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GIMS: Image Matching System Based on Adaptive Graph Construction and Graph Neural Network

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Feature-based image matching has extensive applications in computer vision. Keypoints detected in images can be naturally represented as graph structures, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to outperform traditional deep learning techniques. Consequently, the paradigm of image matching via GNNs has gained significant prominence in recent academic research. In this paper, we first introduce an innovative adaptive graph construction method that utilizes a filtering mechanism based on distance and dynamic threshold similarity. This method dynamically adjusts the criteria for incorporating new vertices based on the characteristics of existing vertices, allowing for the construction of more precise and robust graph structures while avoiding redundancy. We further combine the vertex processing capabilities of GNNs with the global awareness capabilities of Transformers to enhance the model's representation of spatial and feature information within graph structures. This hybrid model provides a deeper understanding of the interrelationships between vertices and their contributions to the matching process. Additionally, we employ the Sinkhorn algorithm to iteratively solve for optimal matching results. Finally, we validate our system using extensive image datasets and conduct comprehensive comparative experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that our system achieves an average improvement of 3.8x-40.3x in overall matching performance. Additionally, the number of vertices and edges significantly impacts training efficiency and memory usage; therefore, we employ multi-GPU technology to accelerate the training process. Our code is available at https://github.com/songxf1024/GIMS.


Advancing Large Language Models for Spatiotemporal and Semantic Association Mining of Similar Environmental Events

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Retrieval and recommendation are two essential tasks in modern search tools. This paper introduces a novel retrieval-reranking framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the spatiotemporal and semantic associated mining and recommendation of relevant unusual climate and environmental events described in news articles and web posts. This framework uses advanced natural language processing techniques to address the limitations of traditional manual curation methods in terms of high labor cost and lack of scalability. Specifically, we explore an optimized solution to employ cutting-edge embedding models for semantically analyzing spatiotemporal events (news) and propose a Geo-Time Re-ranking (GT-R) strategy that integrates multi-faceted criteria including spatial proximity, temporal association, semantic similarity, and category-instructed similarity to rank and identify similar spatiotemporal events. We apply the proposed framework to a dataset of four thousand Local Environmental Observer (LEO) Network events, achieving top performance in recommending similar events among multiple cutting-edge dense retrieval models. The search and recommendation pipeline can be applied to a wide range of similar data search tasks dealing with geospatial and temporal data. We hope that by linking relevant events, we can better aid the general public to gain an enhanced understanding of climate change and its impact on different communities.


Conformal-in-the-Loop for Learning with Imbalanced Noisy Data

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Class imbalance and label noise are pervasive in large-scale datasets, yet much of machine learning research assumes well-labeled, balanced data, which rarely reflects real world conditions. Existing approaches typically address either label noise or class imbalance in isolation, leading to suboptimal results when both issues coexist. In this work, we propose Conformal-in-the-Loop (CitL), a novel training framework that addresses both challenges with a conformal prediction-based approach. CitL evaluates sample uncertainty to adjust weights and prune unreliable examples, enhancing model resilience and accuracy with minimal computational cost. Our extensive experiments include a detailed analysis showing how CitL effectively emphasizes impactful data in noisy, imbalanced datasets. Our results show that CitL consistently boosts model performance, achieving up to a 6.1% increase in classification accuracy and a 5.0 mIoU improvement in segmentation. Our code is publicly available: CitL.


A Survey on LLM-based Code Generation for Low-Resource and Domain-Specific Programming Languages

