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Junjie Hu

Publications and source records attributed to Junjie Hu.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

Single Sequence Prediction over Reasoning Graphs for Multi-hop QA

Recent generative approaches for multi-hop question answering (QA) utilize the fusion-in-decoder method~\cite{izacard-grave-2021-leveraging} to generate a single sequence output which includes both a final answer and a reasoning path taken to arrive at that answer, such as passage titles and key facts from those passages. While such models can lead to better interpretability and high quantitative scores, they often have difficulty accurately identifying the passages corresponding to key entities in the context, resulting in incorrect passage hops and a lack of faithfulness in the reasoning path. To address this, we propose a single-sequence prediction method over a local reasoning graph (\model)\footnote{Code/Models will be released at \url{https://github.com/gowtham1997/SeqGraph}} that integrates a graph structure connecting key entities in each context passage to relevant subsequent passages for each question. We use a graph neural network to encode this graph structure and fuse the resulting representations into the entity representations of the model. Our experiments show significant improvements in answer exact-match/F1 scores and faithfulness of grounding in the reasoning path on the HotpotQA dataset and achieve state-of-the-art numbers on the Musique dataset with only up to a 4\% increase in model parameters.

cs.CL↗

Multimodal Prompt Retrieval for Generative Visual Question Answering

Recent years have witnessed impressive results of pre-trained vision-language models on knowledge-intensive tasks such as visual question answering (VQA). Despite the recent advances in VQA, existing methods mainly adopt a discriminative formulation that predicts answers within a pre-defined label set, leading to easy overfitting on low-resource domains with limited labeled data (e.g., medicine) and poor generalization under domain shift to another dataset. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel generative model enhanced by multimodal prompt retrieval (MPR) that integrates retrieved prompts and multimodal features to generate answers in free text. Our generative model enables rapid zero-shot dataset adaptation to unseen data distributions and open-set answer labels across datasets. Our experiments on medical VQA tasks show that MPR outperforms its non-retrieval counterpart by up to 30% accuracy points in a few-shot domain adaptation setting.

cs.CV↗

Local Byte Fusion for Neural Machine Translation

Subword tokenization schemes are the dominant technique used in current NLP models. However, such schemes can be rigid and tokenizers built on one corpus do not adapt well to other parallel corpora. It has also been observed that in multilingual corpora, subword tokenization schemes over-segment low-resource languages leading to a drop in translation performance. A simple alternative to subword tokenizers is byte-based methods i.e. tokenization into byte sequences using encoding schemes such as UTF-8. Byte tokens often represent inputs at a sub-character granularity i.e. one character can be represented by a sequence of multiple byte tokens. This results in byte sequences that are significantly longer than character sequences. Enforcing aggregation of local information in the lower layers can guide the model to build higher-level semantic information. We propose a Local Byte Fusion (LOBEF) method for byte-based machine translation -- utilizing byte $n$-gram and word boundaries -- to aggregate local semantic information. Extensive experiments on multilingual translation, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and domain adaptation reveal a consistent improvement over traditional byte-based models and even over subword techniques. Further analysis also indicates that our byte-based models are parameter-efficient and can be trained faster than subword models.

cs.CL↗

Greedy-Mine: A Profitable Mining Attack Strategy in Bitcoin-NG

Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special incentive mechanism (i.e., the transaction fees in each epoch are split to the current and next leader) to maintain its security. However, there are some limitations to the existing incentive analysis of Bitcoin-NG in recent works. First, the incentive division method of Bitcoin-NG only includes some specific mining attack strategies of adversary, while ignoring more stubborn attack strategies. Second, once adversaries find a whale transaction, they will deviate from honest mining strategy to obtain extra reward. In this paper, we are committed to solving these two limitations. First, we propose a novel mining strategy named Greedy-Mine attack. Then, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to analyze the competition of honest miners and adversaries. Furthermore, we analysis the extra reward of adversaries and summarize the mining power proportion range required for malicious adversaries to launch Greedy-Mine to obtain extra returns. Finally, we make a backward-compatibility progressive modification to Bitcoin-NG protocol that would raise the threshold of propagation factor from 0 to 1. Meanwhile, we get the winning condition of adversaries when adopting Greedy-Mine, compared with honest mining. Simulation and experimental results indicate that Bitcoin-NG is not incentive compatible, which is vulnerable to Greedy-Mine attack.

