval heuristic. In this paper we propose to solve this problem by using a novel model of computation, one where memory and program are merged: the Function-Representation. This model of computation involves defining a generic Function-Representation and instantiating multiple instances of it. In this paper we explore the potential of this novel model of computation through mathematical definitions and proofs. We also explore the kind of functions a Function-Representation can implement, and present different ways to organise multiple instances of a Function-Representation.

Measures of voting power have been the subject of extensive research since the mid 1940s. More recently, similar measures of relative importance have been studied in other domains that include inconsistent knowledge bases, intensity of attacks in argumentation, different problems in the analysis of database management, and explainability. This paper demonstrates that all these examples are instantiations of computing measures of importance for a rather more general problem domain. The paper then shows that the best-known measures of importance can be computed for any reference set whenever one is given a monotonically increasing predicate that partitions the subsets of that reference set. As a consequence, the paper also proves that measures of importance can be devised in several domains, for some of which such measures have not yet been studied nor proposed. Furthermore, the paper highlights several research directions related with computing measures of importance.

Artificial neural network based Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) has been widely studied in recent years, despite many progresses, however, the energy consumption is still high. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a Spiking Neural Network (SNN) based framework for energy-efficient attribute recognition. Specifically, we first adopt a spiking tokenizer module to transform the given pedestrian image into spiking feature representations. Then, the output will be fed into the spiking Transformer backbone networks for energy-efficient feature extraction. We feed the enhanced spiking features into a set of feed-forward networks for pedestrian attribute recognition. In addition to the widely used binary cross-entropy loss function, we also exploit knowledge distillation from the artificial neural network to the spiking Transformer network for more accurate attribute recognition. Extensive experiments on three widely used PAR benchmark datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed SNN-PAR framework. The source code of this paper is released on \url{https://github.com/Event-AHU/OpenPAR}.

The growing prevalence of generative AI inevitably raises concerns regarding the associated risks and safety implications, which catalyzes significant progress in AI safety. However, as this field thrives, a critical question emerges: Are our current efforts aligned with the broader perspective of human history and civilization? This paper presents a blueprint for an advanced human society and leverages this vision to guide contemporary AI safety efforts. It outlines a future where the Internet of Everything becomes reality, and create a roadmap of significant technological advancements towards this envisioned future. For each stage of the advancements, this paper forecasts potential AI safety issues that humanity may face. By projecting current efforts against this blueprint, we examine the alignment between the present efforts and the long-term needs. This paper identifies gaps in current approaches and highlights unique challenges and missions that demand increasing attention from AI safety practitioners in the 2020s, addressing critical areas that must not be overlooked in shaping a responsible future for AI development. This vision paper aims to offer a broader perspective on AI safety, emphasizing that our current efforts should not only address immediate concerns but also anticipate potential risks in the expanding AI landscape, thereby fostering AI's role in promoting a more secure and sustainable future for human civilization.

This paper introduces a novel lossless compression method for compressing geometric attributes of point cloud data with bits-back coding. Our method specializes in using a deep learning-based probabilistic model to estimate the Shannon's entropy of the point cloud information, i.e., geometric attributes of the 3D floating points. Once the entropy of the point cloud dataset is estimated with a convolutional variational autoencoder (CVAE), we use the learned CVAE model to compress the geometric attributes of the point clouds with the bits-back coding technique. The novelty of our method with bits-back coding specializes in utilizing the learned latent variable model of the CVAE to compress the point cloud data. By using bits-back coding, we can capture the potential correlation between the data points, such as similar spatial features like shapes and scattering regions, into the lower-dimensional latent space to further reduce the compression ratio. The main insight of our method is that we can achieve a competitive compression ratio as conventional deep learning-based approaches, while significantly reducing the overhead cost of storage and/or communicating the compression codec, making our approach more applicable in practical scenarios. Throughout comprehensive evaluations, we found that the cost for the overhead is significantly small, compared to the reduction of the compression ratio when compressing large point cloud datasets. Experiment results show that our proposed approach can achieve a compression ratio of 1.56 bit-per-point on average, which is significantly lower than the baseline approach such as Google's Draco with a compression ratio of 1.83 bit-per-point., Comment: This paper is under reviewed in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

This paper presents research on enhancements to Large Language Models (LLMs) through the addition of diversity in its generated outputs. Our study introduces a configuration of multiple LLMs which demonstrates the diversities capable with a single LLM. By developing multiple customised instances of a GPT model, each reflecting biases in specific demographic characteristics including gender, age, and race, we propose, develop and evaluate a framework for a more nuanced and representative AI dialogue which we call BiasGPT. The customised GPT models will ultimately collaborate, merging their diverse perspectives on a topic into an integrated response that captures a broad spectrum of human experiences and viewpoints. In this paper, through experiments, we demonstrate the capabilities of a GPT model to embed different biases which, when combined, can open the possibilities of more inclusive AI technologies., Comment: 2nd International Conference on Foundation and Large Language Models (FLLM2024), 26-29 November, 2024 | Dubai, UAE

Traditional information theory provides a valuable foundation for Reinforcement Learning, particularly through representation learning and entropy maximization for agent exploration. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on modeling the uncertainty associated with RL's random variables, neglecting the inherent structure within the state and action spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel Structural Information principles-based Effective Exploration framework, namely SI2E. Structural mutual information between two variables is defined to address the single-variable limitation in structural information, and an innovative embedding principle is presented to capture dynamics-relevant state-action representations. The SI2E analyzes value differences in the agent's policy between state-action pairs and minimizes structural entropy to derive the hierarchical state-action structure, referred to as the encoding tree. Under this tree structure, value-conditional structural entropy is defined and maximized to design an intrinsic reward mechanism that avoids redundant transitions and promotes enhanced coverage in the state-action space. Theoretical connections are established between SI2E and classical information-theoretic methodologies, highlighting our framework's rationality and advantage. Comprehensive evaluations in the MiniGrid, MetaWorld, and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks demonstrate that SI2E significantly outperforms state-of-the-art exploration baselines regarding final performance and sample efficiency, with maximum improvements of 37.63% and 60.25%, respectively., Comment: 10 pages in main paper and 15 pages in appendix