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in code generation for popular programming languages. However, their performance on Low-Resource Programming Languages (LRPLs) and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) remains a significant challenge, affecting millions of developers-3.5 million users in Rust alone-who cannot fully utilize LLM capabilities. LRPLs and DSLs encounter unique obstacles, including data scarcity and, for DSLs, specialized syntax that is poorly represented in general-purpose datasets. Addressing these challenges is crucial, as LRPLs and DSLs enhance development efficiency in specialized domains, such as finance and science. While several surveys discuss LLMs in software engineering, none focus specifically on the challenges and opportunities associated with LRPLs and DSLs. Our survey fills this gap by systematically reviewing the current state, methodologies, and challenges in leveraging LLMs for code generation in these languages. We filtered 111 papers from over 27,000 published studies between 2020 and 2024 to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in LRPLs and DSLs. We report the LLMs used, benchmarks, and metrics for evaluation, strategies for enhancing performance, and methods for dataset collection and curation. We identified four main evaluation techniques and several metrics for assessing code generation in LRPLs and DSLs. Our analysis categorizes improvement methods into six groups and summarizes novel architectures proposed by researchers. Despite various techniques and metrics, a standard approach and benchmark dataset for evaluating code generation in LRPLs and DSLs are lacking. This survey serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners at the intersection of LLMs, software engineering, and specialized programming languages, laying the groundwork for future advancements in code generation for LRPLs and DSLs.


Do Current Language Models Support Code Intelligence for R Programming Language?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advancements in developing Pre-trained Language Models for Code (Code-PLMs) have urged many areas of Software Engineering (SE) and brought breakthrough results for many SE tasks. Though these models have achieved the state-of-the-art performance for SE tasks for many popular programming languages, such as Java and Python, the Scientific Software and its related languages like R programming language have rarely benefited or even been evaluated with the Code-PLMs. Research has shown that R has many differences with other programming languages and requires specific techniques. In this study, we provide the first insights for code intelligence for R. For this purpose, we collect and open source an R dataset, and evaluate Code-PLMs for the two tasks of code summarization and method name prediction using several settings and strategies, including the differences in two R styles, Tidy-verse and Base R. Our results demonstrate that the studied models have experienced varying degrees of performance degradation when processing R programming language code, which is supported by human evaluation. Additionally, not all models show performance improvement in R-specific tasks even after multi-language fine-tuning. The dual syntax paradigms in R significantly impact the models' performance, particularly in code summarization tasks. Furthermore, the project-specific context inherent in R codebases significantly impacts the performance when attempting cross-project training.


Context-Augmented Code Generation Using Programming Knowledge Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Code-LLMs (CLLMs) have significantly improved code generation, but, they frequently face difficulties when dealing with challenging and complex problems. However, retrieval models often fail to find most relevant context, and generation models, with limited context capacity, can hallucinate when given irrelevant data. We present a novel framework that leverages a Programming Knowledge Graph (PKG) to semantically represent and retrieve code. This approach enables fine-grained code retrieval by focusing on the most relevant segments while reducing irrelevant context through a tree-pruning technique. PKG is coupled with a re-ranking mechanism to reduce even more hallucinations by selectively integrating non-RAG solutions. We propose two retrieval approaches--block-wise and function-wise--based on the PKG, optimizing context granularity. Evaluations on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks show our method improves pass@1 accuracy by up to 20%, and outperforms state-of-the-art models by up to 34% on MBPP. Our contributions include PKG-based retrieval, tree pruning to enhance retrieval precision, a re-ranking method for robust solution selection and a Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) enhancer module for automatic code augmentation with relevant comments and docstrings. Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of tasks related to code, such as code generation (Huang et al., 2023; Roziere et al., 2023a; Li et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023). As code-related models continue to emerge rapidly (Chen et al., 2021; Li et al., 2023; 2022; Roziere et al., 2023a; Zhu et al., 2024), most of these models rely on a natural language-to-code (NL-to-Code) paradigm, which often lacks the ability to leverage existing contextual information (Wang et al., 2024). Generating a solution from scratch, without access to supplementary context, poses significant challenges (Wang et al., 2024), even for humans (Zhong et al., 2024).