cs.CR↗

Is Fine-tuning Needed? Pre-trained Language Models Are Near Perfect for Out-of-Domain Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a critical task for reliable predictions over text. Fine-tuning with pre-trained language models has been a de facto procedure to derive OOD detectors with respect to in-distribution (ID) data. Despite its common use, the understanding of the role of fine-tuning and its necessity for OOD detection is largely unexplored. In this paper, we raise the question: is fine-tuning necessary for OOD detection? We present a study investigating the efficacy of directly leveraging pre-trained language models for OOD detection, without any model fine-tuning on the ID data. We compare the approach with several competitive fine-tuning objectives, and offer new insights under various types of distributional shifts. Extensive evaluations on 8 diverse ID-OOD dataset pairs demonstrate near-perfect OOD detection performance (with 0% FPR95 in many cases), strongly outperforming its fine-tuned counterparts. We show that using distance-based detection methods, pre-trained language models are near-perfect OOD detectors when the distribution shift involves a domain change. Furthermore, we study the effect of fine-tuning on OOD detection and identify how to balance ID accuracy with OOD detection performance. Our code is publically available at https://github.com/Uppaal/lm-ood.

cs.CL↗

Novel bribery mining attacks in the bitcoin system and the bribery miner's dilemma

Mining attacks allow adversaries to obtain a disproportionate share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among them, the most well-known are selfish mining (SM), block withholding (BWH), fork after withholding (FAW) and bribery mining. In this paper, we propose two novel mining attacks: bribery semi-selfish mining (BSSM) and bribery stubborn mining (BSM). Both of them can increase the relative extra reward of the adversary and will make the target bribery miners suffer from the bribery miner dilemma. All targets earn less under the Nash equilibrium. For each target, their local optimal strategy is to accept the bribes. However, they will suffer losses, comparing with denying the bribes. Furthermore, for all targets, their global optimal strategy is to deny the bribes. Quantitative analysis and simulation have been verified our theoretical analysis. We propose practical measures to mitigate more advanced mining attack strategies based on bribery mining, and provide new ideas for addressing bribery mining attacks in the future. However, how to completely and effectively prevent these attacks is still needed on further research.

cs.GT↗

Boosting Light-Weight Depth Estimation Via Knowledge Distillation

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) methods are often either too computationally expensive or not accurate enough due to the trade-off between model complexity and inference performance. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network that can accurately estimate depth maps using minimal computing resources. We achieve this by designing a compact model architecture that maximally reduces model complexity. To improve the performance of our lightweight network, we adopt knowledge distillation (KD) techniques. We consider a large network as an expert teacher that accurately estimates depth maps on the target domain. The student, which is the lightweight network, is then trained to mimic the teacher's predictions. However, this KD process can be challenging and insufficient due to the large model capacity gap between the teacher and the student. To address this, we propose to use auxiliary unlabeled data to guide KD, enabling the student to better learn from the teacher's predictions. This approach helps fill the gap between the teacher and the student, resulting in improved data-driven learning. Our extensive experiments show that our method achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods while using only 1% of their parameters. Furthermore, our method outperforms previous lightweight methods regarding inference accuracy, computational efficiency, and generalizability.

cs.CV↗

Progressive Self-Distillation for Ground-to-Aerial Perception Knowledge Transfer

We study a practical yet hasn't been explored problem: how a drone can perceive in an environment from different flight heights. Unlike autonomous driving, where the perception is always conducted from a ground viewpoint, a flying drone may flexibly change its flight height due to specific tasks, requiring the capability for viewpoint invariant perception. Tackling the such problem with supervised learning will incur tremendous costs for data annotation of different flying heights. On the other hand, current semi-supervised learning methods are not effective under viewpoint differences. In this paper, we introduce the ground-to-aerial perception knowledge transfer and propose a progressive semi-supervised learning framework that enables drone perception using only labeled data of ground viewpoint and unlabeled data of flying viewpoints. Our framework has four core components: i) a dense viewpoint sampling strategy that splits the range of vertical flight height into a set of small pieces with evenly-distributed intervals, ii) nearest neighbor pseudo-labeling that infers labels of the nearest neighbor viewpoint with a model learned on the preceding viewpoint, iii) MixView that generates augmented images among different viewpoints to alleviate viewpoint differences, and iv) a progressive distillation strategy to gradually learn until reaching the maximum flying height. We collect a synthesized and a real-world dataset, and we perform extensive experimental analyses to show that our method yields 22.2% and 16.9% accuracy improvement for the synthesized dataset and the real world. Code and datasets are available on https://github.com/FreeformRobotics/Progressive-Self-Distillation-for-Ground-to-Aerial-Perception-Knowledge-Transfer.

cs.CV↗

Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Tasks

Recently, RGB-Thermal based perception has shown significant advances. Thermal information provides useful clues when visual cameras suffer from poor lighting conditions, such as low light and fog. However, how to effectively fuse RGB images and thermal data remains an open challenge. Previous works involve naive fusion strategies such as merging them at the input, concatenating multi-modality features inside models, or applying attention to each data modality. These fusion strategies are straightforward yet insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion method named Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion (EAEF) that fully takes advantage of each type of data. Specifically, we consider the following cases: i) both RGB data and thermal data, ii) only one of the types of data, and iii) none of them generate discriminative features. EAEF uses one branch to enhance feature extraction for i) and iii) and the other branch to remedy insufficient representations for ii). The outputs of two branches are fused to form complementary features. As a result, the proposed fusion method outperforms state-of-the-art by 1.6\% in mIoU on semantic segmentation, 3.1\% in MAE on salient object detection, 2.3\% in mAP on object detection, and 8.1\% in MAE on crowd counting. The code is available at https://github.com/FreeformRobotics/EAEFNet.

cs.CV↗

Descriptor Distillation for Efficient Multi-Robot SLAM

Performing accurate localization while maintaining the low-level communication bandwidth is an essential challenge of multi-robot simultaneous localization and mapping (MR-SLAM). In this paper, we tackle this problem by generating a compact yet discriminative feature descriptor with minimum inference time. We propose descriptor distillation that formulates the descriptor generation into a learning problem under the teacher-student framework. To achieve real-time descriptor generation, we design a compact student network and learn it by transferring the knowledge from a pre-trained large teacher model. To reduce the descriptor dimensions from the teacher to the student, we propose a novel loss function that enables the knowledge transfer between two different dimensional descriptors. The experimental results demonstrate that our model is 30% lighter than the state-of-the-art model and produces better descriptors in patch matching. Moreover, we build a MR-SLAM system based on the proposed method and show that our descriptor distillation can achieve higher localization performance for MR-SLAM with lower bandwidth.

cs.RO↗

Learn2Agree: Fitting with Multiple Annotators without Objective Ground Truth

The annotation of domain experts is important for some medical applications where the objective ground truth is ambiguous to define, e.g., the rehabilitation for some chronic diseases, and the prescreening of some musculoskeletal abnormalities without further medical examinations. However, improper uses of the annotations may hinder developing reliable models. On one hand, forcing the use of a single ground truth generated from multiple annotations is less informative for the modeling. On the other hand, feeding the model with all the annotations without proper regularization is noisy given existing disagreements. For such issues, we propose a novel Learning to Agreement (Learn2Agree) framework to tackle the challenge of learning from multiple annotators without objective ground truth. The framework has two streams, with one stream fitting with the multiple annotators and the other stream learning agreement information between annotators. In particular, the agreement learning stream produces regularization information to the classifier stream, tuning its decision to be better in line with the agreement between annotators. The proposed method can be easily added to existing backbones, with experiments on two medical datasets showed better agreement levels with annotators.

cs.LG↗

Peer Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Unbiased scene graph generation (USGG) is a challenging task that requires predicting diverse and heavily imbalanced predicates between objects in an image. To address this, we propose a novel framework peer learning that uses predicate sampling and consensus voting (PSCV) to encourage multiple peers to learn from each other. Predicate sampling divides the predicate classes into sub-distributions based on frequency, and assigns different peers to handle each sub-distribution or combinations of them. Consensus voting ensembles the peers' complementary predicate knowledge by emphasizing majority opinion and diminishing minority opinion. Experiments on Visual Genome show that PSCV outperforms previous methods and achieves a new state-of-the-art on SGCls task with 31.6 mean.

cs.CV↗

Domain-adapted large language models for classifying nuclear medicine reports

With the growing use of transformer-based language models in medicine, it is unclear how well these models generalize to nuclear medicine which has domain-specific vocabulary and unique reporting styles. In this study, we evaluated the value of domain adaptation in nuclear medicine by adapting language models for the purpose of 5-point Deauville score prediction based on clinical 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET/CT reports. We retrospectively retrieved 4542 text reports and 1664 images for FDG PET/CT lymphoma exams from 2008-2018 in our clinical imaging database. Deauville scores were removed from the reports and then the remaining text in the reports was used as the model input. Multiple general-purpose transformer language models were used to classify the reports into Deauville scores 1-5. We then adapted the models to the nuclear medicine domain using masked language modeling and assessed its impact on classification performance. The language models were compared against vision models, a multimodal vision language model, and a nuclear medicine physician with seven-fold Monte Carlo cross validation, reported are the mean and standard deviations. Domain adaption improved all language models. For example, BERT improved from 61.3% five-class accuracy to 65.7% following domain adaptation. The best performing model (domain-adapted RoBERTa) achieved a five-class accuracy of 77.4%, which was better than the physician's performance (66%), the best vision model's performance (48.1), and was similar to the multimodal model's performance (77.2). Domain adaptation improved the performance of large language models in interpreting nuclear medicine text reports.

cs.CL↗

Attentional Graph Convolutional Network for Structure-aware Audio-Visual Scene Classification