Ranking Perspective for Tree-based Methods with Applications to Symbolic Feature Selection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tree-based methods are powerful nonparametric techniques in statistics and machine learning. However, their effectiveness, particularly in finite-sample settings, is not fully understood. Recent applications have revealed their surprising ability to distinguish transformations (which we call symbolic feature selection) that remain obscure under current theoretical understanding. This work provides a finite-sample analysis of tree-based methods from a ranking perspective. We link oracle partitions in tree methods to response rankings at local splits, offering new insights into their finite-sample behavior in regression and feature selection tasks. Building on this local ranking perspective, we extend our analysis in two ways: (i) We examine the global ranking performance of individual trees and ensembles, including Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART), providing finite-sample oracle bounds, ranking consistency, and posterior contraction results. (ii) Inspired by the ranking perspective, we propose concordant divergence statistics $\mathcal{T}_0$ to evaluate symbolic feature mappings and establish their properties. Numerical experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of these statistics in symbolic feature selection tasks compared to existing methods.


Fair Railway Network Design

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

When designing a public transportation network in a country, one may want to minimise the sum of travel duration of all inhabitants. This corresponds to a purely utilitarian view and does not involve any fairness consideration, as the resulting network will typically benefit the capital city and/or large central cities while leaving some peripheral cities behind. On the other hand, a more egalitarian view will allow some people to travel between peripheral cities without having to go through a central city. We define a model, propose algorithms for computing solution networks, and report on experiments based on real data.


MergeRepair: An Exploratory Study on Merging Task-Specific Adapters in Code LLMs for Automated Program Repair

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

[Context] Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown good performance in several software development-related tasks such as program repair, documentation, code refactoring, debugging, and testing. Adapters are specialized, small modules designed for parameter efficient fine-tuning of LLMs for specific tasks, domains, or applications without requiring extensive retraining of the entire model. These adapters offer a more efficient way to customize LLMs for particular needs, leveraging the pre-existing capabilities of the large model. Merging LLMs and adapters has shown promising results for various natural language domains and tasks, enabling the use of the learned models and adapters without additional training for a new task. [Objective] This research proposes continual merging and empirically studies the capabilities of merged adapters in Code LLMs, specially for the Automated Program Repair (APR) task. The goal is to gain insights into whether and how merging task-specific adapters can affect the performance of APR. [Method] In our framework, MergeRepair, we plan to merge multiple task-specific adapters using three different merging methods and evaluate the performance of the merged adapter for the APR task. Particularly, we will employ two main merging scenarios for all three techniques, (i) merging using equal-weight averaging applied on parameters of different adapters, where all adapters are of equal importance; and (ii) our proposed approach, continual merging, in which we sequentially merge the task-specific adapters and the order and weight of merged adapters matter. By exploratory study of merging techniques, we will investigate the improvement and generalizability of merged adapters for APR. Through continual merging, we will explore the capability of merged adapters and the effect of task order, as it occurs in real-world software projects.


A Review of AI and Machine Learning Contribution in Predictive Business Process Management (Process Enhancement and Process Improvement Approaches)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Purpose- The significance of business processes has fostered a close collaboration between academia and industry. Moreover, the business landscape has witnessed continuous transformation, closely intertwined with technological advancements. Our main goal is to offer researchers and process analysts insights into the latest developments concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to optimize their processes in an organization and identify research gaps and future directions in the field. Design/methodology/approach- In this study, we perform a systematic review of academic literature to investigate the integration of AI/ML in business process management (BPM). We categorize the literature according to the BPM life-cycle and employ bibliometric and objective-oriented methodology, to analyze related papers. Findings- In business process management and process map, AI/ML has made significant improvements using operational data on process metrics. These developments involve two distinct stages: (1) process enhancement, which emphasizes analyzing process information and adding descriptions to process models, and (2) process improvement, which focuses on redesigning processes based on insights derived from analysis. Research limitations/implications- While this review paper serves to provide an overview of different approaches for addressing process-related challenges, it does not delve deeply into the intricacies of fine-grained technical details of each method. This work focuses on recent papers conducted between 2010 and 2024. Originality/value- This paper adopts a pioneering approach by conducting an extensive examination of the integration of AI/ML techniques across the entire process management lifecycle. Additionally, it presents groundbreaking research and introduces AI/ML-enabled integrated tools, further enhancing the insights for future research.