Audio-Visual scene understanding is a challenging problem due to the unstructured spatial-temporal relations that exist in the audio signals and spatial layouts of different objects and various texture patterns in the visual images. Recently, many studies have focused on abstracting features from convolutional neural networks while the learning of explicit semantically relevant frames of sound signals and visual images has been overlooked. To this end, we present an end-to-end framework, namely attentional graph convolutional network (AGCN), for structure-aware audio-visual scene representation. First, the spectrogram of sound and input image is processed by a backbone network for feature extraction. Then, to build multi-scale hierarchical information of input features, we utilize an attention fusion mechanism to aggregate features from multiple layers of the backbone network. Notably, to well represent the salient regions and contextual information of audio-visual inputs, the salient acoustic graph (SAG) and contextual acoustic graph (CAG), salient visual graph (SVG), and contextual visual graph (CVG) are constructed for the audio-visual scene representation. Finally, the constructed graphs pass through a graph convolutional network for structure-aware audio-visual scene recognition. Extensive experimental results on the audio, visual and audio-visual scene recognition datasets show that promising results have been achieved by the AGCN methods. Visualizing graphs on the spectrograms and images have been presented to show the effectiveness of proposed CAG/SAG and CVG/SVG that could focus on the salient and semantic relevant regions.

cs.CV↗

Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources

While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of datasets can be misleading as dataset quality varies: many datasets are automatically induced or translated from English data. To provide a more comprehensive picture of language resources, we examine the characteristics of 156 publicly available NLP datasets. We manually annotate how they are created, including input text and label sources and tools used to build them, and what they study, tasks they address and motivations for their creation. After quantifying the qualitative NLP resource gap across languages, we discuss how to improve data collection in low-resource languages. We survey language-proficient NLP researchers and crowd workers per language, finding that their estimated availability correlates with dataset availability. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we identify strategies for collecting high-quality multilingual data on the Mechanical Turk platform. We conclude by making macro and micro-level suggestions to the NLP community and individual researchers for future multilingual data development.

cs.CL↗

Utilizing Language-Image Pretraining for Efficient and Robust Bilingual Word Alignment

Word translation without parallel corpora has become feasible, rivaling the performance of supervised methods. Recent findings have shown that the accuracy and robustness of unsupervised word translation (UWT) can be improved by making use of visual observations, which are universal representations across languages. In this work, we investigate the potential of using not only visual observations but also pretrained language-image models for enabling a more efficient and robust UWT. Specifically, we develop a novel UWT method dubbed Word Alignment using Language-Image Pretraining (WALIP), which leverages visual observations via the shared embedding space of images and texts provided by CLIP models (Radford et al., 2021). WALIP has a two-step procedure. First, we retrieve word pairs with high confidences of similarity, computed using our proposed image-based fingerprints, which define the initial pivot for the word alignment. Second, we apply our robust Procrustes algorithm to estimate the linear mapping between two embedding spaces, which iteratively corrects and refines the estimated alignment. Our extensive experiments show that WALIP improves upon the state-of-the-art performance of bilingual word alignment for a few language pairs across different word embeddings and displays great robustness to the dissimilarity of language pairs or training corpora for two word embeddings.

cs.CL↗

MultiRoboLearn: An open-source Framework for Multi-robot Deep Reinforcement Learning

It is well known that it is difficult to have a reliable and robust framework to link multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms with practical multi-robot applications. To fill this gap, we propose and build an open-source framework for multi-robot systems called MultiRoboLearn1. This framework builds a unified setup of simulation and real-world applications. It aims to provide standard, easy-to-use simulated scenarios that can also be easily deployed to real-world multi-robot environments. Also, the framework provides researchers with a benchmark system for comparing the performance of different reinforcement learning algorithms. We demonstrate the generality, scalability, and capability of the framework with two real-world scenarios2 using different types of multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms in discrete and continuous action spaces.

cs.RO↗

Deep Depth Completion from Extremely Sparse Data: A Survey

Depth completion aims at predicting dense pixel-wise depth from an extremely sparse map captured from a depth sensor, e.g., LiDARs. It plays an essential role in various applications such as autonomous driving, 3D reconstruction, augmented reality, and robot navigation. Recent successes on the task have been demonstrated and dominated by deep learning based solutions. In this article, for the first time, we provide a comprehensive literature review that helps readers better grasp the research trends and clearly understand the current advances. We investigate the related studies from the design aspects of network architectures, loss functions, benchmark datasets, and learning strategies with a proposal of a novel taxonomy that categorizes existing methods. Besides, we present a quantitative comparison of model performance on three widely used benchmarks, including indoor and outdoor datasets. Finally, we discuss the challenges of prior works and provide readers with some insights for future research directions.

cs.CV↗